Matrix Conference 2025 Highlights
8 points by arathorn
8 points by arathorn
More and more I get the impression that Matrix/Element just doesn't really care about the community anymore. There's just a big push for corporations/government and the good stuff is exclusive to them (like the optimized Rust version of Synapse while the community is stuck with the slow inefficient Python implementation[1]).
[1]: And apparently the Python/community Synapse version is not even supposed to be used in production environment anymore? So there is actually no official way to use Matrix outside of a testing environment if you're not using the Pro version? What?
The thing that Element cares about is figuring out how to fund itself to work on Matrix. At the same time, The Matrix Foundation is trying to establish funding so it can sustainably support the whole Matrix ecosystem, including (especially!) the community.
The primary sustainable source of funding we’ve identified are governments and govt-adjacent orgs who desperately want to not be dependent on big tech for things like secure communication. Therefore the focus is unashamedly on supporting those big orgs in order to use their $ to improve Matrix for everybody, including them.
Open source Synapse is continuing same as ever. You can use it in production, but it is not provided by Element with the intention of use for commercial/professional purposes: if you are operationally dependent on it you should support the upstream vendor (Element) by using Synapse Pro. The more folks who actually buy Pro, the more $ there is to improve the FOSS. Meanwhile we keep improving FOSS Element as much as ever (be that in the db or in python or rust).
In an ideal world Element would be pure FOSS, but we tried that and it was simply not sustainable. So instead we now have a paid products too - similar to Grafana or Gitlab.
We have not forgotten the community: the plan is to get economically sustainable and then accelerate the open network as fast as we can.