Matrix tries to kill XMPP but the reality is that if you want to self-host, XMPP is much less of a hassle. Also, Matrix is an open standard as in “pay big money to participate in the openness”. https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/01/funding-matrix-via-the-matrix-org-foundation/

Membership comes at various levels, each with different rewards:

Individual memberships (i.e. today’s Patreon supporters):
    Ability to vote in the appointment of up to 2 ‘community representatives’ to the Foundation's governing board.
    Name on the Matrix.org website
Silver member: between £2,000 and £80,000 per year, depending on organisation size
    Ability to vote on the appointment of up to 2 ‘Silver representative’ to the Foundation's governing board
    Supporter logo on the front page of the new Matrix.org website
Gold member: £200,000 / year, adds:
    Ability to vote on the appointment of up to 3 ‘Gold representatives’ to the Foundation's governing board.
    Press release announcing the sponsorship
    1 original post on the Matrix.org blog per year
    Participation in the internal Spec Core Team room
    Larger logo on the front page of Matrix.org
Platinum member: £500,000 / year, adds:
    Ability to vote on the appointment of up to 5 ‘platinum representatives’ to the Foundation's governing board.
    1 sponsored Matrix Live episode per year
    Largest logo on the front page of Matrix.org

But what is dead may never die!

Yes, it’s totally fantastic, and I’m not biased at all when I talk about it. xD

It does support a crazy amount of networks (it uses libpurple which is the lib of pidgin), unfortunately it lacks modern features and even groups don’t work that well. I actually started to work on slidge because I was fed up with spectrum2’s limitations and realised that spectrum2’s maintainer think, like many others, that XMPP is dead…