I'm not talking about the client ecosystem. I'm talking about the server ecosystem. There is only one fully-featured one, Synapse, everything else is in Alpha or Beta, feature-incomplete, or abandoned.
When I looked into writing my own implementation, the protocol seemed underspecified to me. "Do what synapse does" seemed to be the concensus.
This was a few years ago, so maybe things have improved. But given that no new feature complete servers have appeared, I doubt it.
Is it really an open ecosystem if there's only one real implementation? Is there really a specification if the reference implementation is the real specification? Do we want to put all of our eggs into one basket? YMMV, but for me the answer to all those questions is "no".
When I looked into writing my own implementation, the protocol seemed underspecified to me. "Do what synapse does" seemed to be the concensus.
This was a few years ago, so maybe things have improved. But given that no new feature complete servers have appeared, I doubt it.