It sounds like they are going to end up with their own standard starting from Matrix as a base that will do more than just messaging.

If they had of just set up XMPP as a messaging system we would of never heard of it. It would of been an entirely routine thing to do.

What experience in the field do you have implementing or managing Matrix or XMPP solutions?

I used to run an XMPP server (Prosody). I now run a Matrix server (Synapse - the one everyone uses).

Synapse feels like a bloated monster that I'm afraid to touch in case it goes bang and I can't recover.

Prosody felt like a simple light weight service that I could easily recover no matter how much I broke it.

Synapse is indeed very bad but it should by replaced soonish

Hopefully with a simple migration path

This isn't necessarily an endorsement of one protocol/ecosystem over the other, nor do I have direct experience with integrating Matrix or XMPP (though I run the latter on my home-server for family), but XMPP has seen a few large deployments, including in healthcare (in the UK)[0][1] and in Germany[2].

The consumer-facing client ecosystem for XMPP has indeed seen less rapid development than Matrix (the latter probably benefits from a more cohesive approach), but the server ecosystem for XMPP is very mature, and servers such as Ejabberd are known to scale to hundreds of thousands of connections on a single, modest host[3]. Obviously, that's only one part of the puzzle, hence why Matrix was chosen here.

Still, it'd be interesting to see how the two evolve and compare down the line.

[0]: https://www.erlang-solutions.com/case-studies/pando-health-c... [1]: https://medium.com/miquido/successful-migration-to-a-custom-... [2]: https://twitter.com/iNPUTmice/status/1203611711967813633 [3]: https://www.process-one.net/blog/ejabberd-nintendo-switch-np...

Does the development of an XMPP client with a few million downloads count as sufficient experience in the field?

Hey, why not IRC?

It's also the IETF Internet standard and does not collect venture capital.

Matrix is looked after the Matrix.org Foundation which is non-profit and doesn't collect venture capital either: https://matrix.org/foundation.

(It's true that many contributions to Matrix come from Element, though, the VC-funded for-profit founded by the original Matrix team in order to pay for us to keep the lights on and keep working on Matrix. Just as VC-funded Jabber Inc contributed massively to XMPP, back in the day).

I’m working on a project management app for small businesses using Matrix. I’ve been inspired by your work and the transparency with which the team operates and the business model you have pursued and succeeded at. I’m also stunned by the technology recently being deployed in Dendrite.

Is one of the best ways to support Matrix and grow the influence to hire Element’s team as consultants to build custom implementations and use cases?