Advocacy and conferences aren't going to move the needle on mainstream adoption; those methods almost by definition are targeting the enthusiast crowd. In my view, the only factor that matters to attracting users is UI/UX. Streamlining the user's experience will do more for user adoption than any number of bridges.
It's possible that growing the community is the primary goal of Element.io rather than the Matrix Foundation, but in that case, it seems that there is a tension between the goals of the foundation vs Element. I'd like to understand the breakdown between the responsibilities of the foundation vs Element more clearly.
Element is a for-profit company, originally set up to hire the Matrix Core team and is the primary driver for many projects in the Matrix eco-system. Element cannot be successful without a thriving Matrix eco-system.
In the early days the line between Element and Matrix was rather blurred, which is why we set up the Foundation as a separate entity in 2018 to ensure that whatever happened to Element, Matrix could continue as an independent entity.
It was blurred for a handful of years. Now it is clearly in control of Element.io corporation again.
ref 1: https://matrix.org/blog/2023/11/06/future-of-synapse-dendrit... , https://element.io/blog/element-to-adopt-agplv3/
And the protocol remains under the auspices of the Foundation, maintained by the volunteer Spec Core Team.
Element may be where Matrix was incubated, but it spun up the Foundation as a nonprofit and assigned the copyrights and governance of the protocol to that nonprofit. People can fearmonger all they want, but to Element's credit they've done a whole helluva lot more to preserve the integrity of open source – unlike Elastic, Redis, MongoDB, and dozens of other companies.
What part of this do you claim is false? Your link does not make any such claims re: code. It is all about the composition in people of the matrix foundation. Unfortunately the health, vigor, and composition of the matrix foundation is irrelevant to the aforementioned code and protocol now. I'm not denying that some of them still contribute code, but it's all Element.io's choice now to include it or not. Without control of the reference implementation statements like, "Members of the Spec Core Team pledge to act as a neutral custodian for Matrix on behalf of the whole ecosystem and uphold the Guiding Principles of the project" ring hollow. Eventually a for-profit corporation is going to act like a for profit-corporation.
Maybe not a popular opinion, but they should let the Matrix die altogether so something better can replace it.
IETF standard, massivelly used (video-games https://xmpp.org/uses/gaming/, IM https://xmpp.org/uses/instant-messaging/, social...), modern features, managed by a fundation with a good ecosystem and plenty of alive projects: https://xmpp.org/software/ .
Yes its not perfect, yes there's still things to improve, but the clients are there, working, on many platforms. The server-S (yes several of them!) as well, they can scale, they can adapt to many use cases.
Matrix did a few things better than XMPP (the Spaces/Servers things, that XMPP is still figuring out), but for most of the rest... well.
Oh and there's also many bridges on XMPP, maintained by different projects, and they don't need 100K$ to stay alive :)
There are a gazillion clients for Android, mostly forks of Conversations implementing slightly different extensions, but like the upstream they fail at being enjoyable to use. I have not found a decent desktop client as of my last attempt.
I seriously think that XMPP is one of the best examples of why the "write protocols, not apps" approach has failed. Without an actual, complete and cohesive reference implementation, that others follow with theirs, there will always be a fragmentation like this, which will always ruin any attempt at mainstream adoption.
Anyone telling me "actually nvm, I'm switching from Matrix to XMPP again" won't get me to replace the chat app that I keep just for this one person plus 2-3 others with another experimental, broken, soon to be replaced chat app, they'll get a link to Signal and an invite to send me a letter if they don't want to use that.
Matrix seems reasonably usable for 1:1 channels at least, and I've also successfully used it for groups, including ones bridged to discord and IRC.
Apparently they are unable or unwilling to moderate and prevent spam, even on arguably probably the first channel a large part of their potential users would join first.
That evaporated any remaining interest I had in it.
Even PGP was easier to adopt en-masse than this.
But I can see why bad experiences in the past would stick.
