Coincidentally when I logged in to my account, for the first time in years, they also pulled my reviews. I got one email for each of them, saying:
"Our moderators evaluate each review to determine whether it complies with our Community Guidelines. We determined your review does not meet these guidelines.
If you wish, you are welcome to edit your review here and your edited review will be reevaluated within 24 hours of receipt."
As the Managing Director of the Matrix.org Foundation I can assure you I'd love nothing more than to displace centralized, proprietary communication tools.
It just so happens that right now it's easier to land with folks who are patient with sharp edges and already believe in the value of FOSS, E2EE, and decentralization. Gotta start somewhere, right? :)
IDK if you caught it, but the project lead, Matthew Hodgson, gave a main stage talk at FOSDEM a couple weeks ago and offered an update on the project and, in particular, on how we're taking advantage of the push that regulators are making for interoperability. WhatsApp, in particular, gets mentioned in this context and the writers at WIRED and Tech Crunch seemed to pick up on that!
We definitely have work to do on the onboarding experience, but I'm pleased to say that there are 115M addressable users on the open federation – so many people are having great success once they get past the initial friction. Aside from all the FOSS projects that use Matrix, it's also used by the German healthcare agency, French civil servants, NATO, a number of universities including MIT and TU Dresden, Moodle, and many others.
We're moving quickly to address the feedback in the blog post and will be investing more in docs and UX to address the friction.
Please don't hesitate to share your own experiences if you run into trouble! Stuff like that is a real gift. We're always looking to learn and improve.
Josh, Managing Director of the Matrix.org Foundation
Likewise, glad for these discussions. Even if it's a bit uncomfortable to be on the receiving end, this kind of feedback is a gift. Please do share more about your experiences, we're all ears and looking to learn and improve!
BTW, on the moderation front: Draupnir is the most actively maintained tool in that space and I recommend checking it out. Separately, the Foundation is currently investing in developing better tooling to complement moderation bots like Draupnir. We don't have a planned release date, but what we're making will be FOSS and available to all to use.
We're also looking to involve more technical writers to help us better support new users and homeserver admins – for sure, it's a rough road right now.
Josh, Managing Director of the Matrix.org Foundation
Thanks for continuing to give Matrix a try! There are rough edges, for sure. I'm excited to hear what you think the next time you give it a spin – your experience is valuable feedback for us.
Element != the Matrix.org Foundation. Element relicensed Synapse. The Foundation is running a fundraiser.
I'm a little confused about your comment "AGPL for me, but not for thee." Can you unpack that a bit? Synapse is available under an AGPL license for _everyone_.
Thanks for flagging the error on our website, I believe there's a PR currently in flight to fix that.
Hey, thanks for sharing your concerns. I think we need to start right at square 0: Element is not the same as the Matrix.org Foundation, and the Foundation has not had layoffs or a reduction in scale.
We did EOL the public Libera.Chat<->Matrix bridge we were previously operating, while at the same time expanding our advocacy work to make sure we don't end up with legislators undermining their goals around safety by introducing backdoors or dangerous surveillance.
I'd _love_ to hear your questions and concerns, so that I can address them, but it is hard to address what you've currently written as it is all based on the premise that Element and the Foundation are one in the same.
Check your facts. Matrix remains an open protocol, under open source license, with open governance, stewarded by a nonprofit. And there remain multiple open source server implementations and clients.
As useful as Cory Doctorow's concept of enshittification is, it has absolutely no utility in describing what is happening here.
Nobody is being locked in, the user experience is incrementally improving as the spec and the implementations evolve, and we're sure as hell not collecting ever more data and using recommendation algorithms to shove advertising down people's throats.
There are plenty of valid critiques. But what you're saying here is just patently absurd.
I really appreciate you sharing your concerns, and for all the hope and energy you've put into Matrix to date. Very much to your point, we're not yet in a state where I recommend Matrix to friends and family. Right now I only use it with people in FOSS and other circles where folks are a little more patient with the tech.
Only time will tell, and of course I'm biased as the Matrix.org Foundation's Managing Director, but I think there's good reason to remain hopeful:
The spec continues to evolve with major improvements expected in feature set and performance in the next year as we get to the 2.0 spec release, the Foundation is staffing up and beginning to fundraise, we're on the cusp of holding our first ever community elections to seat a Governing Board, and adoption has continued doubling on an annual basis.
I invite you and anyone else who is invested and/or concerned to join us in the Foundation's new office room – it's a way to get a view into ongoing activities, ask questions, provide direct feedback, and celebrate all the little wins on our way to collective success: https://matrix.to/#/#foundation-office:matrix.org
I suspect many people _did_ find other ways to connect (indeed I fired my IRC Cloud subscription back up...), but that's not what ultimately brought us* to this decision. Really it came down to not having the funds or staff time to maintain and operate it to the level that was needed.
Echoing you, I am likewise really grateful for all the people who worked on it while it was doable!
* Speaking on behalf of the Matrix.org Foundation here as its Managing Director.
There are a number of open source events, projects, and foundations that primarily communicate on Matrix, and no surprise it seems particularly common among projects that build on federated technologies (eg ActivityPub-based projects). That's what got me started on Matrix before I joined to lead the Matrix.org Foundation :)
Hi there! Managing Director of the Foundation here. First, yes, the response times have not been great, though of course that's all been on the basis of volunteerism. Now that there's a full-time staffer you should expect better response times.
Regarding the payments to Element: those are based on the many services for which we still rely on Element.
The Foundation has a Master Services Agreement (MSA) with Element which includes administrative services, operation of the matrix.org homeserver, and secondment of several personnel whose responsibilities include advocacy, program management, standards work, and trust and safety. The MSA also includes provisions for the Foundation to reimburse Element for any bills they pay on our behalf.
Hi there! I'm the Managing Director of the Foundation. That owing balance is down to the many services for which we rely on Element.
The Foundation has a Master Services Agreement (MSA) with Element which includes administrative services, operation of the matrix.org homeserver, and secondment of several personnel whose responsibilities include advocacy, program management, standards work, and trust and safety. The MSA also includes provisions for the Foundation to reimburse Element for any bills they pay on our behalf.
Thank you for being a donor! Naturally, you can expect us to eventually publish an annual report that details revenue, expenses, and programmatic activities. At a high level, the payments to Element includes administrative services (accounting, legal, etc), operation of the matrix.org homeserver, and secondment of several personnel whose responsibilities include advocacy, program management, standards work, and trust and safety. The MSA also includes provisions for the Foundation to reimburse Element for any bills they pay on our behalf.
In terms of funding development, the Foundation's focus has mostly been on building open source trust and safety tooling since that is a gap that others haven't addressed.
The Foundation has a Master Services Agreement (MSA) with Element which includes administrative services (accounting, legal, etc), operation of the matrix.org homeserver, and secondment of several personnel whose responsibilities include advocacy, program management, standards work, and trust and safety. The MSA also includes provisions for the Foundation to reimburse Element for any bills they pay on our behalf.
For the most part, the Foundation hasn't directed much funding to active development as other folks in the ecosystem have been doing that ably. That isn't to say we don't fund development though – most recently we've been investing in developing open source trust and safety tools.
Grateful to NL Times who included this line in their article: "The investigation did not spotlight the similarly-named Matrix open source communication protocol." https://nltimes.nl/2024/12/03/dutch-french-police-take-matri...
Of course, we are staying tuned as more information becomes available.