Or a worse bet, if it makes them scramble to monetize the product down the road e.g. by making it unfree (à la Transifex).

hm, fair enough. i guess you would still have an impedance mismatch due to every new discourse topic really needing its own thread in Matrix, as creating a new room for each topic would surely get unwieldy quite rapidly.

So, on the Matrix side we would love a bridge to Discourse. The Discourse folks have already written a very basic bridge bot (https://meta.discourse.org/t/set-up-matrix-riot-im-notifications-using-the-discourse-chat-integration-plugin/66944), and there is also a wider discussion about using their bridging plugin system versus Matrix’s own bridging APIs over at https://meta.discourse.org/t/common-event-system-for-chatrooms-a-specification/59245/8.

p.s. there's a bunch of wikimedians already on Matrix over at #wikimedia-matrix:matrix.org.

Hi folks; I'm the project lead for Matrix.org (and Riot.im). Ftr pinned messages have already landed on develop although they need a bit of polish; i've updated that issue to reflect. We'd love to support WMF in any way we can to assist. Riot is relatively unique in terms of being built on Matrix (open standard & FOSS impls for open decentralised comms), so you get an API and very open model of operation whilst participating in a global network. However, the fact that rooms are decentralised over all participants (in a merkle tree, a bit like Git or a blockchain) makes some features like reactions and threading harder than they should be. Reactions are due in the next few months; Threading later this year.