I've given some more thought to Matrix as a contender and I'm increasingly liking this option among the available contenders.
The available Matrix clients are currently not quite as polished as their competition (specifically Slack/Discord), but Matrix does have their features in its scope, including things like replies and edits which Thomas and others consider important (I also like them sometimes, though they're no dealbreakers for me personally). The mobile Riot client already looks better that Rocket.Chat's though, which is just a wrapped web app. Moreover, as a client dev (Konvi maintainer) I could actually see myself making or contributing to a Matrix client built on our stack (which I think offers some great tooling for a modern chat client, e.g. previews for media embeds are a snap for our machinery). With Rocket.Chat I would have no interest in doing so, because it's a one-off web app and doesn't actually have a seperate spec for its protocol, nor stability guarantees for it, nor a governance model ... it's just not something that tries to build a durable technology/platform. Some of the feature plans for Matrix also sound super great for our plans. For example, keep in mind every Rocket.Chat instance is an island, but Matrix is actually a fully-federated network, so it's a wider world. One thing on the horizon for organizing that world is groups: "These will probably be the single biggest change to Matrix that we’ve seen since E2E encryption landed: it changes the dynamic of the whole network, given users can explicitly declare allegiance to different groups, which in turn have their own home pages and directories etc. It lets users form communities, and declare their participation in those communities (if desired), and also lets rooms be grouped together. One of our single biggest requests has been “subrooms” and we’re incredibly excited to see how well Groups solve this." Having a KDE group on Matrix and getting a channel directory out of it seems like exactly what we need (and is a little like our group and namespace on freenode). I also personally heavily sympathize with their self-conception as a project and community: "There are very very few people actually working professionally on trying to build general-purpose open communication networks and protocols. There’s us, some XMPP, IRCv3 and GNU Social/Mastodon folks, GNU Ring, Tox, Briar, Secure Scuttlebutt, IPFS, Status.im, Ricochet… and that’s literally all the major projects I can think of (sorry if I missed you!). There’s probably only 50 developers in total working in this domain as their day job. Meanwhile, there are literally hundreds of thousands of folks trudging away building more and more near-indistinguishable proprietary closed communication systems – trapping users inside ever more silos and fragmenting the basic ability to communicate on the ‘net. It’s like a world where the open web was pushed into a tiny underground resistance, and everyone else was trapped in the walled gardens of AOL and Compuserve (or more contemporarily: Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp etc)." I guess I like what these guys are doing. Other points: - Bridging: exists and works - Sticker packs: Currently being worked on for Matrix and Riot Cheers, Eike