Matrix and its beautiful, user-friendly Riot web / iOS / Android reference client is a new attempt to establish a decentralised, more open alternative to the variety of instant messaging / chat silos that have sprung up in recent years. By combining features such as end-to-end encryption with a modern API and easy-to-use SDKs I feel that this project has a lot of promise.

Playing around with Matrix, I have been working on a small chatbot that connects to various useful services (Wunderlist, Bitmessage, Kanban Tool, Wolfram Alpha among others). You can invite @hello-matrix:matrix.org into your own matrix rooms - he will auto-join and afterwards respond to !helpwith a list of the available features.

You can also host your own version of Hello Matrix. For more details check out the hello-matrix-bot Gitlab repository! Note that at the moment the implementation is really quick-&-dirty, lacking partial features and also being not very consistently coded. Also - and this is a big one in my opinion - it does not yet support rooms with enabled end-to-end encryption. But I wanted to get this off the ground and will build on it in the future.

By the way: If you want to talk about anything logfile-ish, feel free to join #logfilech:matrix.org using your favourite Matrix client for a discussion.