Yup, "bitter" sounds about right.

I'd be first to agree that Matrix hasn't evolved as rapidly as it should, and we (specifically me) could and should have been more focused. Building out future-looking projects like P2P Matrix or Low Bandwidth or Third Room has helped inspire folks to build on Matrix, but it's come at the expense of focus on the core spec & implementations. And that's one of the main reasons (besides funding) that we've shelved them for now. It's also true that 8 years ago, everything was flakey as hell.

However, whether you like it or not, we fixed it. The federation problems were resolved before the time of Matrix 1.0 back in 2019, and since then we've focused on making everything go fast too - e.g. Faster Room Joins in Matrix 2.0. We experimented with fan-out routing back in 2015 or so (as yet another future-looking experiment), saw it had potential, but at the same time saw that empirically full-mesh federation was good enough for the vast majority of cases. So we focused on fixing things like consensus bugs and lazy-loading joins rather than premature optimisation on full-mesh routing. Meanwhile P2P Matrix took over better-than-full-mesh routing, but practically speaking it simply doesn't buy enough to prioritise it relative to other stuff, and it certainly makes Matrix (even) more complicated.

> Fast forward to today, all the points above still hold true in 2023

This is demonstrably false, and it's particularly obtuse to be whining about it in the comments on a post on Matrix 2.0 which is literally dedicated to spelling out how Matrix has improved. Your complaint seems to be simultaneously that we've improved both the implementations (e.g. scalable Synapse) and the spec (e.g. sliding sync, removing Matrix authentication in favour of OIDC)... while complaining that the project hasn't improved since 2015. Personally, I think it's an extremely good thing that the new APIs start off as separate projects, which can evolve and release as rapidly as possible and benefit all homeservers, before being embedded into Synapse or whatever once they're stable. But it's also easy to spin this as "new components added left and right" as if it were a bad thing.

> New Vector's hosted instances have a de facto quasi monopoly on the user base and on the protocol implementation. I'd be curious to know how this dissonance fits in your mental model, because this insane technical complexity was sold as the price to pay for not letting servers hold too much network power.

There are >65k servers on the public network, of which about 2000 are run by Element (New Vector). All the biggest deployments (100K+ users) aren't run by Element (other than the matrix.org server), given the most people who pick Matrix do so because they want to run it themselves. Community services like Mozilla/KDE/GNOME are tiny by comparison, and they only end up hosted by Element because those projects don't care about self-hosting and would rather someone else runs it for them. They could equally well host with providers like https://etke.cc/ or https://ungleich.ch/u/products/hosted-matrix-chat/ or https://federated.computer or whoever; nobody's forcing them to use Element.

> Anyways, I don't doubt that this message will be met with a well written and kind reply

I'm sure you're a lovely person, but you come across as a complete asshole here, imo. Sorry you feel let down by Matrix; meanwhile most other people on the thread seem to think it has some merit. shrug