I think one of the reasons federated systems (which once were the backbone of the internet) are being phased out while the huge monoliths like Facebook are winning is that, while people do want a federated alternative, they want this alternative to be philosophically pure in a way that makes the end user experience untenable.
I'm building an open source distributed social network quite similar to this Matrix thing, actually. It's simple, scalable, and it works. It provides a good user experience, too. But fellow geeks tend to hate it. JSON over SSL? Too simplistic. 'We want a VM that runs inside a JavaScript engine which implements its own crypto and _true_ P2P, nothing else will do.'
The trouble is we do know how to make simple and "awkward" solutions work quite well, whereas I have yet to see a "pure" option I'd want to use myself. Of course, that may be personal preference in the end, but I'm kind of hoping I'm not alone.
One of the things that's important to me is the option for "3rd party software" to participate in the network as well, so we're keeping it as simple as possible to enable others to build stuff that integrates with it.
That distributed social network thing sounds quite exciting, and very much in a similar vein as Matrix. Does it have a website/github repo yet?
We've definitely found its not always easy to balance a philosophically pure/technically nice solution with one that actually has a usable UX. Although it sometimes seems that half the battle is figuring out what actually is a usable UX...
I know where you're coming from.
We're working (well, it's just two guys for the moment) on the first version and we're planning to launch for early feedback soon. I'll be posting it as a Show HN, but in case it gets buried I can put you on our notify list - just shoot me an email.
you will have the server with the most downtime and people will hate talking to you when you are not online. but that may be a good thing...