> Without advocacy, conferences, documentation and tutorials, Matrix would become a niche protocol used by a few enthusiasts for side projects, whilst big proprietary and siloed networks continue to hold the world’s communications.
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.
Except that the Matrix Foundation has already given up control of the reference implementation and protocol architectural choices back to Riot.im/Element.io corporation. This happened a year or two ago.
It was blurred for a handful of years. Now it is clearly in control of Element.io corporation again.
I entirely agree. The advocacy they should be doing is making it as attractive as possible to develop new clients (with good UX) so that finally one with a good UX will come out.
I mean, I've tried to use Matrix many times overy many years. I do care about more than JUST the UX but it has been SO consistently bad that I just can't. Something has gotta change, preferably before Discord completely implodes.
Video calls work on schildichat on android but I use straight element now and I'd have to check.
We are all aware that matrix needs a TURN/STUN server to do audio and video calls, right? I think users might be able to specify their own turn server, but if your homeserver can't punch NAT you're not making video calls, period.
I don't know of any non-centralized functional service offhand that can do peer to peer video or voice without an intermediary 100% of the time. That crap died in the 90s.
I have had only bad experience with its federation and chat clients over many years, I don't think it can improve, if it could, they probably would have fixed it a long time ago.
Maybe not a popular opinion, but they should let the Matrix die altogether so something better can replace it.
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 :)
XMPP in its current state is a mess. The bare protocol is minimal, the things which actually make the thing usable are just a bunch of extensions, barely glued onto the thing, which means that there are clients that implement different features, and you never know if whatever you send will be supported by the receiver (including encryption).
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.
Matrix isn't particularly better though; its main spec does "have" a bunch of things, sure, but they're still very bodged together (threads are replies but with a tag of "no, this is actually a thread"; and for backwards-compatibility clients are "supposed to" understand a non-marked-as-thread reply as being in the thread, but the spec doesn't facilitate any way to consistently reason about such replies (i.e. they're not included when paging through the threads messages); all formatting-ful messages contain both a HTML and plain-text version of the message; edit events contain both "* "-prepended versions of the body for clients who don't support edits, and a "proper" copy for those that do, so that's 4 copies of the body in an edit event).
And there's plenty of inconsistencies across matrix clients too: some don't support displaying spoilers and so get spoiled (incl. Element X android); most (incl. Element) don't have a way to send spoilers outside of whole-message spoilers or manually writing out the HTML. Thread support is flakey. Some clients insert a newline every 70-or-whatever chars, which is supposed to be ignored by proper HTML parsing, but some things don't. Off the top of my head.
Threads are an anti-feature to me. The only time I found them remotely useful is when I was doing an AI bot integration into the Matrix channel and it was just me and the bot.
I don't imagine using them much either even if they were feasible to use (I have the extra trouble of being primarily in a community that's bridged to discord, but the bridge doesn't bridge threads), but I've seen them used meaningfully in other discords for tangential/off-topic discussions.
XMPP had its run and is dead, replaced by Matrix. Every single contact I've had on XMPP has migrated away from it.
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.
As I said - every single of my chat-app-militant contacts has migrated from XMPP (which they pushed early and aggressively) to Matrix, which includes groups like hacker spaces etc. (at least the ones that didn't just give up and migrate to closed solutions).
I literally have no single person to talk to on XMPP. The software names you mention all trigger flashbacks of horrible experiences, with my last experience even worse than my recent experience with Element, and unless they have been rewritten from scratch, I wouldn't be willing to install them again. At least I can run Element in a browser tab where it can't pwn my system...
There seem to be three incompatible standards for e2ee on XMPP, the latest being https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0384.html which is marked "experimental". I've never seen OpenPGP used, OTR was a compatibility nightmare, and I think by the time OMEMO started to be a thing XMPP started to stop being a thing.
OMEMO is the only E2EE standard to use now (I mean, barring occasional outliers, but OMEMO is the norm). That's cool, I'm talking to people on XMPP every day with people who have zero intention of moving unless something better (by their definition) comes along. XMPP seems to be gaining popularity as one of the last possible options for a genuinely decentralized encrypted chat protocol that isn't beholden to a singular closed org/corp. I just personally onboarded like five people and they're all like "this is awesome" and.... wait, did you just say "at least I can run this in a browser tab where it can't pwn my system"? Please search "browser exploit rce" on your favorite search engine. Here's one from two weeks ago: https://windowsforum.com/threads/cve-2025-21279-remote-code-...
I used to have a couple 1:1 Matrix chats with friends where I was trying to bridge the whole "different OS" issue for E2EE chat. Neither of them use Matrix anymore, and we were all having issues with Signal (my account is still b0rked). It was just too much hassle. So I mean, the anecdotes go both ways here.
I'm a fan and active user of XMPP. However, it unfortunately is true that encryption is a can of worms. OMEMO should be the standard, yet there is fragmentation in terms of the specific OMEMO spec version that clients use. Not even the most prominent clients keep up with the latest spec, as can be seen here [1]. One of the issues is, that everything prior to 0.4.0 uses AES-128-GCM, instead of the standard that is used by other platforms (eg Signal), that is AES-256-CBC with HMAC-SHA-256. In plain English this means that most mainstream XMPP clients do not offer encryption at a level that can and should be expected these days.
Browser sandbox escape to userspace exploits are still much harder to make though, compared to... uh.. a userspace to userspace exploit, given that the latter takes literally (actually literally) zero effort, and as such you don't have one every couple weeks, but rather an ∞ of new exploits per second.
(that said, a web-based client has the aspect that an exploit could be inserted at any point with only a page restart necessary, whereas a native client would need updating; but hopefully you update your client, lest you start missing out on new protocol features!)
I agree, I've tried every possible setup I could to get things running reliably for a client and ultimately just held up my hands and went, "exactly why are you not using a combination of Signal/Keybase/GPG" for your use case?
I disagree--it doesn't feel resolved. I've been trying to use Matrix for so long now, and just recently gave another shot at helping my partner get up and running with Element X on her M4 iPad.
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.
This sounds very strange. Element X on iOS is a native Swift UI app, and for me (even in an enormous account) it’s super snappy - similar to WhatsApp or Telegram or iMessage. It’s not Electron, which is only for desktop apps; is there a chance you’re mixing up Element X with Element Web/Desktop (which is still sluggish, but should get much-needed upgrades this year)?
No, there's no chance I'm mixing them up. It's Element X from the App Store. The app label is "Element X".
