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Is Matrix cooked?

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  • In today's episode of Kill The Messenger, Matrix co-founder Matthew Hodgson reveals how full of bullshit is the writer of the original article.

    The messages were published in the Office of the Matrix.org Foundation room: https://matrix.to/#%2F!sWpnrYUMmaBrlqfRdn%3Amatrix.org%2F%24XpQe-vmtB7j0Uy1TPCvMVCSCW63Xxw_jwy3fflw7EMQ%3Fvia=matrix.org&via=element.io

    https://paper.wf/alexia/matrix-is-cooked is fascinatingly incorrect

    Until the 6th of November 2023 when they—in their words—moved to a different repository and to the AGPL license. In reality, the Foundation did not know this was coming, and a huge support net was pulled away under their feet.

    fwiw, the Foundation had a front-row seat in the fact that Element (as incorporated by the folks who created Matrix) had donated $$M to the Foundation over the years, but wasn't going to survive if it kept giving all its work away as apache-licensed code - which in turn would have been catastrophic for the Foundation.

    Yes, the high expenses for the Matrix.org homeserver are largely because they are still managed by Element, just not as donated work but instead like with any other customer.

    nope, Element passes the hardware costs (and a fraction of the people costs) of running the matrix.org server to the Foundation without any overheads or markup at all.

    Either way it shows that Element is seemingly cashing in on selling ,Matrix to governments and B2B as a SaaS solution without it going back to the foundation

    Element has literally put tens of millions into the foundation, and is continuing to do so - while some of the costs get passed to the Foundation, Element donates a bunch too (e.g. by funding a large chunk of the Matrix conference as the anchor sponsor, and by donating time all over the place to help support trust & safety etc)

    At the same time I can't help but think that this could have been prevented. Even Matthew himself recognizes that putting the future on Matrix on the line with VC funding and alike was not the best idea for the health of Matrix.

    No, even Matthew knows that Matrix would never have been funded without routing the VC funding from Element into... building Matrix. We tried to fund it originally purely as a non-profit, but failed (just as it's a nightmare to raise non-profit for the Foundation today even now that Matrix exists and is successful!). If you need to raise serious $ for an ambitious project, you either need to get lucky with a billionaire (as Signal did with Brian Acton) or you have to raise on the for-profit side. Perhaps it would have have been best for Matrix to grow organically, but I suspect that if it did, it would have failed miserably - instead, it succeeded because we already had a team of ~12 people who could crack on and jump-start it if they could work on it as their dayjob; the team who subsequently founded Element.

    Ultimately, for-profit companies will do what makes them profit, not what's the best option. Unless the best option happens to coincide with making the most profit.

    No, Element is not profitable. Nor is it trying to maximise profit. Right now it's trying to survive and get sustainable and profit-neutral (i.e. break-even) - while doing everything it can to help keep Matrix healthy and successful too (given if Matrix fails, Element fails too).

    Unfortunately, supporting the foundation through anything more than “in spirit” and a platinum membership is out of their budget, apparently. I think that morally they owe a lot more than that.

    wow.

    the FUD level is absolutely astonishing, and I really wonder what the genesis of this is

    so, absolutely, spectacularly, depressing

    this, my friends, is why we can't have nice things.

    In response to an other person suggesting that the publisher is also known as a reasonable person on the platform:

    Interesting, the matrix handle that seems behind this blog seems always to have been quite a reasonable person

    somewhat why i’m wondering what the backstory is, and whether this is an unfortunate example of spicy lies outpacing the boring truth

    Matrix has always been way too bulky for being a simple messenger. Imo their architecture was cooked from the start.

  • Honestly the reply sort of burys the leade, the most damning part (as an outsider) was:

    but wasn’t going to survive if it kept giving all its work away as apache-licensed code…

    OSS getting sacrificed first sign of financial instability isn't something I can condone.

    edit: see reply chain.

