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I joined Element about a month ago (we're hiring! https://element.io/careers https://element.io/careers) and now that I'm on the inside, I'm genuinely optimisti

I joined Element about a month ago (we're hiring! https://element.io/careers https://element.io/careers) and now that I'm on the inside, I'm genuinely optimistic about our trajectory. We're not taking over the world overnight, but we are steadily growing. From a business perspective, data sovereignty and end-to-end encryption seem to be really potent differentiators for certain market segments, especially government. To wit, the French government has a massive Matrix deployment under the name "Tchap", and the German military began rolling out a similar initiative called "BwMessenger" last month: https://esut.de/en/2020/11/meldungen/24138/matrix-messenger-fuer-die-bundeswehr/ https://esut.de/en/2020/11/meldungen/24138/matrix-messenger-... On the opposite end of the spectrum you've got Mozilla, who replaced their IRC network with open, federated Matrix and saw greater far greater community engagement as a result. October also saw a commercial entity (Famedly.com) begin sponsoring the development of a third-party homeserver implemented in Rust (Conduit). So we're starting to see glimmers of a potential ecosystem around the Matrix protocol independent of Element. We don't have the same pop culture buzz as Slack or Discord, but I absolutely think there is something of substance here.

callahad 6y ago
As an aside: Having come to Element from Mozilla, it's really weird to work somewhere with multiple large, paying customers. It gives me hope that we'll be able to maintain the runway we need to reach critical mass, one use case at a time.
j1elo 6y ago
The latest open source project that caught my eye in terms of the chosen chat technology was Servo, which has chosen Zulip [0]. Hopefully, in a not too distant future, we'll start seeing more communities opting for Matrix? [0]: https://blog.servo.org/2020/11/17/servo-home/ https://blog.servo.org/2020/11/17/servo-home/
- Arathorn 6y ago
  Clearly we just need to get Zulip talking Matrix and we can all live together in one big {Zulip, Element, Gitter, IRC, XMPP} happy family :D Edit: not forgetting XMPP via the actually-usable-these-days bifrost bridge! https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-bifrost https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-bifrost
  - MattJ100 6y ago
    += XMPP, don't forget us ;)
Everhusk 6y ago
We're also contributing and building https://social.network https://social.network on Matrix protocol (Conduit) :)
null0pointer 6y ago
As someone who just set up a matrix server for my friends last month, I'm very pleased to hear this optimism!

callahad 6y ago

As an aside: Having come to Element from Mozilla, it's really weird to work somewhere with multiple large, paying customers. It gives me hope that we'll be able to maintain the runway we need to reach critical mass, one use case at a time.

j1elo 6y ago

The latest open source project that caught my eye in terms of the chosen chat technology was Servo, which has chosen Zulip [0]. Hopefully, in a not too distant future, we'll start seeing more communities opting for Matrix? [0]: https://blog.servo.org/2020/11/17/servo-home/ https://blog.servo.org/2020/11/17/servo-home/

Arathorn 6y ago
Clearly we just need to get Zulip talking Matrix and we can all live together in one big {Zulip, Element, Gitter, IRC, XMPP} happy family :D Edit: not forgetting XMPP via the actually-usable-these-days bifrost bridge! https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-bifrost https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-bifrost
- MattJ100 6y ago
  += XMPP, don't forget us ;)

Everhusk 6y ago

We're also contributing and building https://social.network https://social.network on Matrix protocol (Conduit) :)

null0pointer 6y ago

As someone who just set up a matrix server for my friends last month, I'm very pleased to hear this optimism!