I think the Matrix folks shoot themselves in the foot each time they mention identity servers and how they're "not decentralised yet" because it just leads to c

I think the Matrix folks shoot themselves in the foot each time they mention identity servers and how they're "not decentralised yet" because it just leads to confusion and makes it sound like their architecture is half-baked. To their credit, they're being painfully honest but all the same I think it does more harm than good when explaining Matrix to technical people who aren't familiar with Matrix. As others have mentioned, identity servers only exist to map third party identifiers like email addresses or phone numbers to MXIDs. Most people just use MXIDs to start chats (mine is @cyphar:cyphar.com -- it's no more complicated than an email address). It is a useful feature to have, but given that other chat systems don't even have such a system (you can't find someone's email address using just their phone number -- GMail might implement this but that's just as centralised as Matrix's identity servers) it seems pretty unreasonable to say that Matrix's claims of decentralisation are "bullshit". People have been working to make this system decentralised but it's actually an unreasonably hard problem to prove to everyone else that you actually have verified someone else's email address or phone number. And to be honest, I'd prefer they'd spend their time polishing the actual chat UX instead of a feature most users won't even use (let alone redesigning it to provide guarantees that only a handful of users claim to care about).