    AGPL is a full-on FOSS licence with strong copyleft requirements, not a measly open-source licence like Apache, which could be pivoted to proprietary at a moment's notice. We're communicating through an AGPL-licensed system right now as it's what Lemmy's licensed as. If they were going for a corporate-friendly licence, AGPL is the last thing they'd choose as it forces you to share source code with even more people than the regular GPL does.

  • AGPL is a full-on FOSS licence with strong copyleft requirements, not a measly open-source licence like Apache, which could be pivoted to proprietary at a moment's notice. We're communicating through an AGPL-licensed system right now as it's what Lemmy's licensed as. If they were going for a corporate-friendly licence, AGPL is the last thing they'd choose as it forces you to share source code with even more people than the regular GPL does.

    When I first read the article this was a WTF moment for me. I was reading it twice to find out how that fits in the whole picture, but it is just mentioned once... no further explanation. So I called the whole thing BS...

  • Matrix has always been way too bulky for being a simple messenger. Imo their architecture was cooked from the start.

    it's ... not ... a simple messenger, if that helps?

  • Honestly the reply sort of burys the leade, the most damning part (as an outsider) was:

    but wasn’t going to survive if it kept giving all its work away as apache-licensed code…

    OSS getting sacrificed first sign of financial instability isn't something I can condone.

    edit: see reply chain.

    I didn't understand the original post. It seemed like someone whining about a switch to AGPL. But that switch certainly sounds like a good thing to me. I didn't know the old license was Apache but it still seems like a good switch. Redis (with a misstep in between) did something similar.

  • AGPL is a full-on FOSS licence with strong copyleft requirements, not a measly open-source licence like Apache, which could be pivoted to proprietary at a moment's notice. We're communicating through an AGPL-licensed system right now as it's what Lemmy's licensed as. If they were going for a corporate-friendly licence, AGPL is the last thing they'd choose as it forces you to share source code with even more people than the regular GPL does.

    My bad, I thought they were moving from Apache to something more restrictive / less open (the way so many have recently, to effectively "source available"), especially by their wording — which conveys to me they're frustrated they aren't "capturing" the "value" of their code.

    AGPL is not my favorite license but it has its purposes I suppose.

  • Matrix has always been way too bulky for being a simple messenger. Imo their architecture was cooked from the start.

    This. I know a lot of folks in the fediverse like Matrix, but the user experience feels like yet another platform that started with the platform architecture, and not the end user’s experience.

    Then it gets adopted by a bunch of people who enjoy installing Hannah Montana Linux distros for fun, and no one else.

  • SimpleX Chat – Many suggested this and I will explicitly recommend against it due to the founder's positions on various topics. This includes being anti-vaxx, believing COVID-19 was a hoax, trans- and homophobia, climate denial; In the SimpleX Groupchat he's also been seen basically bootlicking trump a couple times, but I've lost receipts to that

    Unrelated to the main points I kind of always thought SimpleX seemed sketchy...

    It's just software...

  • My bad, I thought they were moving from Apache to something more restrictive / less open (the way so many have recently, to effectively "source available"), especially by their wording — which conveys to me they're frustrated they aren't "capturing" the "value" of their code.

    AGPL is not my favorite license but it has its purposes I suppose.

    redacting with strikethrough is fine, and that way we all can learn

  • It's just software...

    with (write) access to everything on your computer, but even just your chats on the phone

  • with (write) access to everything on your computer, but even just your chats on the phone

    Uhhhh no?

  • Uhhhh no?

    what no? why and how am I wrong?

  • redacting with strikethrough is fine, and that way we all can learn

    Omg thanks for linking that thread. The amount of removed and deleted content on Lemmy is so frustrating. I hate the fact that removed or deleted posts also completely nuke all the comments on it.

    Reddit's approach is so much better in this respect. A removed post removed the OP's text, but if it's a link post the link remains, and all the comments remain.

  • what no? why and how am I wrong?

    Why would you think a chat app has full write access to your disk?

  • In today's episode of Kill The Messenger, Matrix co-founder Matthew Hodgson reveals how full of bullshit is the writer of the original article.

