I just wish Matrix’s E2EE worked better.

For "real-time communication" for individuals who don't want to maintain their own communication infrastructure, the information around https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/ is surely at least somewhat useful. The recommendations might not be suitable for "government communication" or for people who are capable of setting up and maintaining a lot of infrastructure since I wouldn't describe the infrastructure required as being easy to host independently: it doesn't seem to be easy to set up 3 servers and make it possible to use them to communicate even if something bad happens to the communication network maintained by the original creators of the software. However, the Matrix protocol might be unsuitable for this too, since it is considered to be "social networking software" now, and it stopped being a recommendation for encrypted real-time communication: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/social-networks/#element

XMPP is not better than Matrix. My major gripes with it are OMEMO and the clients that implement different subsets of the extensions.

OMEMO still is an extension instead of the core. It should be extremely easy to upgrade a chat to an encrypted one but if the client doesn't have a plugin installed to support it, you're stuck with unencrypted traffic.

And the clients I've tested have all been visually unappealing and lacking in features. Reacting to messages, quoting messages, using threads, encryption, and finding rooms has been difficult or impossible with them.

Matrix has a major advantage over XMPP in that it has an official, reference client which implements just about everything. It works better than most any XMPP client I've tried and, this is my feeling, every MSC accepted by the foundation has actually been implemented, instead of just being suggested and"left as an exercise to the developer".

Matrix didn't come out of nowhere and didn't supplant XMPP for no reason. XMPP simply doesn't have the ecosystem that makes it attractive to users and debs alike.

Zulip fulfills a completely different purpose than matrix. Its also not e2ee or federated so its kind of not an option at all for government use. Local governments need to be able to run independent infrastructure that can talk to each other. Centralized infrastructure is not an option anymore these days, its a national security risk.

Zulip is a PITA to set up, by reading the docs

Cloudflare is not a host. It’s a reverse proxy and governments use it.

You don’t. But you don’t get to make that decision for everyone you talk to. People /erroneously/ think they do, so it has become impossible to participate in a public discussion without Cloudflare in the loop.

FOSDEM 2026 demonstrates this embarrassment. Every single FOSDEM talk this year has a link to matrix.to (Cloudflare). Even if your own account is CF-independent, the rest of the crowd who you correspond with is not. You cannot isolate yourself from Cloudflare and also participate in FOSDEM rooms. That’s not ETS.

follow the link. See the title. Read the article. It’s about Matrix.

Matrix is self-hosted and federated so it's Cloudfare-free if you just don't use Cloudflare.