If I'm using a mobile app, chances are I'm on-the-go. I probably have a slow, high-latency, or otherwise unreliable connection. It's possible it comes down to protocol differences that hinder UI responsiveness.
Edit: As a test, I just sent a message from my phone while on a cell connection with good service. Hitting the send button felt unresponsive: it took a bit for the message to appear in the chat history (maybe 100-200ms). That's on a stable 300 Mbps connection mere miles from my homeserver.
For contrast, Telegram doesn't wait to clear my text area. I can queue further messages to send even if my first hasn't gone through. Same for Slack and Discord.
The first msg does take a little longer to clear the composer, but it’s barely noticeable. And as the recording shows, it queues up msgs fine if the first hasn’t gone through.
It's hard to say because I can't see when you're clicking, but that looks snappier than what I'm seeing. I'll comment further in the issue and attach a screen recording of my own.
Same here. I really like Matrix protocol but Element on desktop and Android is... Still beta? Recovering keys is not user friendly. Many family members use unverified devices after upgrade. Editing is laggy, new channels connect for ages...
So what exactly is the status of Element X? I was under the impression it's still in development, lacking some features of the old app, and will fully replace it when it's ready.
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.
It doesn’t have threads or spaces yet; threads are underway currently; spaces will follow.
Dendrite on the other hand has been relegated to an experimental server; we didn’t have bandwidth to do both Synapse and Dendrite so
focused on improving Synapse instead, which has steadily become less of a resource hog. Guess we should provide dendrite->synapse migration paths.
Thanks! But still not sure why Element X isn't featured more prominently on matrix.org then.
And surprised to hear Dendrite is now just experimental and not the future anymore. The README and FAQ on GitHub give no indication of that at all, maybe start there?
> And surprised to hear Dendrite is now just experimental and not the future anymore. The README and FAQ on GitHub give no indication of that at all, maybe start there?
Yup, the readme needs to be updated and that’s with me.
Only for mobile, no? Element X for desktop is still in development, last time I checked, and the old client is as bad as ever.
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.
If you are ever at a point where you have no active sessions (aka “devices”) then other clients will not be able to send you the keys to decrypt their messages.
This is one of the many ways to get “unable to decrypt” errors in Matrix.
Matrix feels like it’s in a strange place. I briefly tried it only to find vast quantities of porn and spam. Even the “programming” channel. I mentioned this in a thread on HN and got blasted by some Matrix maintainer, as if it was preposterous that I found this to not be a good thing.
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.
I have no skin in this game but I'm honestly baffled.
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.
- Very slow for a chat client. Startup, input lag etc
- Continous popups to verify/authenticate. I was never able to complete this process to to some combo of bugs, or the difficulty level being beyond me.
- Synchronization bugs between desktop and mobile clients; messages would be missing for some people, or on some devices. Or the messages would show, but edits not reflected.
Yes ... my matrix.org account is still many times slower than my other chat apps and there's spam everywhere. It's not a great experience. I'm really hoping to see Matrix go big but it feels like there's still a long way to go.
That said, ElementX's video and audio calls work really well. If you added the ability to ring people's phones, so I don't have to first negotiate people into the chat using text messages or a phone call, I could see using it instead of FaceTime.
Pixel 9. Here's an example: GrapheneOS General is mirrored to Discord. Open both and start scrolling up. ElementX shows the spinner for 3 seconds at a time, Discord spins for 1/2 second or so. Go ahead and race them, it's not even close.
Another example: Matrix HQ is always notoriously slow. Just now I opened it and there are no messages ... none. No spinner. Just a note at the bottom saying "27 room changes." I waited for at least 10 seconds. Force quit the app, reload, and the messages are there.
What platform are you using that performs so much better than mine?
I suspect you are hitting perf issues on Android due to lack of caching (which bite Android way more than iOS due to JNA being way slower for calling the rust-sdk than Swift’s rust bindings). This should be fixed by https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/issues/3280, which as you can see from all the checkboxes is making progress.
We are ready to donate. Unfortunately, none of the options work: Only credit card or bank wire transfer are accepted.
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?
I think the Donate page may need a rework. Listing only Donorbox and then Other Options at the top adds unnecessary resistance. I have never heard of Donorbox, I have to click again to see what other options there are. Ok, click. There's also Patreon (which means ongoing donation in my mind) and Librepay (which I've heard of but never used... and is apparently also ongoing donations weekly/monthly/etc). Can't I just use a credit card or PayPal to make a one time donation for instance? After playing around, it seems you can but you have to click DonorBox and then change it to one time.
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.
> There's also Patreon (which means ongoing donation in my mind) and Librepay (which I've heard of but never used... and is apparently also ongoing donations weekly/monthly/etc). Can't I just use a credit card or PayPal to make a one time donation for instance?
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.
That's encouraging, thank you for still keeping lights on. Will make sure to follow up.
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.
I do hope they get what they need. If nothing else, I think they've chosen a solid and well-founded strategy to manage the situation - the focus areas they mentioned are more important than bridging. Maintaining bridges has always struck me as something hugely resource intensive. I applaud their stewardship.
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.
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.
This is probably because you’re using matrix.org, which hasn’t yet rolled out the new Matrix 2.0 authentication thet Element X uses (given it involves migrating 50M accounts or something). This is planned for March however.
It absolutely has not. I'm looking at messages in Element X right now that don't decrypt, ie "Waiting for this message", from one user interspersed between decrypted messages from other users. Meanwhile my other two clients (app.element.io and pantalaimon) happen to be able to read all of them.
I really want to like Matrix, and just last weekend I re-downloaded a matrix client and tried to give it another shot. Maybe I'm holding it wrong, but from what I can tell it's suffering from the same problem that all of the fediverse services seem to suffer from: The only thing to talk about is the fediverse itself.
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_.
Reading the article was helpful to understand the other side of it. I definitely understand how it's a hard problem to solve on the part of the server owners.
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.
There are giant, active channels for specific topics. I've been in the OpenBSD channel(s) for years and there is always relevant deep discussion there. Same for other technical topics like that.
Matrix.org is the hugest public Matrix server, plus $100k is not just infrastructure costs, but development and maintenance of the bridges as well. As an etke.cc developer, I can assure you that development, maintenance, and operations even a small bridge is no joke.
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.
It looks like the site you are referring to quotes pure ISP costs while the matrix foundation bridge costs include maintaining bridge related software they would otherwise archive.
> Without Trust & Safety efforts, bad actors and communities would proliferate on the network and make it unlivable for the rest.
