Reddit never opened its chat for third party apps, and is now stripping those apps further. Would anyone else appreciate it if some Lemmy clients would include a Matrix integration for chat?
You should be aware though that the matrix web UI is probably the most resource hungry application existing today. So far Lemmy is kind of lightweight…
I'd rather keep the different mediums separate. I have fundamentally different expectations of a medium like Lemmy, which is async, and Matrix, which is synchronous.
I wonder if you could transparently bridge the two. Make every Lemmy post into a Matrix chat, and every Lemmy comment into a matrix comment in that chat, and vice versa. Each Lemmy community could also be represented as a Space in Matrix.
I realize now you're probably talking about a community-wide chat, so my comment is kind of off-topic. Given that Lemmy already supports a "Send Secure Message" button on someone's profile that sends them to Matrix, I'd say there's a pretty good chance of the Lemmy devs integrating some feature like this.
As far as advantages for my original comment, I'm mostly thinking that integrating them that way would mean that each client wouldn't have to code its own version of chat, they'd just see comments come in from Matrix like any other comment posted the regular way.