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Notes -
I'll caveat first of all that I'm not sure federation is a solution (and, thus, that Matrix's bad implementation is the problem). A clever and correct federation protocol might be technically interesting (though I'm not entirely convinced it's even possible without trimming off a lot of the core criteria, but like a lot of structural efforts to solve governance problems, there's no guarantee that it's the right fix.
In the modern sphere, federation pushes to one of three local maxima:
While PhotoDNA restricts its use to 'qualified customers', at least in theory relatively small outfits can apply and be recognized; RocketChat has a plugin based on the assumption that your individual outfit will enable it. The on-premise version does seem more restricted, though.
There are also a few other tools with at least different availability requirements, such as Cloudflare's implementation.
But I'm also not sure that on-server images (or video) is really that critical.
I'm not sure I understand the advantages of a lot of the more complex proposed technologies, compared to something like an IRCv2 or even a much-more-rapid self-hosted or mail-list like RSS seem much more valuable -- improve the ability to read old messages or set some messages to specific channels, implement some sort of direct client-to-client file transfer capability a la wormhole, let the server operator optionally set some up-to-server capability, give 'rooms' a better interface and discoverability, give some basic protections for account creation, done.
But even if that were The Ideal Chat Form, a large part of the problem today is that Everything's Good Enough now. Discord, Matrix, RocketChat, and even a lot of lesser-known competitors are workable for communities currently using them, the costs of transition are vast, and new Western-culture communities aren't forming anywhere near the rate they were in the USENET, Eternal September, or early Smartphone era. If you build a better mousetrap, they will not beat a path to your door. They may not even hear about you.
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