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Comment by yabones

6 hours ago

My team started using Matrix/Element after years of frustration with Teams and Slack. It's far from perfect, but using a simple application with no built-in ads, AI, bloat, crap, etc is wonderful.

I really hope the EU throws some serious money at them to get the bugs worked out, add some minor features, and clean up the UX enough that an "office normie" can onboard as easily as MS.

My dream is that Matrix can do for intra-org comms what Signal did for SMS.

29 comments

yabones

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jaredklewis  5 hours ago

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.

  • andrewflnr  3 hours ago

    > 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.

  • toomuchtodo  5 hours ago

    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.

    • pembrook  4 hours ago

      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.

      3 replies →

thibaut_barrere  4 hours ago

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.

  • Arathorn  3 hours ago

    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!

  • lwarfield  3 hours ago

    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.

Teever  6 hours ago

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.

  • troyvit  6 hours ago

    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.

    • ecshafer  4 hours ago

      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.

      1 reply →

    • pmontra  5 hours ago

      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.

    • parchley  5 hours ago

      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.

      1 reply →

    • 0cf8612b2e1e  4 hours ago

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

kgwxd  3 hours ago

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.

Arathorn  4 hours ago

> 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 :)