When Element X first launched, the goal was for it to cover the personal messenger use case. This worked just fine for some people, but for many, feature parity with the old apps and parity with the web experience was a hard blocker.
Both Spaces and Threads are about to land, and there are other lower-profile features that also need rounding out. We would expect full parity by April this year. At which point migration should be an obvious choice.
The complexity associated with Matrix comes from wanting to build a multivendor ecosystem around an open standard, the decentralisation (and federation) to avoid building islands and then implementing things like multi-device e2ee and VoIP in such a context.
However, it is exactly these properties that make it so appealing to an organisation like the EC as they pursue digital sovereignty.
The goals of Matrix have nothing to do with being a social network. You could theoretically build a social network on top of Matrix (Matrix essentially syncs JSON in real-time), but I'm not aware of a project with traction, and more to the point, those projects are not relevant to this discussion. Yes Matrix is resilient to network partitions (that's a good thing for a messenger!), but that seems entirely orthogonal to your point on social networks.
Finally, I don't think it's fair to draw a comparison between the relationship between Kandra Labs and Zulip vs Element and Matrix. Yes Element is a major player in the Matrix eco-system having originally formed to hire the Matrix founding team, but since then many Matrix vendors have sprung up and if Element were to disappear tomorrow Matrix would continue. In fact, this is the whole purpose of having an independent Foundation, which in turn encourages multiple vendors to operate side by side.
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.
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.
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.
Signal and WhatsApp only address the personal messaging usecase, whereas the letter is also talking about wider chat services like Teams.
More to the point, even with e2ee, there is still communication metadata that is leaving your network for a third-party service. In a defense context, you would almost certainly prefer that the data does not leave your network unnecessarily.
The OP is calling out the need for any large org that depends on a FOSS project to contribute to its maintenance.
Currently we don’t have good mechanisms to make this happen.
The post uses Matrix as an example but it applies equally to any project deemed as critical infrastructure which would of course include XMPP, IRC and plenty of others.
To solve this, FOSS projects must work together to advocate for practical funding mechanisms. This is not a zero sum game.
I found this post to be interesting discussion on how a not profit organisation could practically operate to support FOSS maintenance. It still has risks surrounding infiltration by bad actors, but mitigation is easier since staffers are paid.
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/04/01/OSQI
What's more the Synapse team recently announced support for Rust meaning that various performance critical sub-components can be ported over from Python.
Element.io / Matrix.org | REMOTE (EU timezones preferred, though not required)| Full-time
Matrix is an open standard for decentralized secure communications. Matrix’s mission is to make messaging as open as email. For those who do not know us, data sovereignty and end-to-end encryption seem to be really potent differentiators especially for governments and civic institutions. The French government has a massive Matrix deployment under the name "Tchap", and the German military began rolling out a similar initiative called "BwMessenger" in November: https://esut.de/en/2020/11/meldungen/24138/matrix-messenger. On the opposite end of the spectrum you've got Mozilla, who replaced their IRC network with open, federated Matrix and saw greater far greater community engagement as a result.
Now is an excellent time to join the team as we try to make a genuine challenge to centralised, walled garden messaging technology.
However, whatever your background, feel free to contact me via https://app.element.io on @neilj:matrix.org I am always keen to chat with engineers of all disciplines about the project.
Element.io / Matrix.org | REMOTE (EU timezones preferred, though not required)| Full-time Matrix is an open standard for decentralized secure communications. Matrix’s mission is to make messaging as open as email.
For those who do not know us, data sovereignty and end-to-end encryption seem to be really potent differentiators especially for governments and civic institutions. The French government has a massive Matrix deployment under the name "Tchap", and the German military began rolling out a similar initiative called "BwMessenger" in November: https://esut.de/en/2020/11/meldungen/24138/matrix-messenger. On the opposite end of the spectrum you've got Mozilla, who replaced their IRC network with open, federated Matrix and saw greater far greater community engagement as a result.
Now is an excellent time to join the team as we try to make a genuine challenge to centralised, walled garden messaging technology.
However, whatever your background, feel free to contact me via https://app.element.io on @neilj:matrix.org I am always keen to chat with engineers of all disciplines about the project.
Element.io / Matrix.org | REMOTE (EU timezones preferred, though not required)| Full-time
Matrix is an open standard for decentralized secure communications. Matrix’s mission is to make messaging as open as email.
For those who do not know us, data sovereignty and end-to-end encryption seem to be really potent differentiators especially for governments and civic institutions. The French government has a massive Matrix deployment under the name "Tchap", and the German military began rolling out a similar initiative called "BwMessenger" in November: https://esut.de/en/2020/11/meldungen/24138/matrix-messenger. On the opposite end of the spectrum you've got Mozilla, who replaced their IRC network with open, federated Matrix and saw greater far greater community engagement as a result.
Now is an excellent time to join the team as we try to make a genuine challenge to centralised, walled garden messaging technology.
However, whatever your background, feel free to contact me via https://app.element.io on @neilj:matrix.org I am always keen to chat with engineers of all disciplines about the project.
Element.io / Matrix.org | REMOTE (EU timezones preferred, though not required)| Full-time
Matrix is an open standard for decentralized secure communications. Matrix’s mission is to make messaging as open as email.
For those who do not know us, data sovereignty and end-to-end encryption seem to be really potent differentiators especially for governments and civic institutions. The French government has a massive Matrix deployment under the name "Tchap", and the German military began rolling out a similar initiative called "BwMessenger" last month: https://esut.de/en/2020/11/meldungen/24138/matrix-messenger. On the opposite end of the spectrum you've got Mozilla, who replaced their IRC network with open, federated Matrix and saw greater far greater community engagement as a result.
Now is an excellent time to join the team as we try to make a genuine challenge to centralised, walled garden messaging technology.
However, whatever your background, feel free to contact me via https://app.element.io on @neilj:matrix.org I am always keen to chat with engineers of all disciplines about the project.
Element.io / Matrix.org | REMOTE (EU timezones preferred, though not required)| Full-time
Matrix is an open standard for decentralized secure communications. Matrix’s mission is to make messaging as open as email.
However, whatever your background, feel free to contact me via https://app.element.io on @neilj:matrix.org I am always keen to chat with engineers of all disciplines about the project.
Matrix backs the IM needs of the entire French government [1] and more recently signed the largest single instant messaging deal ever to help German schools manage remote education[2], it is also used in mission critical situations such as emergency services response.
I think it is fair to say that Synapse is more than production ready. Admittedly it can be hard to admin out of the box for smaller scale instances and we intend to improve on that experience over the coming months. Alternatively, hosting options are available[3].
After a hiatus, Dendrite is under active development and making rapid progress. It is an alpha release at the moment and not yet ready for production settings, but a beta release is coming soon.
Fwiw self hosting Element and a Matrix homeserver like Synapse provides a full Matrix feature set (including search, archiving and everything else). You don't lose out for self hosting.
It’s on by default for 1:1s _and_ private rooms. Though nothing in the protocol demands an encrypted room so unencrypted 1:1s, say, are entirely possible.
Both Spaces and Threads are about to land, and there are other lower-profile features that also need rounding out. We would expect full parity by April this year. At which point migration should be an obvious choice.