[Youden]

Federation would, technically, decentralize the network and ensure there is no single point of failure. Federation would mean Matrix is about as likely to have a network-wide outage as email (or, for a more apt comparison, Mastodon).

Realistically, I understand that the Matrix.org homeserver is an enormous part of the network and an outage there would be comparable to this one.

However I believe that to be an orthogonal problem that also should be solved.

I'm actually curious, why does Matrix promote the Matrix.org homeserver so strongly? Why isn't there an easy link to community-run homeservers?

If you look at Mastodon for example [0], their onboarding process directs you to a registry of community servers [1], which actively promotes diversity in the network and therefore network resilience and reliability.

Matrix meanwhile, just links you to element.io, which creates an account on the matrix.org homeserver.

[0]: https://joinmastodon.org/

[1]: https://joinmastodon.org/communities