[Reventlov]

« folks can jump on board and participate via their own servers, clients, bridges, bots etc »

Last time I checked, there was only one server really developped, not lagging behind, did that change recently ?

[the_duke]

Sibling comments already mention that this is about custom instances and bridging. Matrix is an open network, you can participate with your own server.

But also note that there is a very actively developed new (official) server implementation called Dendrite. [1]

It's somewhere between alpha and beta.

Dendrite also has some experimental support for peer to peer. [2]

[1] https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite

[2] https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/02/introducing-p-2-p-matrix

[est31]

I think this refers to server instances instead of server implementations.

[Arathorn]

It does - the point is that anyone can spin up their own Matrix server (or pick an existing one) and get involved; they don't have to use the fosdem.org one.

Separately, in terms of implementations: Dendrite is usable these days, albeit beta: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/08/dendrite-is-entering-beta, and meanwhile Synapse is stable. Conduit (https://conduit.rs) is making progress on federation (and works for simple use cases), and Construct (https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct) exists too.