This will not work. There are no incentives for different groups of people to collaborate on a single shared communication standard. The incentive is for entities to keep data to themselves.
Also, this standard is too complex and unclear. Complex standards which try to bring together many different technologies under one abstraction never seem to work.
Also, universal standards are not necessarily a good thing. Decentralization with multiple competing tools and standards is good as it provides redundancy and opportunities for specialization.
They're up to 20k visible servers from about 5.5k servers in September 2018, and if you look here: https://youtu.be/1TPICntbC5w?t=1692 you can see the growth curve looks pretty good.
> Also, universal standards are not necessarily a good thing. Decentralization with multiple competing tools and standards is good
Matrix explicitly doesn't try to be "the one true standard". That's the whole idea of their bridging model: https://youtu.be/1TPICntbC5w?t=296
10M (nowadays 16.8M) is the total number of matrix IDs we can see from matrix.org based on phone-home stats from Synapse. 2M (nowadays 5.18M) is the total number of matrix rooms from Synapse.
The ratio is about what we'd expect - there's a mix of DMs, private rooms, and massive public rooms; the DMs will dominate, hence this ratio. Every conversation in Matrix happens in a "room" (even DMs), under the hood, which might be the point of confusion here.
I don't know about federation, but to me matrix hits the right spot for people that want modern chat (irc with full history & e2e encryption) in-house. I know my org is using it heavily on a custom install. I think the French government also announced some time ago some kind of adoption. I hope we can get away from whatsapp, telegram, slack and anything Google when we want.
Only things missing (to me) is a full Java API. I built one for bots and quick fleet-history-monitoring, but it's clunky...
> Decentralization with multiple competing tools and standards is good as it provides redundancy and opportunities for specialization
Strange argument. This is one of those competing, decentralised standards you are asking for. It’s not clear that fragmentation is better for chat services, even if like you say commercial interests lead to that. Would the web be better if information was spread across 10 competing incompatible versions of http/dns/html/web browser?
Also, universal standards are not necessarily a good thing. Decentralization with multiple competing tools and standards is good as it provides redundancy and opportunities for specialization.