I feel there’s never a good and satisfying answer to this very question… Why have 5 competing instant messengers, why not have one perfect one? Why should we retrofit threaded conversations onto Matrix and not retrofit realtime chat onto a platform that already has threaded conversations? I mean the argument goes the other way as well. The Fediverse also already exists and once Matrix comes up with new overlapping features, why does it get added there instead of them using the Fediverse? Why do they put effort into video-chat when there’s already video conferencing solutions out there? The real world is just messy. There’s a bazillion ways to arrive at a similar thing and there’s also quite some ideas out there and we constantly come up with yet more of them. And then projects grow, sometimes different ones into similar directions. We have different technological origins/roots, different ideologies and motivations that all get into the mix and have an influence on decisions. Things sometimes change during a long process. And then this is made by humans and they often don’t abide by logic. They’ll do things just for fun or because they don’t know any better. They’ll have a broad bandwith of motivations to do things a certain way. I think this is a very valid question, but the world just doesn’t work that way. And I think it’s a detailed case-by-case decision anyway to balance the positive aspects of competition with the negative aspect of investing additional resources which could be combined. And we sometimes can’t even tell unless we have hindsight available.
I feel there’s never a good and satisfying answer to this very question… Why have 5 competing instant messengers, why not have one perfect one? Why should we retrofit threaded conversations onto Matrix and not retrofit realtime chat onto a platform that already has threaded conversations? I mean the argument goes the other way as well. The Fediverse also already exists and once Matrix comes up with new overlapping features, why does it get added there instead of them using the Fediverse? Why do they put effort into video-chat when there’s already video conferencing solutions out there? The real world is just messy. There’s a bazillion ways to arrive at a similar thing and there’s also quite some ideas out there and we constantly come up with yet more of them. And then projects grow, sometimes different ones into similar directions. We have different technological origins/roots, different ideologies and motivations that all get into the mix and have an influence on decisions. Things sometimes change during a long process. And then this is made by humans and they often don’t abide by logic. They’ll do things just for fun or because they don’t know any better. They’ll have a broad bandwith of motivations to do things a certain way. I think this is a very valid question, but the world just doesn’t work that way. And I think it’s a detailed case-by-case decision anyway to balance the positive aspects of competition with the negative aspect of investing additional resources which could be combined. And we sometimes can’t even tell unless we have hindsight available.