Matrix proponents like to claim that Matrix is not a product of one company, but a protocol. They say that someday there will be other servers developed by comp

Matrix proponents like to claim that Matrix is not a product of one company, but a protocol. They say that someday there will be other servers developed by competing commercial companies. Ok, let's see how it'll resolve a problem of conflicting implementations with other commercial company. Seeing how Arathorn reacts to such questions, I'd say that it is unlikely that such conflict would be resolved successfully. I'd also say that it is unlikely that any other serious company would start building products that are based on the 'protocol' over which they have zero influence and which governance is not mature enough to handle divergence. Due to this, it would be more appropriate to compare matrix with a product like RocketChat than with true protocols like XMPP or email. XMPP, on the other hand, is somewhat backwards looking, but it is extremely flexible and extremely durable. Hell, it even survived more than a decade of mismanagement and neglect by FSF! It has a long history and best practices for reconciling conflicting implementations and providing basic compatibility. It is a true widely used protocol, has multiple server implementations, and a few dozen clients. Disclosure (previously matrix zealots criticized me for not telling it): I am a leader of Xabber project. We are working on making XMPP great for once. (Because it was never great, lol). In the process we broke it to the core and threw away all the inconsistent rubbish that over last 15 years crawled into XSF-approved extensions, and reinvented it the right way so it can work equally well on all platforms. If Arathorn and co wanted a real distributed protocol, they should have done the same with XMPP when they started, not invent their own protocol. But then, of course, they wouldn't have dictatorial control over it.