[Arathorn]

On the Matrix side of this: rather than spending time responding in detail I'll link to last week's iteration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29152551.

The TL;DR seems to be the concern that Matrix was created by an existing team of folks who worked together (we built VoIP stacks for telcos), and because 50% of the people in the Spec Core Team who define Matrix's direction are from that original team, they have a disproportionate influence over how the protocol develops.

The reality, as far as I can tell, is that we are incorporating the best proposals from across the whole community, wherever they come from, and the protocol is progressing steadily under this open governance model, and folks are constantly experimenting with new features under prefixes, which they propose MSCs (Matrix Spec Changes) for, and then get incorporated into the official spec once they're approved by the Spec Core Team (which requires 75% consensus).

We spent ages setting up https://matrix.org/foundation and trying to enshrine a fair and neutral governance process for the spec, and as far as I can tell it's overall working. The thread linked above gives examples of ways in which the process is working as intended.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

Translation from prspeak: one closely integrated group has outsized influence on specification, and development is dominated by over commercial entity.

This is not how healthy federated networks work.

[xorcist]

It's how they all start. "Rough consensus and running code."

The question is where to take it from that.