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?
because if your friends start roaming around the public Matrix network and find public chatrooms full of abusive content, then they will indeed be affected. see https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/ for more.
So much so that it’s looking like maybe federation is not the best model. Your server ends up hosting any room and potentially any media that any of your users gets into. So naturally server admins must take an interest us in what their users are doing. This is in conflict with the top level goals of freedom and privacy.
Maybe the simpler client-server model of the web is better after all. Then if some user on my server is also into some super weird stuff, I don’t have to know. Because they connect to the weird server directly from their client, not through me.
I love the concept behind the Matrix protocol, but I have zero faith in the Matrix Foundations ability to execute. Folks have been asking for financial tranparency for years now (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/571#issueco...). And all that we get are posts like this complainging about not having enough money and threatening to shut things down, repeatedly.
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.
> 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).
Thank you for sharing that information. It seems like the foundation has been slowly moving in the right direction. I may have written a bit too harshly in my previous comment. I have been checking in on the development of Matrix, the Foundation, and monitoring that Github issue for quite some time.
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.
> Can you expand on your doubts for the ability to execute?
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.
> But the software produced by the foundation is simply bad.
The foundation produces things like the spec and the e2ee libs. The last time the foundation produced a client was in 2015, and servers in 2023 - in both instances the wider community builds the implementations, just as W3C doesn’t make web browsers any more.
> Usually followed by people from the foundation saying it's fixed in X or 2.0.
Could this be because… it’s fixed in Element X or Matrix 2.0, perhaps?
A breakdown was actually just posted on that thread an hour ago:
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 infra
The intention is very much to offer greater financial transparency, in fact doing so is a prerequisite for multiple funding sources.
The 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.
I've never run a non-profit, but what's stopping the Foundation from releasing a raw dump of expenses?
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?
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!
I still don't understand why Matrix exists. It feels like a solution looking for a problem to solve. I must be missing something? Can someone explain the gap it closes?
From my perspective, the biggest differentiator is that Matrix allows users to remove the centralized coordinator from their chat provider. That is, I can run my own Matrix server, where my users can chat with each other, without any interaction with Element.io or other operator. All other major providers (Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc) all rely on a single operator to coordinate the system.
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.
AIUI (from talking to people who had to implement XMPP), the problem isn't that "XMPP is XML", the problem is that XMPP is XML done badly. An XMPP connection is essentially a giant XML document that's never closed, which most XML libraries tend to handle very poorly, so you often end up writing your own XML library to handle XMPP. With all of the pain that entails.
Yup. You can write xmpp parsers with thin wrappers around a push based sax parser. It is not hard, people are just not familiar with sax.
Sure, sax parsers have their limitations, but there are sax parsers that avoid the callback trouble by doing a tree-style fold over the XML structure instead of the linear fold over the XML stream. Not for the server, since it is not super efficient, but writing a client like that is easy peasy.
I found XMPP an absolute delight to work with and built all kinds of command-and-control messaging utils with it that allowed me the flexibility to use it as a chat service and RPC broker all at the same time, with bots as APIs. It was nuts but brilliant. Bring it back, I say.
Coincidentally I just got an XMPP server going and have a bunch of people happily chatting on it. Yeah it has its issues, but it's an open, well-defined protocol evolved over a long period of time. It won't disappear if its singular maintainer disappears (referring to both Signal and Matrix here).
yes and XMPP is actually a messaging protocol. Matrix is an eventually consistent database with a crappy messaging app implemented on top, and because of the insane architecture they are justifying decisions like message ordering that is non-deterministic[0] -- for multi user chat!
What could possibly go wrong if users in a multi user chat see messages in different orders? This decision is a perfect example of how smart systems engineers can be so completely divorced from the real problem (human communication) that they make completely asinine choices justified by implementation details no user cares about.
Matrix needs to die so it can stop sucking the air out of this space. The funding problems are also completely predictable but that's an opinion for another time.
Even the E2EE implementation is garbage. To this day fifty percent of the conversation in every E2EE group chat I'm in is "Hey XYZ I can't see your messages because they fail to decrypt" because they still have bugs in how clients distribute their keys to other clients. Imagine the state of a chat platform literally failing at chat.
Or look at how until a few months ago, the media store of every homeserver served media on the internet without any authentication. Someone just had to post CP in a popular room and they'd get hundreds of servers rehosting it for free. (Recently they finally added the ability to require authentication for the media store, although they didn't add support for it to their web client, only their new Android one.)
Matrix Con 2024 had a public sector track where various organisations such as NATO, the French Government and the German Healthcare industry outlined the problems they are solving with Matrix.
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.
It seems to be the only currently existing open, e2e encrypted, chat application that reasonably supports both multi-device and large group chats. Essentially Slack or Discord without the centralization.
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 property of federated control over the network, which is what the rest of the internet (including the protocol you're using right now, and all the proprietary chat apps) depend on.
I don't understand why my question got reported. I didn't say that Matrix is bad or shouldn't be funded. Even if it's just to compete with other protocols, that alone would make it worth funding. I just can't find enough information to actually understand it's angle. Thanks for those who replied to help explain it. :)
It didn't get reported - it just got downvoted. Downvotes are often unfathomable.
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.
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.
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.
While that's fair, My understanding is Element does fund matrix.org (They even state that in the article and it can be seen here: https://matrix.org/support/). So I would think that money they get from those services would help.
at the same time, they (Element) focus on bigger customers, where they can make bigger money and then fund the Foundation.
On the contrary, etke.cc focuses on small, independent Matrix servers that could work as a single-user server, and as a small company/community internal server, and even a public server. Our focus is to be sustainable and to provide a way to own your communications in a hassle-free (or, at least, less painful) way.
So, our goals are just different.
Disclaimer: I'm Aine, one of the etke.cc developers
Hi Aine! I actually migrated to etke.cc when that happened, and have been really happy with your services.
I do get that the goals are different, and to be honest, I'm still not sure whether my post/annoyance is justified. EMS is within their rights to do what they want, and sure, single users/small instances like me may not be worth their time. I would just think that if they are still struggling to fund large public servers, I wouldn't turn own even smaller instances until I am financially solvent.
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.
Another way of saying this is, "Riot.im/Element.io corporation has taken over the reference protocol development from the matrix foundation (now defunct in that aspect, *1) . Now that matrix is controlled by Element.io corporation the remaining Matrix foundation does not have the resources to continue bridges. And Element.io decided that early bridges to bootstrap/steal users from other messenging networks are no longer needed and so will not help the matrix foundation with them or spend any resources to maintain them themselves."
