Matrix Is Cooked

Those are the contents of a post I recently made, but really that and even the replies I made are not the full story

Truth is, to get right to the point, the fact that Matrix was accompanied by a for-profit entity, funded by venture capital was the biggest mistake that Matrix as a project has ever made.

Element is not a friend

In roughly the beginning, there was two organizations that came out of the project: The Matrix Foundation and New Vector Ltd / Riot / Element. The idea was for New Vector Ltd to carry out the necessary work and bring in the necessary funding for the Matrix Foundation to thrive. Or well, so I've been told.

They had multiple funding rounds lead by the likes of status.im, Automattic, the AI and Web3 company protocol labs and others; You get the gist, lots of VC and similar funding also a questionable amount of “Web3” and bullshit generation AI. Element was then tasked with using that to build the software that would power Matrix.

And for a long time, they did that. They relied on the software themselves but kept it in the hands of the Non-Profit Matrix Foundation.

Until the 6th of November 2023 when they—in their words—moved to a different repository and to the AGPL license. In reality, the Foundation did not know this was coming, and a huge support net was pulled away under their feet.

Element's “re-focusing” on “establishing a level playing field” means hostile takeover of all important projects that were under the Matrix Foundation banner and to stop running and managing the Matrix.org homeserver despite it still being the default option in Element today.

The results of this are, as one may expect, devastating. I don't think I've seen the Matrix Foundation ring the alarm bells any more than today that they need funding to keep the foundation going. Unfortunately, all the money is being swept up by Element instead.

Of course I understand there is not really an alternative as of right now; No one else wants to take up Element's job, by which I mean the job that the foundation pays them to do now instead of it being donated to them. Yes, the high expenses for the Matrix.org homeserver are largely because they are still managed by Element, just not as donated work but instead like with any other customer.

This also means that the Foundation suffers from Element's decisions and is why they pay a hefty price for what would otherwise not be this expensive.

Today this leaves the foundation in a dire situation.

So dire in fact that they are starting to adopt things that I can almost guarantee many on the governing board do not like.

The Matrix Foundation is making Matrix.org a freemium service.

Now, and I can't stress this enough, I really don't think many people at the foundation want this. But with Element sort of just pushing whatever they need in their client and nothing else, I doubt anyone would even be able to get anything implemented in Element to notify Matrix.org users akin to what Thunderbird or KDE started doing in their respective products. As such the governing board does recognize that measures like these are kind of necessary, even if ugly.

Either way it shows that Element is seemingly cashing in on selling ,Matrix to governments and B2B as a SaaS solution without it going back to the foundation, without it funding critical parts of the core of matrix that need to be revised (like moderation, or a lack thereof) or the Matrix Foundation.

At the same time I can't help but think that this could have been prevented. Even Matthew himself recognizes that putting the future on Matrix on the line with VC funding and alike was not the best idea for the health of Matrix.

Matrix should, from the start, never have been this heavily tied-into and reliant on VC funds to keep the project as a whole afloat. Ultimately, for-profit companies will do what makes them profit, not what's the best option. Unless the best option happens to coincide with making the most profit.

Unfortunately, supporting the foundation through anything more than “in spirit” and a platinum membership is out of their budget, apparently. I think that morally they owe a lot more than that.

So, what now?

If you believe Matrix can still thrive despite, in my eyes, being sabotaged by New Vector Ltd, please do go donate.

If you're like me, and you've seen Matrix fail too many times and have concerns about the sustainability of some of the core design decisions, there are some other projects you may be interested in.

This list is split into two, things that I personally want to recommend and things that were recommended for me to include by others. Everything I am recommending here specifically isn't tied to VC funds or a for-profit entity, at least not to my knowledge.

Personal:

• Polyproto / The Polyphony Project – Made by 🏳️‍⚧️ people, aims to have Discord API compatibility and builds a “boring” identity federation protocol with multi-homing and user-owned identity and data in its design. (donate)
• Delta chat – Builds on traditional E-Mail standards like SMTP and IMAP, enhancing it with end-to-end-encryption, a custom server stack and a full instant-messenger experience. Additionally has webxdc. (donate)
• Revolt? – An open-source discord clone. The ? is there because whilst it's okay, it is not federated which makes me a bit hesitant to recommend it as an alternative to matrix of all things.

other's recommendations:

• XMPP/Jabber – battle-tested instant messaging standard with lots of client apps for major platforms. Despite me running an xmpp server I don't personally recommend it due to clients taking a while to catch up with features, i.e how Conversations currently lacks replies and most clients lack the ability to delete/retract messages.
• IRCv3 – An evolution of the well-known IRC standard with lots of quality-of-life and functionality improvements that are to be expected from modern chat applications. I haven't personally used it so I can't personally recommend it.

Anti-recommendations:

• SimpleX Chat – Many suggested this and I will explicitly recommend against it due to the founder's positions on various topics. This includes being anti-vaxx, believing COVID-19 was a hoax, trans- and homophobia, climate denial; In the SimpleX Groupchat he's also been seen basically bootlicking trump a couple times, but I've lost receipts to that.

Additions from 09:38 CEST, 16th of June 2025

I saw that this post got shared around in...some room that matthew is in, the details don't really matter to me

I wrote this on a relatively short timespan with some public records I found, it's not like I can look into Element's finances nor that of the foundation as the financial report is to my knowledge still not out despite being “almost finished”. There is some more information shared in that thread now but it is in no way a full breakdown of finances.

To answer the question of “where this came from”, I lost my enthusiasm in matrix and this is the result

matrix used to be something I was genuinely excited to use on my devices, I talked to my dad about Matrix – which otherwise never hears of these kinds of projects – because I was convinced it was gonna make it, I was convinced Matrix would become the next big IM standard

The reality is, after over 10 years...that is not where Matrix ended up. It is less so about fear or doubt and moreso about sadness and disappointment.

Call this bait, I just don't feel excited about matrix anymore.

https://liberapay.com/cyrneko https://ko-fi.com/cyrneko Any little bit helps <3