    The messages were published in the Office of the Matrix.org Foundation room: https://matrix.to/#%2F!sWpnrYUMmaBrlqfRdn%3Amatrix.org%2F%24XpQe-vmtB7j0Uy1TPCvMVCSCW63Xxw_jwy3fflw7EMQ%3Fvia=matrix.org&via=element.io

    https://paper.wf/alexia/matrix-is-cooked is fascinatingly incorrect

    Until the 6th of November 2023 when they—in their words—moved to a different repository and to the AGPL license. In reality, the Foundation did not know this was coming, and a huge support net was pulled away under their feet.

    fwiw, the Foundation had a front-row seat in the fact that Element (as incorporated by the folks who created Matrix) had donated $$M to the Foundation over the years, but wasn't going to survive if it kept giving all its work away as apache-licensed code - which in turn would have been catastrophic for the Foundation.

    Yes, the high expenses for the Matrix.org homeserver are largely because they are still managed by Element, just not as donated work but instead like with any other customer.

    nope, Element passes the hardware costs (and a fraction of the people costs) of running the matrix.org server to the Foundation without any overheads or markup at all.

    Either way it shows that Element is seemingly cashing in on selling ,Matrix to governments and B2B as a SaaS solution without it going back to the foundation

    Element has literally put tens of millions into the foundation, and is continuing to do so - while some of the costs get passed to the Foundation, Element donates a bunch too (e.g. by funding a large chunk of the Matrix conference as the anchor sponsor, and by donating time all over the place to help support trust & safety etc)

    At the same time I can't help but think that this could have been prevented. Even Matthew himself recognizes that putting the future on Matrix on the line with VC funding and alike was not the best idea for the health of Matrix.

    No, even Matthew knows that Matrix would never have been funded without routing the VC funding from Element into... building Matrix. We tried to fund it originally purely as a non-profit, but failed (just as it's a nightmare to raise non-profit for the Foundation today even now that Matrix exists and is successful!). If you need to raise serious $ for an ambitious project, you either need to get lucky with a billionaire (as Signal did with Brian Acton) or you have to raise on the for-profit side. Perhaps it would have have been best for Matrix to grow organically, but I suspect that if it did, it would have failed miserably - instead, it succeeded because we already had a team of ~12 people who could crack on and jump-start it if they could work on it as their dayjob; the team who subsequently founded Element.

    Ultimately, for-profit companies will do what makes them profit, not what's the best option. Unless the best option happens to coincide with making the most profit.

    No, Element is not profitable. Nor is it trying to maximise profit. Right now it's trying to survive and get sustainable and profit-neutral (i.e. break-even) - while doing everything it can to help keep Matrix healthy and successful too (given if Matrix fails, Element fails too).

    Unfortunately, supporting the foundation through anything more than “in spirit” and a platinum membership is out of their budget, apparently. I think that morally they owe a lot more than that.

    wow.

    the FUD level is absolutely astonishing, and I really wonder what the genesis of this is

    so, absolutely, spectacularly, depressing

    this, my friends, is why we can't have nice things.

    In response to an other person suggesting that the publisher is also known as a reasonable person on the platform:

    Interesting, the matrix handle that seems behind this blog seems always to have been quite a reasonable person

    somewhat why i’m wondering what the backstory is, and whether this is an unfortunate example of spicy lies outpacing the boring truth

    I self host matrix. Should anyone who’s not on the foundation’s home server care? Do these changes affect anyone else?

  • In today's episode of Kill The Messenger, Matrix co-founder Matthew Hodgson reveals how full of bullshit is the writer of the original article.