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.
Further from the truth? It is an established fact that Element.io corporation has now re-taken over development of the matrix protocol reference implementations. I provided easy reference links to verify this. And matrix 2.0 and all it's new features and architecture are defined by the corporation's choices alone. The matrix foundation does not do this anymore.
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.
I was a huge matrix user, had converted "most" of my family and extended family to join matrix to be able to talk to me and it was generally a fine experience. Not great, just fine.
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.
I'm shocked that Matrix Foundation is considering shutting down if they don't raise $100K - what's going on behind the scenes here?
Matrix has been a staple in the community, hosting Matrix.org, so this news comes as a blow to many of us who rely on their services.
Here are some key points to consider
• They're struggling to maintain the server costs
• They've tried fundraising but haven't reached their goal
• They might shut down servers and discontinue some projects if they don't get more funding
It's hard not to wonder how this could have been avoided - were there any warning signs or mismanagement that led to this point?
Can someone explain what's going on with Matrix Foundation's financials - are they overspending or is this just a case of underfunding?
What does this mean for the future of decentralized communication platforms like Matrix?
guess that explains the weird unicode middots. wonder if it’s random or targeted; anti-matrix/element spam seems to be a thing since certain govts started relying on it.
The act as police and spy on their users "problem"? I don't know - have apartment buildings solved the domestic violence problem, that happens within them, shielded by their opaque walls?
See my other reply, watch the linked video it's not as black and white as you make it sound like and public non-encrypted rooms hosting tons of CSAM being replicated to any matrix server where any user joined them is a problem.
That's the opposite of a problem, isn't it? Have cops request the IPs and arrest those sharing the material - you've just caught a lot of criminals for almost zero effort.
Unless the "problem" isn't catching criminals, and you don't really care about CSAM, just maintaining matrix's reputation from mercenary journalists willing to conflate a protocol with its users for some clickbait title, or to give a government ammo to ban encryption.
You could watch the video to actually understand the issue instead of making wild assumptions about me.
Until very recently and still to a degree today, you couldn't host a matrix server that has public registration without someone registering, joining a CSAM room and having all that material replicate to your server.
This would be LESS of a problem if the content was actually encrypted and you as an Admin couldn't access it. But sure, it's not an issue just some bad journalism that's why Matrix just recently actually addressed it (thanks Arathorn for replying): https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/
But if you don't think it's a problem, i'm sure you are willing to link to your publicly open server and let people register, i'll write an e-mail to your local law enforcement to let them know you are knowingly hosting childporn on your server, i'm sure the courts will agree with your opionion
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.
IDK, have you? Has Apple, Google, Linux? Have we really solved it as a society until we have reached the end-game of Zero Trust Architecture; locked down all bootloaders to only run trusted firmware; locked down firmware to only boot trusted os; enforce attestation at service auth so only genuine devices with client-side "safety" rootkits are accepted?
If you actually watched the linked video you would see that random matrix servers were co-opted to spread CSAM on a massive scale due to what is essentially a design flaw and there was until very very recently not much done to make it possible for server admins to fight that. It's not as black and white as your comment makes it seem.
> Without advocacy, conferences, documentation and tutorials, Matrix would become a niche protocol used by a few enthusiasts for side projects, whilst big proprietary and siloed networks continue to hold the world’s communications.
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.
The Matrix Foundation's goals and structure are described here (https://matrix.org/foundation/about/)
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.
Except that the Matrix Foundation has already given up control of the reference implementation and protocol architectural choices back to Riot.im/Element.io corporation. This happened a year or two ago.
It was blurred for a handful of years. Now it is clearly in control of Element.io corporation again.
"would become a niche protocol.." I would say that's exactly what it is today, more conferences will clearly not change that.
I entirely agree. The advocacy they should be doing is making it as attractive as possible to develop new clients (with good UX) so that finally one with a good UX will come out.
I mean, I've tried to use Matrix many times overy many years. I do care about more than JUST the UX but it has been SO consistently bad that I just can't. Something has gotta change, preferably before Discord completely implodes.
the thing that changed is that Element rewrote the mobile apps and made them not suck. Web will follow shortly: https://element.io/blog/we-have-lift-off-element-x-call-and-... etc
For the second time...
And they still don't support many features...
And there is lack of compatibility for things like video calling so transitioning to them is infeasible for lots of people.
This sort of seems like the sort of UX issue OP is concerned about.
Video calls work on schildichat on android but I use straight element now and I'd have to check.
We are all aware that matrix needs a TURN/STUN server to do audio and video calls, right? I think users might be able to specify their own turn server, but if your homeserver can't punch NAT you're not making video calls, period.
I don't know of any non-centralized functional service offhand that can do peer to peer video or voice without an intermediary 100% of the time. That crap died in the 90s.
I tried Element X but it failed to authenticate with no suitable explanation for me because it's lacking SAML support.
Edit: it's also lacking threads still, apparently?
[dead]
I have had only bad experience with its federation and chat clients over many years, I don't think it can improve, if it could, they probably would have fixed it a long time ago.
Maybe not a popular opinion, but they should let the Matrix die altogether so something better can replace it.
Like... XMPP ?
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 :)
XMPP in its current state is a mess. The bare protocol is minimal, the things which actually make the thing usable are just a bunch of extensions, barely glued onto the thing, which means that there are clients that implement different features, and you never know if whatever you send will be supported by the receiver (including encryption).
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.
Matrix isn't particularly better though; its main spec does "have" a bunch of things, sure, but they're still very bodged together (threads are replies but with a tag of "no, this is actually a thread"; and for backwards-compatibility clients are "supposed to" understand a non-marked-as-thread reply as being in the thread, but the spec doesn't facilitate any way to consistently reason about such replies (i.e. they're not included when paging through the threads messages); all formatting-ful messages contain both a HTML and plain-text version of the message; edit events contain both "* "-prepended versions of the body for clients who don't support edits, and a "proper" copy for those that do, so that's 4 copies of the body in an edit event).
And there's plenty of inconsistencies across matrix clients too: some don't support displaying spoilers and so get spoiled (incl. Element X android); most (incl. Element) don't have a way to send spoilers outside of whole-message spoilers or manually writing out the HTML. Thread support is flakey. Some clients insert a newline every 70-or-whatever chars, which is supposed to be ignored by proper HTML parsing, but some things don't. Off the top of my head.
Threads are an anti-feature to me. The only time I found them remotely useful is when I was doing an AI bot integration into the Matrix channel and it was just me and the bot.
