Rocket.Chat adopts Matrix Protocol
External coordination and collaboration must be more agile and provide more privacy and freedom. To that end, Rocket.Chat, the leading open-source communication platform, has announced it is building its new federation capabilities on the Matrix protocol to allow its users to communicate with users on other platforms.
This is fantastic. If you are not familiar with Matrix protocol, this is a good description from their website
Matrix gives you simple HTTP APIs and SDKs (iOS, Android, Web) to create chatrooms, direct chats and chat bots, complete with end-to-end encryption, file transfer, synchronised conversation history, formatted messages, read receipts and more.
Conversations are replicated over all the servers participating in them, meaning there are no single point of control or failure. You can reach any other user in the global Matrix ecosystem of over 40M users, even including those on other networks via bridges.
I hope this build momentum for other commercial players in the chat and collaboration space.