from what I have seen in comments over the years is that it's been spotty to make it so you could depend on things working / being delivered to the other (federated) clients - as most do not accept the same feature set as each other.

I had suggested that a chart is made of all the clients along with which features are not yet implemented there, along with the programming language they are written in. This way it should be possible to estimate the amount of hours to add all features to all clients, then estimate the cost - and maybe we could crowdsource the amount of money or volunteer hours to get most clients to reciprocate most feature interoperability.

When I mentioned this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19216077#19223912

someone pointed out this chart here: https://compliance.conversations.im/

Which I found interesting and was not aware existed.

I'd love to see xmpp, the clients, and matrix and it's clients all get more streamlined and user friendly. (signal too)

The thing with an open protocol is that there is always going to be a vast number of clients that don't support much of anything. We really only need one really good free client on each major platform.