I don't imagine using them much either even if they were feasible to use (I have the extra trouble of being primarily in a community that's bridged to discord, but the bridge doesn't bridge threads), but I've seen them used meaningfully in other discords for tangential/off-topic discussions.
XMPP had its run and is dead, replaced by Matrix. Every single contact I've had on XMPP has migrated away from it.
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.
XMPP isn't dead, but think what you like. More and more people have been adopting it. "experimental, broken", that's not really how I describe software that's been in use since 2004 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gajim / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software) ), 2014 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversations_(software) ) etc. If you want to describe something as experimental or broken just take a look at Element, which has never once been what I would describe as "polished".
As I said - every single of my chat-app-militant contacts has migrated from XMPP (which they pushed early and aggressively) to Matrix, which includes groups like hacker spaces etc. (at least the ones that didn't just give up and migrate to closed solutions).
I literally have no single person to talk to on XMPP. The software names you mention all trigger flashbacks of horrible experiences, with my last experience even worse than my recent experience with Element, and unless they have been rewritten from scratch, I wouldn't be willing to install them again. At least I can run Element in a browser tab where it can't pwn my system...
There seem to be three incompatible standards for e2ee on XMPP, the latest being https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0384.html which is marked "experimental". I've never seen OpenPGP used, OTR was a compatibility nightmare, and I think by the time OMEMO started to be a thing XMPP started to stop being a thing.
OMEMO is the only E2EE standard to use now (I mean, barring occasional outliers, but OMEMO is the norm). That's cool, I'm talking to people on XMPP every day with people who have zero intention of moving unless something better (by their definition) comes along. XMPP seems to be gaining popularity as one of the last possible options for a genuinely decentralized encrypted chat protocol that isn't beholden to a singular closed org/corp. I just personally onboarded like five people and they're all like "this is awesome" and.... wait, did you just say "at least I can run this in a browser tab where it can't pwn my system"? Please search "browser exploit rce" on your favorite search engine. Here's one from two weeks ago: https://windowsforum.com/threads/cve-2025-21279-remote-code-...
I used to have a couple 1:1 Matrix chats with friends where I was trying to bridge the whole "different OS" issue for E2EE chat. Neither of them use Matrix anymore, and we were all having issues with Signal (my account is still b0rked). It was just too much hassle. So I mean, the anecdotes go both ways here.
I'm a fan and active user of XMPP. However, it unfortunately is true that encryption is a can of worms. OMEMO should be the standard, yet there is fragmentation in terms of the specific OMEMO spec version that clients use. Not even the most prominent clients keep up with the latest spec, as can be seen here [1]. One of the issues is, that everything prior to 0.4.0 uses AES-128-GCM, instead of the standard that is used by other platforms (eg Signal), that is AES-256-CBC with HMAC-SHA-256. In plain English this means that most mainstream XMPP clients do not offer encryption at a level that can and should be expected these days.
[1]: https://xmpp.org/extensions/#xep-0384-implementations
Browser sandbox escape to userspace exploits are still much harder to make though, compared to... uh.. a userspace to userspace exploit, given that the latter takes literally (actually literally) zero effort, and as such you don't have one every couple weeks, but rather an ∞ of new exploits per second.
(that said, a web-based client has the aspect that an exploit could be inserted at any point with only a page restart necessary, whereas a native client would need updating; but hopefully you update your client, lest you start missing out on new protocol features!)
Hey man, GNU Social still exists toooooo
I agree, I've tried every possible setup I could to get things running reliably for a client and ultimately just held up my hands and went, "exactly why are you not using a combination of Signal/Keybase/GPG" for your use case?
Even PGP was easier to adopt en-masse than this.
The irony is that I suspect we have fixed it - eg Element X and Matrix 2.0 is a massive step change forwards; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHyHO3xPfQU etc.
But I can see why bad experiences in the past would stick.
I disagree--it doesn't feel resolved. I've been trying to use Matrix for so long now, and just recently gave another shot at helping my partner get up and running with Element X on her M4 iPad.
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.
This sounds very strange. Element X on iOS is a native Swift UI app, and for me (even in an enormous account) it’s super snappy - similar to WhatsApp or Telegram or iMessage. It’s not Electron, which is only for desktop apps; is there a chance you’re mixing up Element X with Element Web/Desktop (which is still sluggish, but should get much-needed upgrades this year)?
No, there's no chance I'm mixing them up. It's Element X from the App Store. The app label is "Element X".
If I'm using a mobile app, chances are I'm on-the-go. I probably have a slow, high-latency, or otherwise unreliable connection. It's possible it comes down to protocol differences that hinder UI responsiveness.
Edit: As a test, I just sent a message from my phone while on a cell connection with good service. Hitting the send button felt unresponsive: it took a bit for the message to appear in the chat history (maybe 100-200ms). That's on a stable 300 Mbps connection mere miles from my homeserver.
For contrast, Telegram doesn't wait to clear my text area. I can queue further messages to send even if my first hasn't gone through. Same for Slack and Discord.
I’m not sure I’m seeing what you’re describing. Here’s a screen recording of send performance (on fast internet, a few ms ping to the homeserver): https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-ios/issues/3810
The first msg does take a little longer to clear the composer, but it’s barely noticeable. And as the recording shows, it queues up msgs fine if the first hasn’t gone through.
How does this compare with what you’re seeing?
It's hard to say because I can't see when you're clicking, but that looks snappier than what I'm seeing. I'll comment further in the issue and attach a screen recording of my own.
Same here. I really like Matrix protocol but Element on desktop and Android is... Still beta? Recovering keys is not user friendly. Many family members use unverified devices after upgrade. Editing is laggy, new channels connect for ages...
So what exactly is the status of Element X? I was under the impression it's still in development, lacking some features of the old app, and will fully replace it when it's ready.
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 X exited beta in September, and is the preferred app from Element, as per https://element.io/app-for-productivity
It doesn’t have threads or spaces yet; threads are underway currently; spaces will follow.
Dendrite on the other hand has been relegated to an experimental server; we didn’t have bandwidth to do both Synapse and Dendrite so focused on improving Synapse instead, which has steadily become less of a resource hog. Guess we should provide dendrite->synapse migration paths.
Thanks! But still not sure why Element X isn't featured more prominently on matrix.org then.
And surprised to hear Dendrite is now just experimental and not the future anymore. The README and FAQ on GitHub give no indication of that at all, maybe start there?