It's still so clunky and so difficult to get off the ground. To start, E2E key verification just wouldn't work on Element X; she had to install Element, verify my key there, and go back to Element X.
That would be easy to overlook if the UI felt responsive and snappy, but it doesn't. It feels far from native. I don't know if it's Electron under the hood--I haven't checked--but it sure feels like it. It feels unresponsive in the same way as a stereotypical bank app, like walking through Jello. Maybe it's a protocol issue; I'm not sure.
I've got a nice, powerful homeserver running, waiting for love, but it will continue waiting until such time as there's a responsive client. Every month or two, I upgrade it and give it another shot, but I always end up back on a mix of Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack, and Discord. None of my work or social circles are willing to make the switch when it feels so slow.
If I search for Element on app stores I still get the old app first (with millions of installs, vs. tens of thousands with Element X), and https://matrix.org/try-matrix also still points people to the old app. So I'm confused what "past" you're talking about :)
Similar situation with Dendrite BTW, it's been in beta forever, and the only private Matrix community I ever was a part of ditched it because Synapse was too much of a resource hog, and there's no clear migration path.
Element is the only piece of software where logging in and out (I don't want to be permanently logged in) proved to be too much of a challenge - I was regularly losing encryption keys on different devices.
A group of friends and I have been using Matrix for a couple of years now (web, Android, iOS, maybe some native clients (not sure here)) - and it's just been working. So maybe we're just using it somehow differently but we've all been quite happy with it.
The only oddities I'd noticed was when joining a massive channel, and people posting from the @matrix.org homeserver instead of their own or this small community one.
My story with moving to Matrix is similar to many others. I was enthusiastic about it, managed to persuade my groups to try it out, but then everyone was "unable to decrypt message", lost confidence in Matrix and left. The frequency with which the Matrix folks have to repeat "this is fixed in Element X and Matrix 2.0" is worrying. They keep repeating it everywhere, constantly. This indicates to me that an extremely large percentage of people have dismissed Matrix and not looked at it since their initial bad impression. This is a tough challenge to overcome, so I see why they are prioritizing evangalizing the protocol over bridges. Reputation is valuable and they need to get it back, they're definitely trying. I hope they succeed.
And yes, I think you're right to be a bit worried about how frequently we need to ask people if they've tried Matrix recently. First impressions matter a lot, and a lot of early adopters had bad first impressions. At some point we need a more concerted communication and outreach strategy to address that issue.
There is still a lot to do
Back in the heyday of IRC I spent a lot of time in technical channels on networks that were mostly technically focused, but I started using IRC in the first place because of the social channels where you could join games, talk about music, or find people with other shared interests.
Then there was a moment in time where community slack groups popped up, and again I mostly joined tech focused slack groups, but it still felt social and there were channels to talk about movies or games in addition to talk about careers or particular programming languages. Slack killed those kind of communities but they moved to discord. I left discord when they introduced ads.
Open up a Matrix client and look at the public rooms on any large server and you'll find places to talk about... the matrix protocol. and matrix servers. and matrix clients. If it's a really popular server you might also be able to talk about mastadon clients and servers too.
Even as someone who is enthusiastic about the idea of federation who might actually be interested in talking about the Matrix protocol or implementing particular servers, I still want to also talk about math or programming languages or movies. Without anything like that Matrix as a whole just gives off this general vibe of being kind of unwelcoming and not _fun_.
I noticed in the linked post that there's not a clear way forward in the short term for people to submit their own room directories. Do you think there are other ways someone might be able to help with the need for discoverable fun community spaces on Matrix? I suppose running a server is one option, but it's both difficult to bootstrap a userbase and I suspect that anyone running a server that's open for public signups risks running into exactly the same problem.
e.g. t2bot.io also runs Matrix bridges and the costs are only about $1.5k/mo [0], not $100k
t2bot's costs look like infrastructure and operation costs, not development and maintenance.
