Thank you! I am optimistic that we'll pull through.
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.
Yeah the post is new but we've been steadily ramping up investment in Trust & Safety the whole time I've been leading the Foundation :) Having added a couple moderators to the team late last year, our T&S team now has a little breathing room to do more proactive, strategic work to improve the situation. Previously, they were almost constantly on their back foot trying to keep up incident management.
Might be worth revisiting, we've seen great improvement in the last year :) I use Element X as my mobile daily driver, and use Element Web on my laptops. Feel free to ping me if you have any questions!
(meta: I need to create a new account here... but engaging here with this one since it'd be suspicious to have a new account with zero karma weighing in.)
This couldn't be further from the truth. The Matrix.org Foundation is expanding open governance, with a Governing Board that has representatives from all across the ecosystem: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/06/election-results/
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.
Because a raw dump of expenses obscures many important details, and sets people up for misunderstanding things and reporting them out of context.
I'd love to get to a point of radical and automatic transparency as you describe, but that takes a great deal of effort to do well – and the Matrix.org Foundation is still in its infancy. Gotta learn to walk before we can run!
You can trust that if there's anything obvious we should be doing, we are already doing it :) And I'm pleased to report that Automattic is one of our biggest sponsors.
Thanks for your enthusiasm for Matrix! We're at a critical point in its evolution, but there's a lot of reason to be hopeful and excited about the future – and we'll be digging deeper into that in each of the following blog posts in the series.
I think the others have covered it pretty well, but just so you hear it from the source:
> if over 60% of the annual “expenses” of your nonprofit goes to “management” covering the salaries of four people who have other full time jobs,
That is an incorrect reading of the situation. The four full-timers who work for the Foundation do not have other jobs, so we are covering 100% of their salary. And that line item on the budget _also_ covers a bunch of part-timers, such as the SREs who keep the Matrix.org homeserver running.
If you have any other questions or concerns, I'm more than happy to speak to them :)
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.