joshsimmons

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.

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.

Following up, we at Matrix.org have put out a blog post to clarify that this is unrelated: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/12/unrelated-cybercriminal-netw...

Grateful to NL Times who included this line in their article: "The investigation did not spotlight the similarly-named Matrix open source communication protocol." https://nltimes.nl/2024/12/03/dutch-french-police-take-matri...

Of course, we are staying tuned as more information becomes available.

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."

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

Likewise, glad for these discussions. Even if it's a bit uncomfortable to be on the receiving end, this kind of feedback is a gift. Please do share more about your experiences, we're all ears and looking to learn and improve!

BTW, on the moderation front: Draupnir is the most actively maintained tool in that space and I recommend checking it out. Separately, the Foundation is currently investing in developing better tooling to complement moderation bots like Draupnir. We don't have a planned release date, but what we're making will be FOSS and available to all to use.

We're also looking to involve more technical writers to help us better support new users and homeserver admins – for sure, it's a rough road right now.

Josh, Managing Director of the Matrix.org Foundation

Thanks for continuing to give Matrix a try! There are rough edges, for sure. I'm excited to hear what you think the next time you give it a spin – your experience is valuable feedback for us.

Element != the Matrix.org Foundation. Element relicensed Synapse. The Foundation is running a fundraiser.

I'm a little confused about your comment "AGPL for me, but not for thee." Can you unpack that a bit? Synapse is available under an AGPL license for _everyone_.

Thanks for flagging the error on our website, I believe there's a PR currently in flight to fix that.

Hey, thanks for sharing your concerns. I think we need to start right at square 0: Element is not the same as the Matrix.org Foundation, and the Foundation has not had layoffs or a reduction in scale.

We did EOL the public Libera.Chat<->Matrix bridge we were previously operating, while at the same time expanding our advocacy work to make sure we don't end up with legislators undermining their goals around safety by introducing backdoors or dangerous surveillance.

I'd _love_ to hear your questions and concerns, so that I can address them, but it is hard to address what you've currently written as it is all based on the premise that Element and the Foundation are one in the same.

Thanks for your enthusiasm for Matrix! We're at a critical point in its evolution, but there's a lot of reason to be hopeful and excited about the future – and we'll be digging deeper into that in each of the following blog posts in the series.

I think the others have covered it pretty well, but just so you hear it from the source:

> if over 60% of the annual “expenses” of your nonprofit goes to “management” covering the salaries of four people who have other full time jobs,

That is an incorrect reading of the situation. The four full-timers who work for the Foundation do not have other jobs, so we are covering 100% of their salary. And that line item on the budget _also_ covers a bunch of part-timers, such as the SREs who keep the Matrix.org homeserver running.

If you have any other questions or concerns, I'm more than happy to speak to them :)

Thanks for noticing :) Doing my best to make sure everyone who is invested in these things gets the information they want and need.

Thank you for your work in the Matrix ecosystem, and for your support!

Check your facts. Matrix remains an open protocol, under open source license, with open governance, stewarded by a nonprofit. And there remain multiple open source server implementations and clients.

As useful as Cory Doctorow's concept of enshittification is, it has absolutely no utility in describing what is happening here.

Nobody is being locked in, the user experience is incrementally improving as the spec and the implementations evolve, and we're sure as hell not collecting ever more data and using recommendation algorithms to shove advertising down people's throats.

There are plenty of valid critiques. But what you're saying here is just patently absurd.

As the Managing Director of the Matrix.org Foundation it is expected that I conduct myself with some level of decorum.

So, exercising all due restraint, I say this: your statement is unmoored from reality. I thank @camgunz for chiming in and citing sources.

I really appreciate you sharing your concerns, and for all the hope and energy you've put into Matrix to date. Very much to your point, we're not yet in a state where I recommend Matrix to friends and family. Right now I only use it with people in FOSS and other circles where folks are a little more patient with the tech.

Only time will tell, and of course I'm biased as the Matrix.org Foundation's Managing Director, but I think there's good reason to remain hopeful:

The spec continues to evolve with major improvements expected in feature set and performance in the next year as we get to the 2.0 spec release, the Foundation is staffing up and beginning to fundraise, we're on the cusp of holding our first ever community elections to seat a Governing Board, and adoption has continued doubling on an annual basis.

I invite you and anyone else who is invested and/or concerned to join us in the Foundation's new office room – it's a way to get a view into ongoing activities, ask questions, provide direct feedback, and celebrate all the little wins on our way to collective success: https://matrix.to/#/#foundation-office:matrix.org

That is definitely a thing that Matrix has, all the more so because it's a decentralized protocol and many deployments federate with each other.

I suspect many people _did_ find other ways to connect (indeed I fired my IRC Cloud subscription back up...), but that's not what ultimately brought us* to this decision. Really it came down to not having the funds or staff time to maintain and operate it to the level that was needed.

Echoing you, I am likewise really grateful for all the people who worked on it while it was doable!

* Speaking on behalf of the Matrix.org Foundation here as its Managing Director.

There are a number of open source events, projects, and foundations that primarily communicate on Matrix, and no surprise it seems particularly common among projects that build on federated technologies (eg ActivityPub-based projects). That's what got me started on Matrix before I joined to lead the Matrix.org Foundation :)

Hi there! Managing Director of the Foundation here. First, yes, the response times have not been great, though of course that's all been on the basis of volunteerism. Now that there's a full-time staffer you should expect better response times.

