[emias]

> I'd counter and suggest that the super frustrating thing is XMPP zealots saying "oh my god how dare you try to create a different protocol".

I see no such consensus within the XMPP community, but yes personally I agree with those zealots. My interest in federation is making it possible to communicate with anyone just like I can call anyone by phone. Inventing an incompatible protocol obviously won't help with this goal, even if you ignore the issue of splitting up scarce manpower and assume bridges can act as a partial workaround (at least for geeks who can cope with their limitations).

> With this mentality, nothing would evolve and we'd be stuck on svn rather than git...

Comparing XMPP to SVN and Matrix to Git just reads like trolling to me. The obvious difference is that XMPP is highly extensible while SVN is not at all. So the discussion is not about whether or not to evolve, the question is whether evolving federated IM required starting from scratch, i.e. whether the advantages are worth the resulting fragmentation. And I just fail to see the problem in using/extending the XMPP spec to replicate your DAG.