this is all good and dandy like jabber was. Then someone like google will provide a massive, free*, always-on server. take control of everything because it will have all the users. and dictate when features are in or not (e.g. jabber federation)
Yes, it's deliberately much harder for this failure mode to happen:
1. Matrix's baseline featureset is much more comprehensive than XMPP and doesn't yet support API extensions; only datatype extensions. So for a Google to become the defacto implementation and then start lobotomising the featureset they really would not be speaking Matrix at all any more.
2. Federation is completely fundamental to Matrix. All rooms are distributed over all participating servers with no single points of control or failure. So rooms and the network will always live on in other servers, even if a big player becomes a default provider.
this is all good and dandy like jabber was. Then someone like google will provide a massive, free*, always-on server. take control of everything because it will have all the users. and dictate when features are in or not (e.g. jabber federation)
Or is this harder to happen with matrix?