Regarding the payments to Element: those are based on the many services for which we still rely on Element.

The Foundation has a Master Services Agreement (MSA) with Element which includes administrative services, operation of the matrix.org homeserver, and secondment of several personnel whose responsibilities include advocacy, program management, standards work, and trust and safety. The MSA also includes provisions for the Foundation to reimburse Element for any bills they pay on our behalf.

More details and context in my official reply: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/571#issueco...

Hi there! I'm the Managing Director of the Foundation. That owing balance is down to the many services for which we rely on Element.

The Foundation has a Master Services Agreement (MSA) with Element which includes administrative services, operation of the matrix.org homeserver, and secondment of several personnel whose responsibilities include advocacy, program management, standards work, and trust and safety. The MSA also includes provisions for the Foundation to reimburse Element for any bills they pay on our behalf.

More details and context in my official reply: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/571#issueco...

Happy to address any other concerns or questions you may have.

Thank you for being a donor! Naturally, you can expect us to eventually publish an annual report that details revenue, expenses, and programmatic activities. At a high level, the payments to Element includes administrative services (accounting, legal, etc), operation of the matrix.org homeserver, and secondment of several personnel whose responsibilities include advocacy, program management, standards work, and trust and safety. The MSA also includes provisions for the Foundation to reimburse Element for any bills they pay on our behalf.

In terms of funding development, the Foundation's focus has mostly been on building open source trust and safety tooling since that is a gap that others haven't addressed.

The Foundation has a Master Services Agreement (MSA) with Element which includes administrative services (accounting, legal, etc), operation of the matrix.org homeserver, and secondment of several personnel whose responsibilities include advocacy, program management, standards work, and trust and safety. The MSA also includes provisions for the Foundation to reimburse Element for any bills they pay on our behalf.

Yeah, that was surely an error. The value most definitely would have changed.

I've published my official response over on GitHub, where I provide context and answer the specific questions the OP has asked: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/571#issueco...

I'm copying the first part of my response here for y'all's convenience:

Hi @alohapersona, I’ve included answers to your specific questions below, but first I wanted to share some context.

You can expect the Matrix.org Foundation to grow and evolve like other open source foundations, in terms of incrementally staffing up, increasing transparency and community governance, and establishing programs that support the ecosystem.

There are a lot of great examples we can learn from, though the manner in which we are starting adds some complexity. It’s a lot cleaner to start with a small balance and some IP than to inherit massive pre-existing commitments like running the matrix.org homeserver. The added complexity also makes things more difficult, and it’s fair to say the path to now has reflected that difficulty level.

The Foundation hit a key milestone this year when it delivered on its promise to make its first hire. If you look at the landscape and the history, you’ll find that the first hire makes a radical difference in delivering on the kinds of things I see you’ve been seeking for the last four years.

Setting expectations

So, I’d like to set some expectations. The Foundation’s fiscal year, as you know by now, runs from November 1 to October 31, and it takes time to close the books. Especially when we’re still separating out our infrastructure and relying on people for whom the Foundation isn’t their first priority. After we close our books, two things happen: we send them off to the tax accountants, and I begin preparing our annual report. That annual report will cover revenue, expenses, and programmatic activity, all contextualized with our vision and where we are on the path to realizing our vision.

The timeline is a little fuzzy, but I’d expect that annual report to land around March or April.

And we should expect further maturation/normalization of process each successive year: when we seat our first elected Governing Board in 2024 Q2, I’ll finally have a board of community representatives to review and approve my budget! With that, we’ll start to see both a public budget before each financial year begins, and an annual report after it ends.

Getting involved

Ultimately, the project is to build this Foundation up into an independent, transparent, self-sustaining organization with community-driven governance at every layer. We will need continued mutual accountability to stay the course on the way to achieving that vision. To wit, I welcome call-ins and incisive questions, and also stress the need to be charitable with each other. This work is hard, it is painfully incremental, and it happens over the scale of years and decades.

I do not, however, welcome escalation to Hacker News with bad faith editorializing, which brings out the worst in people and leaves me wasting time confronting FUD rather than tending to forward-looking work that truly serves the community. Starting fires like that isn’t helpful.

For those who are invested in Matrix and want greater visibility into the Foundation’s activities, I invite you to join the Office of the Matrix.org Foundation room I launched last month. We have a lovely community of people there who provide input, offer accountability, and join together to celebrate even the small successes on our collective journey to organizational maturity and self-governance.

I hope this helps you and all those who read this to understand where we are, where we are going, why things are the way they are, and how to get involved.

With gratitude, Josh Simmons Managing Director of the Matrix.org Foundation

ad astra per aspera

I get that we're operating in a low trust environment, and you don't yet have any reason to trust me.

I will say this: I'm not here to carry water for past performance. I _am_ here to build the foundation into the organization the community deserves, and I have a track record when it comes to making organizations more responsive to the communities they serve.

Not only will I respond to the questions and concerns, I am actually working on systemic solutions that will provide transparency as a matter of course.

Of course, these are just words for now. Judge me by my actions in the days and months ahead, and know that I do aim to earn your trust.