I don’t know much about Matrix. Maybe in this case the key is money.

But having worked at various startups and enterprises, it is very common for lots of money and resources to thrown at projects and for little or no progress to be made.

Money might be a necessary condition but it’s definitely not a sufficient one. See Microsoft teams.

Again I know nothing about Matrix, but I found your comment about UX concerning. UX is a problem that is almost immune to money. An extremely clear vision is almost always the bottleneck. Money can always help with adding features or performance or scaling, but I feel like it doesn’t usually fix UX. Hope I’m wrong.

> UX is a problem that is almost immune to money

Usability testing seems like something where you can get better UX with a lot of money: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-testing-101/

Oh I doubt it, unless you have that person with vision to interpret the results of the usability testing and turn them into a single cohesive design.

Good UX comes from someone that has deeply internalized the problems a piece of software is solving for users and the constraints on those users. Most startups do this without usability testing by doing things like sales or customer support. Anyway, IME usability testing is not the bottleneck to good UI.

I don't disagree with you that you need to have a singe cohesive design vision based on solving for users. But I think that certainly usability testing can lead to even better results and is mostly constrained by cost.

For sure. But without a cohesive vision throwing money at it can only make it worse if it does anything at all.

> UX is a problem that is almost immune to money.

Unfortunately this is very well-put.

But on the other hand, I think it's reasonable to hope that the "clear vision" for Matrix can largely be cribbed from all the other nigh-indistinguishable team chat apps like Slack, Discord, Mattermost, et al. In that case money to actually make the obvious fixes might be enough.

Sometimes good enough is good enough. Slack, Teams, Matrix, whatever, as long as you're meeting most daily driving requirements, everything else is maintenance and long tail quality of life improvement (imho).

What else are Teams users going to get out of Microsoft chasing an ever increasing enterprise valuation and stock price target with regards to their user experience? Email just works, make teams comms that just works and is mostly stable. Get off the treadmill of companies chasing ever more returns (which will never be enough) at the expense of their customer base. We have the technology.

I think the PowerSync [1] team is missing out on an opportunity to showcase their impressive data sync technology by building a minimalist Slack clone.

[1] https://www.powersync.com/

Yea, if you have to waste an extra 15 minutes per day due to bad UX who cares, it’s much better that you get the self-satisfied feeling of sticking it to “the man” (American big tech).

I mean it only adds up to 90 days of your life wasted over a 30 year career. European peoples time has a lower salary value anyways. UX doesn’t even matter that much, the political meme of the day is much more important.

Microsoft Teams already is already terrible UX, we have nowhere to go but up. Perhaps you are unaware, and if so, you should be thankful you don’t have to lose time using it. There are objectively better solutions available.

I too hate Microsoft teams but it can always get worse, you have no idea.

I'm in several Slack teams for non profits and professional orgs, Teams for a client or two, IRC and Matrix servers for digital archiving ops, Signal/WhatsApp/GroupMe/Telegram groups, etc. I have been in tech for 25+ years, I am familiar with the extremes. You are right, things can be bad, that is the point of systems engineering: to drive directionally towards continual improvement. Success is never assured, but throwing our hands up and giving up is not reasonable. Make a plan, work the plan. Default to action. Work is hard.

I recommend "Thinking in Systems" by Donella H. Meadows (ISBN13 9781603580557) on this topic [1]. It's ~$10 on Amazon as of this comment, and the PDF is easy to find with a quick web search.

[1] https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3737036W/Thinking_in_systems

Care to give me an example to satisfy my morbid curiosity? I have used a lot of really bad chat clients over the year and Microsft's rewritten Skype is one of only a handful worse than Teams. Teams is not the worst but it is on my top 3 or 5 worst of the 30+ chat clients I have used. I have heard Lynk also was really bad but I never used it. Microsoft certainly has some of the worst.

Element is bad but it is way better than Teams from my experience.

Matrix is so much worse than Team it will make your head spin. It suffers from design by committee to an unbelievable extent, and its various end-to-end security features are wonderful from a privacy standpoint but make things much much more complicated.

