We are providing an option to bring together walled gardens with matrix.org: an open standard for federated distributed and persistent communications. It does g

We are providing an option to bring together walled gardens with matrix.org: an open standard for federated distributed and persistent communications. It does give you the option to run your own server and bridge to other services like IRC (and Slack actually). We're also building Vector.im as a glossy client on top of Matrix to precisely address the fact that non techy users need something easy to use. So all this might answer your concern :)