Oh, that's interesting. I did not see any amount of money in those blogposts, do you have an idea how much it cost?

Also it appears Gitter is actually not operating a matrix server, but is instead bridged with https://www.matrix.org/docs/projects/bridge/native-gitter-br... ? Does that mean gitter.im is only reachable from matrix.org?

Personally when i had to join a gitter room, i would join from my XMPP account using the @matrix.org gateway (which despite being unreliable is very nice) so i have no clue.

Some of the Matrix folks are active on HN, maybe they mentioned something in the discussions back then? But I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't much if anything - my impression was that Gitlab didn't really know what to do with gitter, so giving it to messaging-focused project would make some sense.

No, bridged rooms generally are reachable from any instance. It's just that the bridge talks to matrix.org and matrix.org "hosts" (that's not 100% accurate afaik to how Matrix works, but close enough for this) the room just like any other matrix.org room, that is also reachable from other instances.

From what I know, they are still bridging, but in the long run (I assume they are somewhat waiting for stable Dendrite, since Synapse is shit for massive deployments) I believe they want to run an actual homeserver in gitter.im and have a sort of Gitter themed/branded Element client for it.

This is already the case. There is an actual matrix server reachable @gitter.im and you can join gitter rooms through it

ah thanks for that information! it was not apparent from the blogpost/docs about it on matrix side