As someone who has used Discord for the past few years, it's kind of sad to see how dominant and arbitrary it's become. Gotta say I would prefer Matrix if the communities I participate in used it.
It's gotten pretty far from the good old days of IRC --- which I'm quite aware is still alive! --- and that's both good and bad at times. But one of the biggest flaws is that it's not an open standard. (Interop is only done by prohibited programs like Ripcord!)
Matrix is controlled by the Matrix.org Foundation (https://matrix.org/foundation). The original team who created Matrix subsequently set up Element (New Vector) in order to fund Matrix work, but we very deliberately split Matrix into an independent foundation.
Unsure what you mean by “not a standard” - all APIs of the Matrix spec have been successfully implemented at this point by indpependent developers: this makes it an open standard. Eventually, once the standard has reached maturity, we may try to contribute to W3C or IETF - or we might turn it into a dedicated standards body like W3C did for the Web.
That is exactly what I mean by not a standard, standards are usually a bit more stable in the flow of new features than I see with a specification. That all api have been independtly implemented is news to me as I have no knowledge of any server implementations that are still not heavy wip so I will retract that comment and similarily the one of the relationship with New Vector.
It's gotten pretty far from the good old days of IRC --- which I'm quite aware is still alive! --- and that's both good and bad at times. But one of the biggest flaws is that it's not an open standard. (Interop is only done by prohibited programs like Ripcord!)