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.

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.

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.

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 :)

[dead]

I've been running a Matrix homeserver for a couple of years now and I've never had any issues with it. Not saying Matrix is perfect, but it is not as bad as you are making it out to be either.

While I don't doubt your experience, I've been running Conduit[0] for a while now to great success (a lot simpler to configure than Synapse).

I don't think it's a fact that Matrix is not good. For MS Teams? It's pretty close to a fact.

0 - https://conduit.rs

Zulip is phenomenal. Cool and unique concept, clean and snappy UI. I have no idea why it's not more popular. (Network effects and an unfamiliar layout, I suppose.)

I see the comments that say Matrix has improved a lot, so maybe it's fine now, but yeah, when I tried it previously it sucked. Weird UI was my chief complaint, but more importantly it didn't seem like there was a proper concept of organizations, in the sense of Discord or Slack servers? With roles, channels, even silly things like custom emojis. Matrix at the time seemed like just an SMS group chat replacement, I have no idea why people recommended it for organizational use. Maybe it's improved since.

When did you try it? Both Matrix the protocol and implementations like Element X have improved immeasurably over the last year or so.

Threema: proprietary, outside EU

Zulip: lacks encryption, interoperability

It works faster & better than Signal Desktop.

Personally I've found Matrix significantly more user friendly than Threema work. Zulip I haven't used in anger so I can't comment on that but I've seen a few places that even open source they charge per user for things like notifications. Not ideal IMHO. There should be an option to replace notifications with a separate service.

It's hard to find a decent service that ticks all the boxes but I do sincerely hope that the EU can support Matrix to bring it up to the standard that we all deserve.

> Mobile notifications for organizations with up to 10 users

Why does the self-hosted edition have this restriction? If the software is truly OSS, the limit could be trivially patched. But this kind of restriction just does not inspire much confidence in the project to be honest.

Can you be more specific about your criticisms? I have gripes about Matrix, but your assessment doesn't match my experience.

Sounds like something Europe would love.

I hope you're right! I mean, at the level of personal relationships I fully agree[0]. However, institutions tend to be forgetful.

[0]: Someone once said to me something very similar to what you quoted: "Be nice to people. People will remember you. And they will gossip if they don't like you and you have wronged them. It's much easier to ruin your reputation with a single action done to a single person than to build up a good one."

> EU can’t out innovate US tech

why not?

Okay not today but China was known as the cheap copier and is now the innovator.

> Sadly, the US has done this to ourselves… all this arm twisting and strong-manning is coming home to roost.

No it's not. This is theater to give the impression that they are "getting the orange buffoon". They'll be back in short order, and even if they aren't, it'll just be an insignificant blip on a financial chart somewhere, not even big enough to warrant someone's attention. They did similar things in Trump's first term, and came back groveling.

A lot of the worlds actual problems are not about innovation but correctly using existing technologies and making the right investments in the needed infrastructure.

France’s government uses Matrix. Presumably a nice perk to be able to talk to them via federation

so Matrix doesn't have self hostable open source options?

talking about Teams, right? O:-)

Element’s topco may be UK based for now, but the vast majority of our business and footprint is in the EU - https://element.io/en/about. All but one of our mobile app team is in the EU for instance (and when we started, the UK was too :|)

Why reinvent the wheel when there are already open standards like Matrix or XMPP that can be adapted to your use case?

> Why can’t a company in the EU make a secure video/voice chat app?

What makes you think they can't?

Microsoft's corporate edge isn't merely the product, it's also an army of sales, entrenched corporate markets/clients, lock-in, etc.

You could have a better version of their product and still get eaten alive.

One major issue is system management:

Installing another app, such as Signal, on your personal computer is one thing. On 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 computers, installing it, configuring it, changing settings, updating it, backing it up, locking down settings from user changes (such as retention) - all that requires special tools to do it efficiently at scale. Without the management tools, no way that bit of IT can be used.

The most common tool by far is Microsoft's Active Directory and Group Policy, which has the best compatibility with Windows and with Microsoft applications, including Office. If AD/GP is already deployed, imagine the burden of deploying a second tool to your 1K/10K/100K computers, setting up the server, learning to use it ... you're not doing that for one application unless it's very valuable. The exception is a tool bundled with the application for its own management, but that's going to have to be efficient to deploy, learn, and use to be worthwhile.

Therefore, for many organizations, any application must be effectively managed by AD/GP, which requires the application's developer to create AD/GP management components.

Do Matrix, Signal, or any other application have system management tools?

The french government recently did: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet

Zoom came along with a securre video/voice chat, sure it's American, but it was by far the world leader

Microsoft then used its monopoly in office tools to push Teams to everyone

You can't compete with a trillion dollar company offering your product as a bundle your clients already pay for, even if your product is better. Even VC money runs out eventually

Jitsi

Formerly - skype

Matrix

There is Wire with HQ in Berlin, Germany.

https://wire.com/en/

The idea of the likes of SAP spinning up a new product quickly and painlessly seems like a joke.

I mean German police is using Palantir.

There is nothing magic about Palantir, especially not about the subset of Palantir that the German police uses as we have stricter data privacy laws.