> But still not sure why Element X isn't featured more prominently on matrix.org then.
That looks to be a snafu. It’s featured on https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/ for instance.
> And surprised to hear Dendrite is now just experimental and not the future anymore. The README and FAQ on GitHub give no indication of that at all, maybe start there?
Yup, the readme needs to be updated and that’s with me.
Only for mobile, no? Element X for desktop is still in development, last time I checked, and the old client is as bad as ever.
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.
Don’t log out!
If you are ever at a point where you have no active sessions (aka “devices”) then other clients will not be able to send you the keys to decrypt their messages.
This is one of the many ways to get “unable to decrypt” errors in Matrix.
yup, only on mobile. Element on Desktop is yet to be revamped, but hopefully we’ll do so this year.
Matrix feels like it’s in a strange place. I briefly tried it only to find vast quantities of porn and spam. Even the “programming” channel. I mentioned this in a thread on HN and got blasted by some Matrix maintainer, as if it was preposterous that I found this to not be a good thing.
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.
It’s probably worth reading https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/ for more context on that. (PS sorry for blasting you, if it was me :)
Matrix works fine for many people. If there's something similar but better, it's free to compete.
Concur. Element is embarrassingly buggy.
I have no skin in this game but I'm honestly baffled.
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.
Cliffnotes (Anecdotal):
the old Element apps were; have you tried Element X?
Yes ... my matrix.org account is still many times slower than my other chat apps and there's spam everywhere. It's not a great experience. I'm really hoping to see Matrix go big but it feels like there's still a long way to go.
That said, ElementX's video and audio calls work really well. If you added the ability to ring people's phones, so I don't have to first negotiate people into the chat using text messages or a phone call, I could see using it instead of FaceTime.
hm, Element X should outperform other chat apps; mine does and I’m in 5000 odd rooms. What platform and hardware are you on?
Pixel 9. Here's an example: GrapheneOS General is mirrored to Discord. Open both and start scrolling up. ElementX shows the spinner for 3 seconds at a time, Discord spins for 1/2 second or so. Go ahead and race them, it's not even close.
Another example: Matrix HQ is always notoriously slow. Just now I opened it and there are no messages ... none. No spinner. Just a note at the bottom saying "27 room changes." I waited for at least 10 seconds. Force quit the app, reload, and the messages are there.
What platform are you using that performs so much better than mine?
iOS.
I suspect you are hitting perf issues on Android due to lack of caching (which bite Android way more than iOS due to JNA being way slower for calling the rust-sdk than Swift’s rust bindings). This should be fixed by https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/issues/3280, which as you can see from all the checkboxes is making progress.
No; will give it a shot; ty!
We are ready to donate. Unfortunately, none of the options work: Only credit card or bank wire transfer are accepted.
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?
I think the Donate page may need a rework. Listing only Donorbox and then Other Options at the top adds unnecessary resistance. I have never heard of Donorbox, I have to click again to see what other options there are. Ok, click. There's also Patreon (which means ongoing donation in my mind) and Librepay (which I've heard of but never used... and is apparently also ongoing donations weekly/monthly/etc). Can't I just use a credit card or PayPal to make a one time donation for instance? After playing around, it seems you can but you have to click DonorBox and then change it to one time.
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.
> There's also Patreon (which means ongoing donation in my mind) and Librepay (which I've heard of but never used... and is apparently also ongoing donations weekly/monthly/etc). Can't I just use a credit card or PayPal to make a one time donation for instance?
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.
https://matrix.org/docs/older/faq/ has our BTC and ETH addresses:
Bitcoin (address: 1LxowEgsquZ3UPZ68wHf8v2MDZw82dVmAE) Ethereum (address: 0xA5f9a4f9E024F6D727f7afdA9257e22329A97485)
Thank you for being up for supporting - it is very much appreciated!
That's encouraging, thank you for still keeping lights on. Will make sure to follow up.
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.
Please see my parallel reply to the parent about some Donate page suggestions. I think your page is getting in the way of people giving you money.
I do hope they get what they need. If nothing else, I think they've chosen a solid and well-founded strategy to manage the situation - the focus areas they mentioned are more important than bridging. Maintaining bridges has always struck me as something hugely resource intensive. I applaud their stewardship.
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.
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.
the frustrating thing is that Element X really did fix the encryption issues. getting people to give it a second chance is hard though.
I just downloaded it and there is no way to reset my password. I had to go to the element web interface to do so.
There is still a lot to do
This is probably because you’re using matrix.org, which hasn’t yet rolled out the new Matrix 2.0 authentication thet Element X uses (given it involves migrating 50M accounts or something). This is planned for March however.
It absolutely has not. I'm looking at messages in Element X right now that don't decrypt, ie "Waiting for this message", from one user interspersed between decrypted messages from other users. Meanwhile my other two clients (app.element.io and pantalaimon) happen to be able to read all of them.
I really want to like Matrix, and just last weekend I re-downloaded a matrix client and tried to give it another shot. Maybe I'm holding it wrong, but from what I can tell it's suffering from the same problem that all of the fediverse services seem to suffer from: The only thing to talk about is the fediverse itself.
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_.
This is probably because we literally just deleted everything but Matrix-related rooms on the matrix.org room directory to deal with abuse: https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/curated-room-directories/
Reading the article was helpful to understand the other side of it. I definitely understand how it's a hard problem to solve on the part of the server owners.
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.
There are giant, active channels for specific topics. I've been in the OpenBSD channel(s) for years and there is always relevant deep discussion there. Same for other technical topics like that.
Anyone have an idea why the matrix.org bridges are so expensive to run?
e.g. t2bot.io also runs Matrix bridges and the costs are only about $1.5k/mo [0], not $100k
[0]: https://t2bot.io/donations/
Matrix.org is the hugest public Matrix server, plus $100k is not just infrastructure costs, but development and maintenance of the bridges as well. As an etke.cc developer, I can assure you that development, maintenance, and operations even a small bridge is no joke.
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.
It looks like the site you are referring to quotes pure ISP costs while the matrix foundation bridge costs include maintaining bridge related software they would otherwise archive.
the $100k is to fund folks to maintain the bridge software, as well as the hardware costs of running them.
> Without Trust & Safety efforts, bad actors and communities would proliferate on the network and make it unlivable for the rest.
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?
because if your friends start roaming around the public Matrix network and find public chatrooms full of abusive content, then they will indeed be affected. see https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/ for more.
This seems like tough choices to make. I see a lot of concerns.
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.
It’s a super hard problem.
