Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat

Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat

Have you looked at Gale? It was written by a friend of mine, and had a very active community for a while. It featured quite seamless federation and end-to-end public key encryption with surprisingly easy to use key management and discovery. Its downfall was really an over-reliance on the everybody-has-an-account-on-a-*nix-server model, which kept the community tidy for a while, then killed it.