I feel like more and more people are coming around to seeing the relevancy of distributed federated chat and breaking out of the walled gardens. My person money is on Matrix[0] taking off but I think the general theme of people pulling away from interesting their communication to corporations is a positive.
[0] matrix.org
Everyone should be using Matrix. Not just open source developers.
It's near feature parity with Slack and it's also one of the best IRC clients around. I used to run ERC in a tmux session just so I could stay connected and not lose messages. No more.
The ease of bridging is great. We've got a minecraft server bridge of all things; being liberated to actually have universal chat is the future for sure.
Yes, Matrix has great momentum. It is somewhat sad that XMPP is falling behind. There is no technical reason, why Matrix should be superior, but they are winning.
Similarly, the huge buzz over the past few weeks about Mastodon as a distributed/decentralized micro-blogging service has been positive. People starting to learn more about federation and decentralization. Good to see.
