> I never really understood why Matrix invented their own thing instead of building on an already existing IETF Internet Protocol. Indeed. For sure XMPP has ug

> I never really understood why Matrix invented their own thing instead of building on an already existing IETF Internet Protocol. Indeed. For sure XMPP has ugly corners (disclaimer I never implemented anything, mostly read some XEPs). I believe parts which are quite clean are the pub/sub part and the message archive (MAM). Afaik the current group chat extension (MUC) isn't so great (once you try to add history multi-device) and some people are trying to refactor it on top of pubsub (MIX) but it's not very active. The matrix team clearly had precise ideas about the right way to do federated group chat and in fact (again afaik, my matrix knowledge is dated) their "rooms" seem to be quite flexible by not being completely tied to a particular server (several servers participate in hosting a room). Imho matrix has an edge in designing this from scratch and already knowing what the hard parts are from the beginning and i hope the good ideas will come over to XMPP. Perhaps some day an XMPP server will support matrix, making more clients available to the network (well integrated clients on every plateform is the real hard part for every distributed network).