Disclaimer: I'm Aine of etke.cc, we offer managed Matrix servers with numerous different components, including bridges. Some of the components (like Postmoogle - email bridge) are developed and maintained by our team.
Arathorn, neiljohnson, thibaultmartin: Could you please provide an option for private and anonymous donations? Throw up a BTC address at least. (For even better exposure while keeping volatility, risk, and overhead at bay, I guess also USDT on SOL+ETH alongside XMR as stretch would be fancy. That USDT would get you access to memecoin gains without having to touch them even with a stick)
Or if you're really feeling prevented from accepting anonymous donations: add a fourth payment integration with a provider who can accept and convert it for you without requiring non-zk KYC on the donor side?
Having a preferred way of donating is great. But most folks who donate just want to give you money. They don't care about whatever service you're using or how much it costs you. I like you, I have some money to give you, make it as friction free as possible.
Organize it by how people want to pay (credit card, wire transfer, crypto, etc) and if they want to make it one time or recurring.
As an example assume you're a user wanting to make a one-time Euro donation via wire transfer. Ignoring the design (which is long overdue for an update) follow the path on my donation page for my open source project: https://portableapps.com/donate
May also make sense to separate out Sponsors from the Donate page since they're kinda separate groups.
That removes nothing from the rest of your comment but note that you can actually make a one time payment with liberapay, and I believe patreon too.
Bitcoin (address: 1LxowEgsquZ3UPZ68wHf8v2MDZw82dVmAE) Ethereum (address: 0xA5f9a4f9E024F6D727f7afdA9257e22329A97485)
Thank you for being up for supporting - it is very much appreciated!
FWIW, I did do a cursory look around and search before posting GP and still didn't find those. Might do you well to make those if not prominent then at least discoverable from CTAs.
But.... then the government imposed a ban and I continued to use it and last year the police knocked on my door with an Armada thinking me and my family were hosting some "terrorist". My.family forced me to cut ties to matrix then and there.
Maybe if they were more open and transparent, folks could help get them on the right track, either by making recomendations to improve, volunteering to help with things, or contributeing financially.
I really want them to succeed, but this has been going on for years now.
> T&S staffing alone is about $360k/yr, and server and SRE costs about $240k/yr
And per https://matrix.to/#/!sWpnrYUMmaBrlqfRdn:matrix.org/$pupglsTX...
> There's a rough cost breakdown available to the Governing Board right now in Discourse, which we'll be polishing and publishing after our first Finance and Fundraising Committee meeting
So the financial report is finally coming together.
We have quite a handful of volunteers and a strong community that is helping us a lot already. But some things cannot be offloaded to volunteers (typically T&S and the SRE team running the matrix.org homeserver).
Can you expand on your doubts for the ability to execute? The Foundation has a narrow set of programs on purpose, and it's not implementing any server or client for example. Most of the budget is going to matrix.org and keeping it safe (which is a lot of invisible and thankless work).
Questions:
What is the narrow set of programs Matrix.org maintains? Is Trust and Safety referring to moderating the Matrix.org homeserver?
Are there strategies that could offload some of the homeserver hosting/moderation burden to community home server operators?
Are there strategies that could make the Matrix Conf closer to break even or perhaps even revenue positive?
Most importantly, how is the foundation protected and independent of its commercial sponsors? Currently 1/2 of the foundation's "Guardians", its top governance board, are from a single commercial entity. (I am profoundly grateful to Element for their past and continued support of Matrix and its operations, but as we have witnessed in other open source communities, having a single commercial interest having too much control can be disastrous over the long term).
I really, really hope Matrix succeeds in the long term. I am absolutely rooting for it.
I have faith that the foundation manages its finance properly. I believe the Matrix protocol (and ecosystem) is full of good, needed, ideas.
But the software produced by the foundation is simply bad. From the clients to the servers. In every single matrix threads, complaints about the UX or performance abound. Usually followed by people from the foundation saying it's fixed in X or 2.0. Or by fanboys saying it's not a real problem and wasting resources on UX is dumb.
