Thank you! I am optimistic that we'll pull through.
And yes, I think you're right to be a bit worried about how frequently we need to ask people if they've tried Matrix recently. First impressions matter a lot, and a lot of early adopters had bad first impressions. At some point we need a more concerted communication and outreach strategy to address that issue.
Yeah the post is new but we've been steadily ramping up investment in Trust & Safety the whole time I've been leading the Foundation :) Having added a couple moderators to the team late last year, our T&S team now has a little breathing room to do more proactive, strategic work to improve the situation. Previously, they were almost constantly on their back foot trying to keep up incident management.
Might be worth revisiting, we've seen great improvement in the last year :) I use Element X as my mobile daily driver, and use Element Web on my laptops. Feel free to ping me if you have any questions!
(meta: I need to create a new account here... but engaging here with this one since it'd be suspicious to have a new account with zero karma weighing in.)
This couldn't be further from the truth. The Matrix.org Foundation is expanding open governance, with a Governing Board that has representatives from all across the ecosystem: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/06/election-results/
And the protocol remains under the auspices of the Foundation, maintained by the volunteer Spec Core Team.
Element may be where Matrix was incubated, but it spun up the Foundation as a nonprofit and assigned the copyrights and governance of the protocol to that nonprofit. People can fearmonger all they want, but to Element's credit they've done a whole helluva lot more to preserve the integrity of open source – unlike Elastic, Redis, MongoDB, and dozens of other companies.
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.
Because a raw dump of expenses obscures many important details, and sets people up for misunderstanding things and reporting them out of context.
I'd love to get to a point of radical and automatic transparency as you describe, but that takes a great deal of effort to do well – and the Matrix.org Foundation is still in its infancy. Gotta learn to walk before we can run!
You can trust that if there's anything obvious we should be doing, we are already doing it :) And I'm pleased to report that Automattic is one of our biggest sponsors.
Coincidentally when I logged in to my account, for the first time in years, they also pulled my reviews. I got one email for each of them, saying:
"Our moderators evaluate each review to determine whether it complies with our Community Guidelines. We determined your review does not meet these guidelines.
If you wish, you are welcome to edit your review here and your edited review will be reevaluated within 24 hours of receipt."
I just went through the process of deleting my content using their data removal tool and their mechanism for deleting your data triggers those "X was removed for violating community guidelines" emails for everything it deletes. I had 9 emails from them as soon as I submitted it.
I was wondering what those were triggered by. I actually thought it was a shady attempt to get you to come back and engage. I got several soon after submitting my data deletion request.
As the Managing Director of the Matrix.org Foundation I can assure you I'd love nothing more than to displace centralized, proprietary communication tools.
It just so happens that right now it's easier to land with folks who are patient with sharp edges and already believe in the value of FOSS, E2EE, and decentralization. Gotta start somewhere, right? :)
IDK if you caught it, but the project lead, Matthew Hodgson, gave a main stage talk at FOSDEM a couple weeks ago and offered an update on the project and, in particular, on how we're taking advantage of the push that regulators are making for interoperability. WhatsApp, in particular, gets mentioned in this context and the writers at WIRED and Tech Crunch seemed to pick up on that!
We definitely have work to do on the onboarding experience, but I'm pleased to say that there are 115M addressable users on the open federation – so many people are having great success once they get past the initial friction. Aside from all the FOSS projects that use Matrix, it's also used by the German healthcare agency, French civil servants, NATO, a number of universities including MIT and TU Dresden, Moodle, and many others.
We're moving quickly to address the feedback in the blog post and will be investing more in docs and UX to address the friction.
Please don't hesitate to share your own experiences if you run into trouble! Stuff like that is a real gift. We're always looking to learn and improve.
Josh, Managing Director of the Matrix.org Foundation
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.