    The messages were published in the Office of the Matrix.org Foundation room: https://matrix.to/#%2F!sWpnrYUMmaBrlqfRdn%3Amatrix.org%2F%24XpQe-vmtB7j0Uy1TPCvMVCSCW63Xxw_jwy3fflw7EMQ%3Fvia=matrix.org&via=element.io

    https://paper.wf/alexia/matrix-is-cooked is fascinatingly incorrect

    Until the 6th of November 2023 when they—in their words—moved to a different repository and to the AGPL license. In reality, the Foundation did not know this was coming, and a huge support net was pulled away under their feet.

    fwiw, the Foundation had a front-row seat in the fact that Element (as incorporated by the folks who created Matrix) had donated $$M to the Foundation over the years, but wasn't going to survive if it kept giving all its work away as apache-licensed code - which in turn would have been catastrophic for the Foundation.

    Yes, the high expenses for the Matrix.org homeserver are largely because they are still managed by Element, just not as donated work but instead like with any other customer.

    nope, Element passes the hardware costs (and a fraction of the people costs) of running the matrix.org server to the Foundation without any overheads or markup at all.

    Either way it shows that Element is seemingly cashing in on selling ,Matrix to governments and B2B as a SaaS solution without it going back to the foundation

    Element has literally put tens of millions into the foundation, and is continuing to do so - while some of the costs get passed to the Foundation, Element donates a bunch too (e.g. by funding a large chunk of the Matrix conference as the anchor sponsor, and by donating time all over the place to help support trust & safety etc)

    At the same time I can't help but think that this could have been prevented. Even Matthew himself recognizes that putting the future on Matrix on the line with VC funding and alike was not the best idea for the health of Matrix.

    No, even Matthew knows that Matrix would never have been funded without routing the VC funding from Element into... building Matrix. We tried to fund it originally purely as a non-profit, but failed (just as it's a nightmare to raise non-profit for the Foundation today even now that Matrix exists and is successful!). If you need to raise serious $ for an ambitious project, you either need to get lucky with a billionaire (as Signal did with Brian Acton) or you have to raise on the for-profit side. Perhaps it would have have been best for Matrix to grow organically, but I suspect that if it did, it would have failed miserably - instead, it succeeded because we already had a team of ~12 people who could crack on and jump-start it if they could work on it as their dayjob; the team who subsequently founded Element.

    Ultimately, for-profit companies will do what makes them profit, not what's the best option. Unless the best option happens to coincide with making the most profit.

    No, Element is not profitable. Nor is it trying to maximise profit. Right now it's trying to survive and get sustainable and profit-neutral (i.e. break-even) - while doing everything it can to help keep Matrix healthy and successful too (given if Matrix fails, Element fails too).

    Unfortunately, supporting the foundation through anything more than “in spirit” and a platinum membership is out of their budget, apparently. I think that morally they owe a lot more than that.

    wow.

    the FUD level is absolutely astonishing, and I really wonder what the genesis of this is

    so, absolutely, spectacularly, depressing

    this, my friends, is why we can't have nice things.

    In response to an other person suggesting that the publisher is also known as a reasonable person on the platform:

    Interesting, the matrix handle that seems behind this blog seems always to have been quite a reasonable person

    somewhat why i’m wondering what the backstory is, and whether this is an unfortunate example of spicy lies outpacing the boring truth

    Sidenote, the modern web is so fucked because how am I supposed to teach a kid that I would trust the random website "paper.wtf" I have never seen before with literally "meow" randomly above their article MORE than businessinsider.com which is like at the top of every search result

  • I self host matrix. Should anyone who’s not on the foundation’s home server care? Do these changes affect anyone else?

    AFAIK it only affects the matrix.org server.

  • SimpleX Chat – Many suggested this and I will explicitly recommend against it due to the founder's positions on various topics. This includes being anti-vaxx, believing COVID-19 was a hoax, trans- and homophobia, climate denial; In the SimpleX Groupchat he's also been seen basically bootlicking trump a couple times, but I've lost receipts to that

    Unrelated to the main points I kind of always thought SimpleX seemed sketchy...

    Also there are not many competitors to Matrix. Just XMPP for the most part.
    SimpleX and Signal are not good at supporting chat rooms with large amounts of people. Telegram does it okay but isn’t decentralized.

  • I self host matrix. Should anyone who’s not on the foundation’s home server care? Do these changes affect anyone else?

