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I'm afraid we'll always be jumping to new apps. If we jump ship from Signal to Matrix, as some people suggest, then I fear that in 2-5 years, Matrix will morph into something unacceptable, just as Signal has.

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Matrix is an open, federated protocol so something like this can't happen. Worst that could happen is bad stuff happens to Element (the flagship client) at which point people can either fork it or simply use another client.

This assumes that there’s enough volunteer capacity to maintain it and that federation remains open despite business incentives to close it or the maintenance costs (i.e. spam).

That could be true but the track record hasn’t been good and it definitely won’t happen without a concerted effort to support it.

I think there is a big enough community to maintain it, should that ever happen. There are multiple totally community-made clients that work well, and there's at least one community-made server that's getting close-ish to federation, even if no-one forked Element/Synapse/Dendrite.

Jabber was an open Federated protocol, before Matrix.

I am absolutely in favor of open protocols, but they are not a guarantee against needing to change ecosystems in the future.

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