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matrix-doc
Discontinued Proposals for changes to the matrix specification [Moved to: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals]
We had a wonderful all-free-software NixCon 2020 a few months ago (with live talks via Jitsi for talker but not audience for better networking topology). All the code is in https://github.com/nixcon/nixcon-video-infra.
It's probably too late for the Element crew to hop on the Nix bandwagon at this point :/, but I look forward to seeing the FOSDEM effort and and that cross pollinate in the future!
It does - the point is that anyone can spin up their own Matrix server (or pick an existing one) and get involved; they don't have to use the fosdem.org one.
Separately, in terms of implementations: Dendrite is usable these days, albeit beta: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/08/dendrite-is-entering-beta, and meanwhile Synapse is stable. Conduit (https://conduit.rs) is making progress on federation (and works for simple use cases), and Construct (https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct) exists too.
Sibling comments correctly mention that this is about custom instances and bridging. Matrix is an open network, you can participate with your own server.
But also note that there is a very actively developed new (official) server implementation called Dendrite. [1]
It's somewhere between alpha and beta.
Dendrite also has some experimental support for peer to peer. [2]
[1] https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite
[2] https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/02/introducing-p-2-p-matrix
Agreeing how to do 1:1 voice and video is very much part of Matrix's spec: it's right here: https://matrix.org/docs/spec/client_server/r0.6.1#module-voi...
For multiway calls, we currently embed Jitsi as a Widget - but widgets themselves are also (almost) part of the spec - they're MSC1236 (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/1236).
Element may be the only client that implements widgets so far, but we expect that to change once MSC1236 finally gets merged into the spec. Meanwhile, "ability to iframe random content into a chatroom" is a pretty useful thing, and solves the whole video conferencing thing fairly nicely.
Finally, in the longer term, we still plan to implement native voice/video conferencing in Matrix as per https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc235... - but for now we'd rather focus on polishing the messaging bits of Matrix.