You might think that would be a strategic risk not worth taking especially with the US getting more hostile towards Europe but here we are.

Why? Honestly I don't have a good answer other than well the whole system is rotten, corruption, lobbyism, take your pick.

Slack costs new money. You’re already paying for teams if you use office/ms365/etc.

That’s all many companies need to see in their purchasing decisions. It’s not just “is slack better” but “is it enough better to pay out“

It's because of the licenses mostly. If you buy e.g. business standard or business premium or whatever you want to make the most of it. Hey, there is a free chat app included, and it integrates so well with the rest of m365!

(Also most people don't know that you can still use a KMS with/for office 2024. You don't need M365.)

errr market monopoly forces are doing their thing … the point is that only a govt can force eg an OS + APP anticompetitive monopoly provider to split up into multiple companies

I felt the same way when I was forced to use Word over Wordperfect, and Powerpoint over Harvard Graphics

I think Mattermost lost a lot of instance admins' trust when they recently decided to update the server to limit access to old messages without good reason. On self-hosted instances!

https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/issues/34271

Mattermost's license statements are confusing and contradictory.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46861331

No. It's not fully OSS.

Anything “sovereign” should decouple the protocol from the client software IMO, which isn’t possible with Mattermost.

Matrix is a decentralised encrypted chat protocol on which you could build something like Zulip, except decentralised and end-to-end encrypted.

Element is the actual app being trialled here, which feels more like Slack and/or Signal than Zulip. The point is that you get something you can selfhost while also interoperating with other deployments… while also encrypting the data end-to-end with Signal protocol.

They are different, and the biggest reason is (I suspect) that a Zulip workspace is self-contained while a Matrix server is able to federate with other Matrix servers.

Other European institutions are also adopting Matrix, so federation may turn out to be an important feature.

Matrix has threads. So does discord, but discords UI around them basically renders them functionally useless.

Anyway, the first goal listed in this project was to move to European sovereign solutions so Zulip failed at the first hurdle.

Given the (lack of) speed of European bureaucracy, this is likely more a reaction to the US sanctioning the ICC than the more recent Greenland saber rattling, but you'll probably see more of this in the future.

Only Matrix.

Correction: Zulip is 100% open-source software, and has been for a decade now. (I lead the Zulip project). Zulip's protocol, which is used for client/server communication by all major clients, has extensive documentation including the complete change history for the last several years on https://zulip.com/api/ and https://zulip.com/api/changelog.

As far as I know, there is no mechanism through which Zulip could bait-and-switch a customer that Element could not also do. And I think that as a practical matter, it would be a lot easier for a new team to pick up developing Zulip if the Kandra Labs team were to disappear than the similar question for Matrix/Element.

The core reason is that Matrix is far less simple and self-contained than Zulip. I've talked to multiple groups who tried to build apps on top of Matrix and found it too difficult. https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/giving-up-on-element-and-matrixorg... may be a useful third-party reference.

This isn't to say Matrix is bad. It's just targeting a different niche. Matrix was designed around the requirements of a global social network, where you want to be able to keep writing in channels even in event of a network partition. As a result, Matrix is far more complex and less self-contained than a Zulip server is. If you are doing internal communications with some external guests, you are far safer from technical risk with a robust self-contained system like Zulip than something like Matrix that is also a social network.

Zulip's goal is to be the best way to do complex work, focused on replacing tools like Slack, Teams, and Discord, without the ambition to support a social network, and that changes a lot about the architecture and what we can do in terms of performance and focus on the human experience.

XMPP has been around for way longer, has proven that it actually works, and has a reliable community behind it, with no VC-funded hype.

I think the intention was never to get their communication audited (potentially via poor security), but ours. You know, to protect the children and all that.

What?

They also sometimes forget to clean their shoes after walking in from the street.

But at least this thing they will hopefully get right and maybe in the longer term they'll be able to break the lock-in on those other things as well.

I don't really care if it's good or bad for the US as a whole; I care whether or not it's good for free software communication apps. I'm an American citizen and I own MSFT in my index funds just like lots of other people do; but I'd also rather run a free software chat app than Microsoft Teams.

The U.S. government has long looked out for U.S. companies, even to the point of staging coups (e.g. United Fruit Company). The Trump administration has been threatening direct invasions while also levying tariff's and other actions when other countries try to enact taxation or legislation of American tech companies operating in their jurisdictions. U.S. tech execs have applauded and lined up to bend the knee. Now they're finding out that their products are replaceable.

The replacements aren't perfect, but an injection of new users and funding could allow them to improve rapidly. Meanwhile, American companies like MS and Google seem determined to enshitify their products and force AI adoption because they're financially entangled with OpenAI.

Is this bad for the U.S.? It depends on how fast Americans smarten up. MS needs to start putting their products first again. Meta needs to stop relying on their government links to coerce other jurisdictions into accepting utterly irresponsible products that cause social harm while producing no tax revenue to mitigate that harm. All Americans need to stand up to their government and force it to back down from imperialist aggression.

The U.S. and U.S. software have lost international trust and are now losing out to competitors because of it. Those competitors no longer need to be better or cheaper. Just trustworthy. It is possible to mitigate this loss of trust with prompt action, but every delay causes permanent harm. The world is watching.