Matrix, to its credit, says this about itself out loud. In his State of the Union talk at the 2025 Matrix conference, co-founder Matthew Hodgson described the goal as “being the best decentralized secure comms platform in the world,” and then followed it up with “we are not going to pursue decentralized social, good luck to Bluesky and atproto, Mastodon, ActivityPub and nostr.” So the open protocol that started in the decentralised social world, is deliberately moving away from it. The interesting question is: why?

...

This is the distinction the whole thing comes down to. There is access governance, deciding who gets in and proving they are who they say they are, and there is behaviour governance, dealing with what people do once they are inside. Institutions need access governance, and they pay for it, because it is how they hold the boundary. Behaviour governance, the messy ongoing moderation work that an actual social network lives and dies on, is precisely the thing they do not need, because they deal with conduct through HR and the law and the org chart instead. And behaviour governance is precisely the thing Matrix had not good enough tools for.