oh yea their website seems to be down. surely a good sign… in the meantime, you can look at the website/spec through their codeberg repos.
i’m not a huge fan of matrix because it seems very bad to selfhost. from my understanding, if anyone using your homeserver joins a big channel, your homeserver will have to store the entire history of that channel and keep it up to date. on top of that, it very much seems like the spec isn’t being developed by the community, but more that element implements some feature and then forces that into the spec. also polyproto claims to be much more resilient, allowing you to migrate to a new homeserver, even if your old one is already dead.
also a lot of matrix’s funding comes from crypto, ai and venture capital, so i think it’s just a matter of time before the whole project becomes completely subsumed by capital interests
i think for my purposes i’m fine with hosting that through a separate service, so instead of XMPP + mumble i would run polyproto + mumble (or some other voip solution, screen sharing seems to be a decent way away in mumble)
but (as i understand it), polyproto isn’t a chat protocol per se, but more a protocol for federated message authentication. as an application of this protocol, they’re building polyproto-chat, which is a chat protocol. in theory, one could then also build a polyproto-voice so you can use the same account for both chatting and voice calls. i still think this is pretty far away, considering how young polyproto is, which is why my current vision is chat and voice as two separate services (which i also prefer because i imagine it makes the technology simpler and hosting easier)