So much so that it’s looking like maybe federation is not the best model. Your server ends up hosting any room and potentially any media that any of your users gets into. So naturally server admins must take an interest us in what their users are doing. This is in conflict with the top level goals of freedom and privacy.
Maybe the simpler client-server model of the web is better after all. Then if some user on my server is also into some super weird stuff, I don’t have to know. Because they connect to the weird server directly from their client, not through me.
I love the concept behind the Matrix protocol, but I have zero faith in the Matrix Foundations ability to execute. Folks have been asking for financial tranparency for years now (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/571#issueco...). And all that we get are posts like this complainging about not having enough money and threatening to shut things down, repeatedly.
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.
Per https://matrix.to/#/!sWpnrYUMmaBrlqfRdn:matrix.org/$xga3TYyV...
> 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).
Thank you for sharing that information. It seems like the foundation has been slowly moving in the right direction. I may have written a bit too harshly in my previous comment. I have been checking in on the development of Matrix, the Foundation, and monitoring that Github issue for quite some time.
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.
> Can you expand on your doubts for the ability to execute?
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.
> But the software produced by the foundation is simply bad.
The foundation produces things like the spec and the e2ee libs. The last time the foundation produced a client was in 2015, and servers in 2023 - in both instances the wider community builds the implementations, just as W3C doesn’t make web browsers any more.
> Usually followed by people from the foundation saying it's fixed in X or 2.0.
Could this be because… it’s fixed in Element X or Matrix 2.0, perhaps?
A breakdown was actually just posted on that thread an hour ago:
The intention is very much to offer greater financial transparency, in fact doing so is a prerequisite for multiple funding sources.
The 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...
I've never run a non-profit, but what's stopping the Foundation from releasing a raw dump of expenses?
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?
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!
I still don't understand why Matrix exists. It feels like a solution looking for a problem to solve. I must be missing something? Can someone explain the gap it closes?
From my perspective, the biggest differentiator is that Matrix allows users to remove the centralized coordinator from their chat provider. That is, I can run my own Matrix server, where my users can chat with each other, without any interaction with Element.io or other operator. All other major providers (Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc) all rely on a single operator to coordinate the system.
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.
We've had this with XMPP already.
Oh, but people don't like XML.
XML means xmpp is awful apparently. I feel pretty alone in having a bad experience with matrix, but a good one with xmpp+omemo.
AIUI (from talking to people who had to implement XMPP), the problem isn't that "XMPP is XML", the problem is that XMPP is XML done badly. An XMPP connection is essentially a giant XML document that's never closed, which most XML libraries tend to handle very poorly, so you often end up writing your own XML library to handle XMPP. With all of the pain that entails.
SAX parsers should have no issue with that, or? So is the pain that you're forced to use SAX parsing or roll your own?
At least the SAX parsers I've used allowed to get partial "subnode DOMs", which makes it quite easy to use in practice.
That said I've only parsed ~1GB XML files (no embedded binaries), not sure if that counts as large enough.
Yup. You can write xmpp parsers with thin wrappers around a push based sax parser. It is not hard, people are just not familiar with sax.
Sure, sax parsers have their limitations, but there are sax parsers that avoid the callback trouble by doing a tree-style fold over the XML structure instead of the linear fold over the XML stream. Not for the server, since it is not super efficient, but writing a client like that is easy peasy.
I found XMPP an absolute delight to work with and built all kinds of command-and-control messaging utils with it that allowed me the flexibility to use it as a chat service and RPC broker all at the same time, with bots as APIs. It was nuts but brilliant. Bring it back, I say.
Coincidentally I just got an XMPP server going and have a bunch of people happily chatting on it. Yeah it has its issues, but it's an open, well-defined protocol evolved over a long period of time. It won't disappear if its singular maintainer disappears (referring to both Signal and Matrix here).
whoa I totally did not get the memo on omemo this sounds great
yes and XMPP is actually a messaging protocol. Matrix is an eventually consistent database with a crappy messaging app implemented on top, and because of the insane architecture they are justifying decisions like message ordering that is non-deterministic[0] -- for multi user chat!
What could possibly go wrong if users in a multi user chat see messages in different orders? This decision is a perfect example of how smart systems engineers can be so completely divorced from the real problem (human communication) that they make completely asinine choices justified by implementation details no user cares about.
Matrix needs to die so it can stop sucking the air out of this space. The funding problems are also completely predictable but that's an opinion for another time.
0 https://artificialworlds.net/blog/2024/12/04/message-order-i...
Even the E2EE implementation is garbage. To this day fifty percent of the conversation in every E2EE group chat I'm in is "Hey XYZ I can't see your messages because they fail to decrypt" because they still have bugs in how clients distribute their keys to other clients. Imagine the state of a chat platform literally failing at chat.
Or look at how until a few months ago, the media store of every homeserver served media on the internet without any authentication. Someone just had to post CP in a popular room and they'd get hundreds of servers rehosting it for free. (Recently they finally added the ability to require authentication for the media store, although they didn't add support for it to their web client, only their new Android one.)
Yeah, similar but different path for bluesky, sometimes we don't really need a prefect technical solution, just something works for average user.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43105028
Matrix Con 2024 had a public sector track where various organisations such as NATO, the French Government and the German Healthcare industry outlined the problems they are solving with Matrix.
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...
It seems to be the only currently existing open, e2e encrypted, chat application that reasonably supports both multi-device and large group chats. Essentially Slack or Discord without the centralization.
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 property of federated control over the network, which is what the rest of the internet (including the protocol you're using right now, and all the proprietary chat apps) depend on.
I don't understand why my question got reported. I didn't say that Matrix is bad or shouldn't be funded. Even if it's just to compete with other protocols, that alone would make it worth funding. I just can't find enough information to actually understand it's angle. Thanks for those who replied to help explain it. :)
It didn't get reported - it just got downvoted. Downvotes are often unfathomable.
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...).
Thanks for clarifying and the resources!
Small Rant on this:
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.
Might just be worth clarifying here that Element is a private company and Matrix.org (the organisation in question here) is a not-for-profit
If I type "matrix" into the Play store: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=matrix&c=apps I get "element" as the first result.
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.
While that's fair, My understanding is Element does fund matrix.org (They even state that in the article and it can be seen here: https://matrix.org/support/). So I would think that money they get from those services would help.
at the same time, they (Element) focus on bigger customers, where they can make bigger money and then fund the Foundation.
