[jasonzemos]

Matrix is an inherently decentralized system. You can run your own fully featured instance on your own property. If the company behind Matrix is acquired, the foundation being announced here today stands in the way of the intellectual property becoming a toxic liability to your own use. This is very good news today.

Furthermore, the openness of the protocol allows free software projects to emerge and exist independent of the matrix company and even the foundation. Such projects can be developed by your contributions and the FOSS community's support until the end of time. One of those projects, for example, is one I started [disclosure] called the Matrix Construct server: https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct and your support of this project is necessary to that end.

[zaarn]

The same was true for XMPP until Google EEE'd it. What stops Matrix from being EEE'd?

[phicoh]

One problem I see with XMPP is that there is a lot on isolated use and not a lot of public use.

If a lot of companies would provide XMPP as a way to contact them, then what Google did would be as silly as taking email private.

Instead, most people are completely used to isolated messaging systems.

So I guss for Matrix, the challenge is to make sure that the dominant use of Matrix remains public. To some extent Matrix is ahead due to the bridging with large IRC networks.

But there are also quite a number of people trying to set up non-federated Matrix servers.

[zaarn]

Matrix is not as popular as email, again, what prevents Google from taking Matrix and EEE'ing it to death?

As a concerete example; imagine next month Google announces their own Matrix instance. All gmail users are automatically signed in. The instance works with other Matrix instances. A year after that, Google stops federating anything but bare text to other servers, claiming protocol limitations. They continue to make interaction worse for non-google users until the non-google users have no choice but to join google or loose their social network.

[phicoh]

Suppose that lots of companies have a public Matrix room where customers and potential customers can ask questions.

Now lots of people start using one particular Matrix instance for that kind of communication.

Now the popular instance stops federating and people can't reach the companies they want to talk to anymore.

The way Google took over was by offering a better user interface than other public XMPP services.

If Google is obviously worse than other Matrix instances, then people will quickly drop them.

[zaarn]

What if google offers a better interface than most matrix instances? Given, Riot isn't exactly a high bar to meet so it should be possible with minimal resources.

[phicoh]

That's indeed a risk.

Though XMPP had to deal with a number of paradigm shifts: images, markup, audio and video calls, persistant history, disconnected operation, security, threading, multi device operation. And I probably forgot a few.

Today messaging is much more established. So the matrix team has many more examples of features that are in common use and how other people designed user interfaces.

So it may be harder for Google to win through engineering. They may just break other matrix clients on android.