All good points. It will probably be helpful to have a bit more context on the goals of Ruma as a project. It is a passion project, and has no intention of ever

All good points. It will probably be helpful to have a bit more context on the goals of Ruma as a project. It is a passion project, and has no intention of ever having direct financial backing or a business model. The "Why" page sounding like activism is somewhat intentional—it explains the motivations for the project, but it is not specifically intended to "sell" it to a person who is not already sympathetic to the problems it tries to address. Perhaps a good comparison is the public reaction to Snowden's leaks about the NSA. They haven't been super big news outside of tech and certain political circles. The average person values convenience and a good user experience over any more philosophical or political beliefs related to privacy and security. The idea of a centralized service or company controlling data just doesn't matter to a lot of people. You're absolutely right that the business motivation is not quite there, because there isn't a strong public demand for it. Matrix itself does have some financial incentives—specifically, its development is funded in part by a company called OpenMarket, who are also the developers of Vector, a web-based client for Matrix that will at some point have a commercial product offering. Edit: In other words, Vector is planning to do exactly what you describe: provide a product that competes with Slack, but building it on a protocol where someone could create a competitor using the same protocol, allowing them to be interoperable. Ruma does not have a financial stake in the game, and I've chosen to build on Matrix because it is well aligned with my values.