On the contrary, etke.cc focuses on small, independent Matrix servers that could work as a single-user server, and as a small company/community internal server, and even a public server. Our focus is to be sustainable and to provide a way to own your communications in a hassle-free (or, at least, less painful) way.
So, our goals are just different.
Disclaimer: I'm Aine, one of the etke.cc developers
Hi Aine! I actually migrated to etke.cc when that happened, and have been really happy with your services.
I do get that the goals are different, and to be honest, I'm still not sure whether my post/annoyance is justified. EMS is within their rights to do what they want, and sure, single users/small instances like me may not be worth their time. I would just think that if they are still struggling to fund large public servers, I wouldn't turn own even smaller instances until I am financially solvent.
They should consider asking Automattic & some of the other companies building on Matrix to contribute 8% of their revenue first.
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.
Start to earn money guys! You can do that!
P.S. donated.
Another way of saying this is, "Riot.im/Element.io corporation has taken over the reference protocol development from the matrix foundation (now defunct in that aspect, *1) . Now that matrix is controlled by Element.io corporation the remaining Matrix foundation does not have the resources to continue bridges. And Element.io decided that early bridges to bootstrap/steal users from other messenging networks are no longer needed and so will not help the matrix foundation with them or spend any resources to maintain them themselves."
ref 1: https://matrix.org/blog/2023/11/06/future-of-synapse-dendrit... , https://element.io/blog/element-to-adopt-agplv3/
It seems that neither user interest nor commercial interests are enough to keep protocol development going.
It’s kind of sad.
I've found Matrix (clients, I guess) really hard to use... but I'm in IRC channels where lots of people are using Matrix. What are people using?
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.)
Hey Robin!
Element Web is I believe what I’ve used in the past and didn’t enjoy. I like the UI of Slack but not the UI of Discord.
I’ll give it another look. I asked on Mastodon for any native apps for desktop people are aware of. I’ll see if that yields anything.
Using matrix isn’t enough to support the foundation, sadly.
Sure. I can’t be the only person who doesn’t fully understand the Matrix ecosystem.
iamb [1] tickles my vim fetish :)
[1] https://iamb.chat/
edit: added link
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.
Further from the truth? It is an established fact that Element.io corporation has now re-taken over development of the matrix protocol reference implementations. I provided easy reference links to verify this. And matrix 2.0 and all it's new features and architecture are defined by the corporation's choices alone. The matrix foundation does not do this anymore.
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.
I was a huge matrix user, had converted "most" of my family and extended family to join matrix to be able to talk to me and it was generally a fine experience. Not great, just fine.
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.
What country has banned matrix?
like my name. kashmir. government of india
I'd think Google might benefit from Matrix bridges... ?
If they only had a dollar for every time any hacker made a comment on how great it is....
Then they'd have much more than 100k
and if we had a dollar for every time someone said how much it sucked when they tried it 5 years ago, we’d have more than the $1.2M target! :D
why are there two irc briges?
To two different IRC servers. There used to be a third, but Libera asked them to shut it down.
Ah I tough the bridge can send to all irc servers.
Why are there several Linux distros ?
Lmao, imagine having a project no one gaf about and the best idea you come up with is asking for ransom from the same people that dgaf about it.
Developers say the darndest things!
Well, good luck finding it - it’s always in the last place you look!
I'm shocked that Matrix Foundation is considering shutting down if they don't raise $100K - what's going on behind the scenes here?
Matrix has been a staple in the community, hosting Matrix.org, so this news comes as a blow to many of us who rely on their services.
Here are some key points to consider
• They're struggling to maintain the server costs • They've tried fundraising but haven't reached their goal • They might shut down servers and discontinue some projects if they don't get more funding
It's hard not to wonder how this could have been avoided - were there any warning signs or mismanagement that led to this point?
Can someone explain what's going on with Matrix Foundation's financials - are they overspending or is this just a case of underfunding?
What does this mean for the future of decentralized communication platforms like Matrix?
> I'm shocked that Matrix Foundation is considering shutting down if they don't raise $100K - what's going on behind the scenes here?
That’s not what’s happening. The point is that running and maintaining bridges requires $, and without $ that won’t happen.
The problem on financials is underfunding.
edit: If you’re interested in how we’ve ended up there: https://fosdem.org/2025/events/attachments/fosdem-2025-6274-...
It's a spam account, look at their profile, karma and other comments.
guess that explains the weird unicode middots. wonder if it’s random or targeted; anti-matrix/element spam seems to be a thing since certain govts started relying on it.
So, has Matrix solved the CSAM Problem, yet?[0]
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8KEuAEYjQ4
The act as police and spy on their users "problem"? I don't know - have apartment buildings solved the domestic violence problem, that happens within them, shielded by their opaque walls?
See my other reply, watch the linked video it's not as black and white as you make it sound like and public non-encrypted rooms hosting tons of CSAM being replicated to any matrix server where any user joined them is a problem.
> public non-encrypted rooms hosting tons of CSAM
That's the opposite of a problem, isn't it? Have cops request the IPs and arrest those sharing the material - you've just caught a lot of criminals for almost zero effort.
Unless the "problem" isn't catching criminals, and you don't really care about CSAM, just maintaining matrix's reputation from mercenary journalists willing to conflate a protocol with its users for some clickbait title, or to give a government ammo to ban encryption.
You could watch the video to actually understand the issue instead of making wild assumptions about me.
Until very recently and still to a degree today, you couldn't host a matrix server that has public registration without someone registering, joining a CSAM room and having all that material replicate to your server.
This would be LESS of a problem if the content was actually encrypted and you as an Admin couldn't access it. But sure, it's not an issue just some bad journalism that's why Matrix just recently actually addressed it (thanks Arathorn for replying): https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/
But if you don't think it's a problem, i'm sure you are willing to link to your publicly open server and let people register, i'll write an e-mail to your local law enforcement to let them know you are knowingly hosting childporn on your server, i'm sure the courts will agree with your opionion
making progress actually: https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/
I'm happy to see that! To be fair > 14.02.2025 That's pretty recently
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.
IDK, have you? Has Apple, Google, Linux? Have we really solved it as a society until we have reached the end-game of Zero Trust Architecture; locked down all bootloaders to only run trusted firmware; locked down firmware to only boot trusted os; enforce attestation at service auth so only genuine devices with client-side "safety" rootkits are accepted?
If you actually watched the linked video you would see that random matrix servers were co-opted to spread CSAM on a massive scale due to what is essentially a design flaw and there was until very very recently not much done to make it possible for server admins to fight that. It's not as black and white as your comment makes it seem.