I don't think it's much of a metaverse competitor to be honest. I think they're just really happy with their federated message multi-receiver message exchange protocol and are experimenting with software that go beyond your standard messenger.
There's not a lot features and popularity to be gained over more mature messengers. You need killer features to get out into the market. For Signal that's privacy, for Telegram it's UX, for Line/WhatsApp/WeChat it's omnipresence in certain areas, for iMessage it's preinstalled vendor-lock-in, for SMS it's "works everywhere". Even email can be used as a chat app these days (DeltaChat uses it as a protocol for their messenger, I believe) so what's the point of trying to get into the messenger market?
So far, the places I've seen Matrix get popular are mostly among researchers/tech enthusiast spaces and open source products that needed something that was better than IRC but self-hostable enough. That's not a market with a lot of potential.
I see some real advantages to some of these experiments. Stuffing collaborative document editing into a federated protocol like this is quite interesting, for example, especially combined with some ACLs. It's not something that many other protocols are well suited for and it might just prevent Element from fading away into obscurity like XMPP.
There's not a lot features and popularity to be gained over more mature messengers. You need killer features to get out into the market. For Signal that's privacy, for Telegram it's UX, for Line/WhatsApp/WeChat it's omnipresence in certain areas, for iMessage it's preinstalled vendor-lock-in, for SMS it's "works everywhere". Even email can be used as a chat app these days (DeltaChat uses it as a protocol for their messenger, I believe) so what's the point of trying to get into the messenger market?
So far, the places I've seen Matrix get popular are mostly among researchers/tech enthusiast spaces and open source products that needed something that was better than IRC but self-hostable enough. That's not a market with a lot of potential.
I see some real advantages to some of these experiments. Stuffing collaborative document editing into a federated protocol like this is quite interesting, for example, especially combined with some ACLs. It's not something that many other protocols are well suited for and it might just prevent Element from fading away into obscurity like XMPP.