Having used both I think you are way too kind on Teams.

I've used both and written code to integrate into both. You never have to worry about, for example, losing access to all previous messages in your Teams channels if you get a new phone.

The case is not money, it's clear: > The move comes at a time of growing concern within European administrations over their heavy dependency on US software for day-to-day work amid increasingly unreliable transatlantic relations

France is leveraging Matrix in Tchap https://element.io/fr/case-studies/tchap (part of La Suite Numérique https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/#products recently featured on HN).

Presumably there is funding or resources because of that.

France donates to the Matrix Foundation (which helps the protocol retain its neutrality and independence, and is very much appreciated), but doesn't currently financially support Element's dev as their upstream. We're trying to fix that though!

better this way than the other way, element doesn't support the matrix foundation enough

Element has put tens of millions of dollars into Matrix over the years and today provides hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of resources per year to support it.

Amandine (acting managing dir on the fdn) is preparing the public financial report of the Foundation which will have more details on this; it should be out in a few weeks.

I've always thought the really low bandwidth support they added a few years ago was to support the french subs. It matched all the requirements of VLF/ELF communications.

It wasn't France (and, ironically, it wasn't funded - it was mainly us showing off)

The key is the money.

I’ve used matrix for years, ran my own federated server for a while.

I’ve been critical of the user experience and issues with how it’s handled by the matrix team before but I acknowledge that by and large these problems can be fixed with money.

Big players need to put their big boy pants on and throw a couple coins from their farcically large coin purse and they can drive a stake through the wretched heart that is Teams.

And this is the part I hope Europe gets. They don't have nearly as much money to throw at Matrix as Microsoft can throw at Teams, but they do have massive resources, and I bet that since Matrix doesn't have many of the same shitty KPIs as Slack and Teams, those resources can go much further.

The lack of shitty KPIs is the main thing. Hiring 10 full time devs to work on Matrix would probably be more effective than 500 full time devs on Slack/Teams with most of them stuck on weird Product Manager goals and renaming things to Copilot 365 Teams with Copilot.

Are you saying that Microsoft is more wealthy than all of “Europe”? And surely you must mean the EU.

The money needed to improve matrix is nothing compared to what is already being spent on Microsoft products.

> Are you saying that Microsoft is more wealthy than all of “Europe”?

"In 2024, the EU spent €403 billion on research and development" [1]. In 2024, Microsoft spend $29.5bn on R&D [2]. So about 20 Microsofts makes up the entire EU's R&D expenditure.

Alphabet, meanwhile, spent $49.3bn on R&D in 2024 [3]. It earned $350bn that year. So it would be correct to say that Microsoft and Alphabet's revenues, alone, rival the total amount Europe spends on research and development. (Non-EU non-British spending is insignificant.)

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar24/

[3] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425...

Nah I'm just saying that Microsoft has more disposable money to throw at Teams than Europe has to throw at Matrix because Microsoft is a corporation that is choosing how to spend its money internally and Europe (or the EU, but why leave Switzerland, GB, etc. out of the fun?) would be funding an external entity in a (possibly?) new way.

I'm still learning how the EU applies grants to open source projects for specific feature sets, but I'm guessing that there's a lot of friction that could be removed.

And yeah, I agree that the money needed to improve Matrix is nothing. It's about getting organized and applying that money well.

To me Europe's push for digital sovereignty has the potential to reshape open source software's competitiveness around the world and in turn, Europe's.

I guess that the European Commission pays a lot of money to Microsoft in licenses. They could pay a fraction of those money to Matrix.

Microsoft may have money, but it certainly does not seem like it is being spent on Teams in an effective way.

I don't know anything about Matrix. What makes it "far from perfect"? First priority of every business chat should be to move the conversation to something designed for the business concern at hand, because a chat app is a terrible place for it to live.

> It's far from perfect, but using a simple application with no built-in ads, AI, bloat, crap, etc is wonderful.

