But that's not fake federation, that's just federation and the reality that most people that can't be bothered to set up their own federated server? You can say

But that's not fake federation, that's just federation and the reality that most people that can't be bothered to set up their own federated server? You can say that a fully distributed chat system would be better at this (like SSB [1]), but that's a totally different beast from a federated system. Matrix's federation is no worse than any other popular federated system I've used (eg. email and xmpp). I'm not saying it shouldn't be better (I dislike the matrix.org centralization, too), but that's not something inherent to Matrix, and I think it's not honest to bring it up as 'fake federation' in this context. Additionally, Matrix is significantly better at this in one way than the alternatives: even if matrix.org goes down, all rooms can continue working, even ones with a :matrix.org label. The same can't be said about XMPP MUC, IIUC. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt