Thanks for the tipoff to look at 0xchat - it does remind me of where Matrix was about 8 years ago (in terms of maturity, speed of growth, features, etc). Good luck to them.

In terms of Matrix having lost the support from the open source community because Element hasn't implemented custom emoji yet... time will tell. In the end I suspect the open source community would be even more upset if Element had run out of money and exploded (although you never know; haters gonna hate :)