I think there are three main reasons it's not perfect yet:

1. Building both a decentralised open standard (Matrix) at the same time as a flagship implementation (Element) is playing on hard mode: everything has to be specified under an open governance process (https://spec.matrix.org/proposals) so that the broader ecosystem can benefit from it - while in the early years we could move fast and JFDI, the ecosystem grew much faster than we anticipated and very enthusiastically demanded a better spec process. While Matrix is built extensibly with protocol agility to let you experiment at basically every level of the stack (e.g. right now we're changing the format of user IDs in MSC4243, and the shape of room DAGs in MSC4242) in practice changes take at least ~10x longer to land than in a typical proprietary/centralised product. On the plus side, hopefully the end result ends up being more durable than some proprietary thing, but it's certainly a fun challenge.

2. As Matrix project lead, I took the "Element" use case pretty much for granted from 2019-2022: it felt like Matrix had critical mass and usage was exploding; COVID was highlighting the need for secure comms; it almost felt like we'd done most of the hard bits and finishing building out the app was a given. As a result, I started looking at the N-year horizon instead - spending Element's time working on P2P Matrix (arewep2pyet.com) as a long-term solution to Matrix's metadata footprint and to futureproof Matrix against Chat Control style dystopias... or projects like Third Room (https://thirdroom.io) to try to ensure that spatial collaboration apps didn't get centralised and vendorlocked to Meta, or bluesky on Matrix (https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean/, before Jay & Paul got the gig and did atproto).

I maintain that if things had continued on the 2019-2022 trajectory then we would have been able to ship a polished Element and do the various "scifi" long-term projects too. But in practice that didn't happen, and I kinda wish that we'd spent the time focusing on polishing the core Element use case instead. Still, better late than never, in 2023 we did the necessary handbrake turn focusing exclusively on the core Element apps (Element X, Web, Call) and Element Server Suite as an excellent helm-based distro. Hopefully the results speak for themselves now (although Element Web is still being upgraded to use the same engine as Element X).

3. Finally, the thing which went wrong in 2022/2023 was not just the impact of the end of ZIPR, but the horrible realisation that the more successful Matrix got... the more incentive there would be for 3rd parties to commercialise the Apache-licensed code that Element had built (e.g. Synapse) without routing any funds to us as the upstream project. We obviously knew this would happen to some extent - we'd deliberately picked Apache to try to get as much uptake as possible. However, I hadn't realised that the % of projects willing to fund the upstream would reduce as the project got more successful - and the larger the available funds (e.g. governments offering million-dollar deals to deploy Matrix for healthcare, education etc) then you were pretty much guaranteed the % of upstream funding would go to zero.

So, we addressed this in 2023 by having to switch Element's work to AGPL, massively shrinking the company, and then doing an open-core distribution in the form of ESS Pro (https://element.io/server-suite/pro) which puts scalability (but not performance), HA, and enterprise features like antivirus, onboarding/offboarding, audit, border gateways etc behind the paywall. The rule of thumb is that if a feature empowers the end-user it goes FOSS; if it empowers the enterprise over the end-user it goes Pro. Thankfully the model seems to be working - e.g. EC is using ESS for this deployment. There's a lot more gory detail in last year's FOSDEM main-stage talk on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkCKhP1jxdk

Eitherway, the good news is that we think we've figured out how to make this work, things are going cautiously well, and these days all of Element is laser-focused on making the Element apps & servers as good as we possibly can - while also continuing to also improve Matrix, both because we believe the world needs Matrix more than ever, and because without Matrix Element is just another boring silo'd chat app.

The bad news is that it took us a while to figure it all out (and there are still some things still to solve - e.g. abuse on the public Matrix network, finishing Hydra (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Keu8aE8t08), finishing the Element Web rework, and cough custom emoji). I'm hopeful we'll get here in the end :)

God speed and thank you for your work. We need a professional world without the hellish Teams-Slack duopoly.

Best of luck to you and the team! I really, really hope it's successful :)

Have you considered raising capital?

yes, Element is venture-funded, which is where much of the money came to build all this in the first place - see the bottom of https://element.io/en/about.