And even if we did go and entirely rearchitect Matrix (e.g. making it entirely P2P, which is certainly a thought experiment we keep in mind), one would just go bridge it into the existing Matrix ecosystem and migrate as desired.
> And even if we did go and entirely rearchitect Matrix (e.g. making it entirely P2P, which is certainly a thought experiment we keep in mind), one would just go bridge it into the existing Matrix ecosystem and migrate as desired.
Are you saying you might end up in a situation where "fragmentation of features between clients and servers is common"?
> False. XMPP has excellent feature negotiation capabilities.
User don't care what the protocol can do. "How come persistent group chat isn't working? Ah, I'll just use WhatsApp"
> Feature negotiation and graceful fallback, is it really that hard?
This is dependent on the client. Does your client support that? Who knows? Users don't care about any of this.
> Incentives, yes. In the (core) protocol? No.
There's no greater incentive for public server providers than the danger of having their user base get isolated from the rest of the network. That can be done through the protocol and is the only incentive that will actually _accomplish_ anything.
False. XMPP has excellent feature negotiation capabilities.
> everyone using Conversations essentially has to use a server that is maintained by the developers
No, you just need to use a server maintained by someone who actually maintains it.
> Otherwise, most of the XMPP featureset they offer simply doesn't work.
Feature negotiation and graceful fallback, is it really that hard?
> I think there needs to be incentive built into the protocol for all servers to maintain a baseline of XEP parity
Incentives, yes. In the (core) protocol? No. I think publishing a new "XMPP Compliance Suite $year" XEP is better than throwing the entire thing out, in a couple of years when everyone suddenly wants a different feature set.
> At least Matrix can provide a clean slate.
A clean slate which will be obsolete in just a few years, and will have to be invented from scratch all over again.