to be fair, while I agree with your other points, I'm also pretty sure (with apologies to the other client authors, who suffer from the normal lack of funding/participation, not their fault) that Conversations is the only app that supports XMPP that has a decent UI too. I think I would honestly take one client per platform that was "OK" over that.

15 years ago or so I was looking for a decent web client for XMPP to offer to my users. I think there was or still is a major lack of such web clients. Haven't checked for many years now.

"OK" is an overstatement

would you like to EEE matrix? we can do that.

Are you saying you should have wan or are you saying #XMPP is even worse ?

Would you be willing to elaborate some? I recently deployed a matrix server for personal use and it seems viable to me? Genuinely curious to understand your perspective.

Synapse is entirely viable and FOSS under AGPL. The standard is indeed truly open, despite the FUD. Protocols don't have UX, but just as Conversations has great UX for XMPP, there are several clients which have great UX for Matrix. Perhaps focus on improving XMPP rather than complaining about Matrix? 😘

I feel that #matrix "success" is almost #xmpp anti-objectives: development almost uniquely done in a single #company, heavily promoting official apps, the weight of matrix.org in the "federation"...

So at least on one point we can all agree: Federated chat is hard, federated encrypted chat is really hard.