    It doesn't affect you in the slightest, other than it might further fund Synapse's/the spec's development meaning your server might get new features.

  • While I understand the need for them to maintain a steady income, all I can think of is Discord’s Nitro when I think of this upcoming Premium account offering.

    Except the premium offering pretty much just relates to media upload limit. I'm honestly surprised that they even allowed people to upload as much as they do.

    Makes sense to limit free users (will also help with spam) if they're not drowning in VC money.

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    I'm sorry but that capitalisation is really off-putting. You're Not Writing A Headline You Know
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    Swappa is good for tech.
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    This is just that zizek quote
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    I have like a dozen Gmail accounts, and I know plenty of others who do too. Before I owned my own domain, I used the different accounts for different things.
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    Just drink some Popov grade Trump Vodka at one of his many totally not bankrupt casinos to take your mind off of it.
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    Came here to say this.
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    Obviously the law must be simple enough to follow so that for Jim’s furniture shop is not a problem nor a too high cost to respect it, but it must be clear that if you break it you can cease to exist as company. I think this may be the root of our disagreement, I do not believe that there is any law making body today that is capable of an elegantly simple law. I could be too naive, but I think it is possible. We also definitely have a difference on opinion when it comes to the severity of the infraction, in my mind, while privacy is important, it should not have the same level of punishments associated with it when compared to something on the level of poisoning water ways; I think that a privacy law should hurt but be able to be learned from while in the poison case it should result in the bankruptcy of a company. The severity is directly proportional to the number of people affected. If you violate the privacy of 200 million people is the same that you poison the water of 10 people. And while with the poisoning scenario it could be better to jail the responsible people (for a very, very long time) and let the company survive to clean the water, once your privacy is violated there is no way back, a company could not fix it. The issue we find ourselves with today is that the aggregate of all privacy breaches makes it harmful to the people, but with a sizeable enough fine, I find it hard to believe that there would be major or lasting damage. So how much money your privacy it's worth ? 6 For this reason I don’t think it is wise to write laws that will bankrupt a company off of one infraction which was not directly or indirectly harmful to the physical well being of the people: and I am using indirectly a little bit more strict than I would like to since as I said before, the aggregate of all the information is harmful. The point is that the goal is not to bankrupt companies but to have them behave right. The penalty associated to every law IS the tool that make you respect the law. And it must be so high that you don't want to break the law. I would have to look into the laws in question, but on a surface level I think that any company should be subjected to the same baseline privacy laws, so if there isn’t anything screwy within the law that apple, Google, and Facebook are ignoring, I think it should apply to them. Trust me on this one, direct experience payment processors have a lot more rules to follow to be able to work. I do not want jail time for the CEO by default but he need to know that he will pay personally if the company break the law, it is the only way to make him run the company being sure that it follow the laws. For some reason I don’t have my usual cynicism when it comes to this issue. I think that the magnitude of loses that vested interests have in these companies would make it so that companies would police themselves for fear of losing profits. That being said I wouldn’t be opposed to some form of personal accountability on corporate leadership, but I fear that they will just end up finding a way to create a scapegoat everytime. It is not cynicism. I simply think that a huge fine to a single person (the CEO for example) is useless since it too easy to avoid and if it really huge realistically it would be never paid anyway so nothing usefull since the net worth of this kind of people is only on the paper. So if you slap a 100 billion file to Musk he will never pay because he has not the money to pay even if technically he is worth way more than that. Jail time instead is something that even Musk can experience. In general I like laws that are as objective as possible, I think that a privacy law should be written so that it is very objectively overbearing, but that has a smaller fine associated with it. This way the law is very clear on right and wrong, while also giving the businesses time and incentive to change their practices without having to sink large amount of expenses into lawyers to review every minute detail, which is the logical conclusion of the one infraction bankrupt system that you seem to be supporting. Then you write a law that explicitally state what you can do and what is not allowed is forbidden by default.
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    Or just use Linkwarden or Karakeep (previously Hoarder)