That's been going on for almost a decade now. That's a clear demonstration of a lack of ability to execute on a good idea.
And in terms of numbers, out of the $1.2M annual costs we mention there, here's the rough breakdown:
* $360K/yr – Trust & Safety
* $250K/yr – Other folks, covering program management, legal, compliance, finance, IT, security, dev
* $240K/yr – Server and SRE
* $170K/yr – My salary, covering fundraising, open governance, community relations, biz ops, and people mgmt
* $150K/yr – Matrix Conf + other events
* $30K/yr – Assorted expenses like travel, lodging, productivity infraThe Matrix Foundation Governing Board now has a dedicated finance committee, I don't have concrete timelines for publishing, though I would expect this to happen within a small number of months.
https://matrix.org/blog/2024/12/governing-board-first-report...
Where I live, all government contracts/invoices need to be published before they come into effect. This obviously required some setup, but presumably you already have similar data as a source for the planned report, why not release it?
What exactly does this mean? How is, say, my friend group chat affected by unconnected "bad communities"? Why do we care if those communities use matrix, or http, or xmpp, or skype?
1. The Matrix Foundation wants to promote communities to encourage adoption.
2. Matrix needs tools for moderating communities, even if the Matrix Foundation doesn't run communities.
So it probably does make sense for the Foundation to take this problem on, even if not directly required to making a chat protocol.
Of course, it's still useful to be able to chat with people without accounts on your private server, which is why the federation is still important. You can link up with broader networks, but you're not reliant on them.
Why this might matter is because if e.g. the UK government compels WhatsApp to implement a backdoor, as an end user I would never know. But, as someone operating entirely outside of the UK, they have no standing to compel me as a private person to implement a backdoor in my own deployment (or at the worst, at least I would know if it occurred).
Think of it as the chat analog to running your own mail server. Does everyone need to run your own mailserver? No. But if we'd started with a siloed system in email, we'd probably still be sending emails only to people with our same TLDs to this day.
Though in short, as a large public institution, being able to self-host a secure and decentralised communications network is highly preferable to needing to rely on a centralised service administered by a company in a foreign jurisdiction.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLl5dnxRMP1hX5u7TZ1FNa...
The nearest competitor is Signal but that's neither really open (it's source-available, maybe technically open source but it's clear that you aren't supposed to try to interop with the official network with non-offical clients) nor does it really seem to be made to support large group chats and a desktop-first experience.
The best way to respond is to look over your comment to see if it broke the site guidelines in any way (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). If you notice something, you can correct it in future comments; if you don't, chalk it up to the internet being weird; and either way, don't sweat the downvotes.
Also, if the downvote was weird, someone else will usually come along and add a corrective upvote (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
I am happy to pay for services like element.io, and I in fact did pay for their hosting services. I am no stranger to self-hosting, and EMS was more expensive then other hosting services. But....I figured it would be nice to help pay for development.
EMS then decided to say that if you didn't have a minimum of 50 users (at 5$/user), we wouldn't support you. So I had to migrate my instance, where I pay less for more service (etke.cc doesn't make you pay per user).
I mean....it's EMS' call that they don't think supporting a single user instance is worth the hassle, and I get it, supporting what they do is expensive, but it rubs me the wrong way to see posts like this that they are complaining about operating costs when I used to pay to support the operating costs.
That means that regardless of what anyone wants, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.app is the Matrix app, and either it works, or "Matrix" is broken, trash, and to be avoided.
Yes, I understand the differences between them. Normal users will not understand, and I will pretend to not understand, because I'm not willing to deal with such distinctions. Either a thing works or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, I'm not willing to try which combination of homeservers and apps may make it work, because normal people won't be willing to do that and the people who are willing to do that will only want to talk to me about debugging their new chat app rather than actually interesting topics.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/12/wordpress-vs-wp-engine-dra...
Then they'd have much more than 100k
P.S. donated.
Developers say the darndest things!