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There's still something I can't wrap my head around. Over 6 months ago, Element laid off the entire Matrix trust & safety team, citing budget and funding concer

There's still something I can't wrap my head around. Over 6 months ago, Element laid off the entire Matrix trust & safety team, citing budget and funding concerns (and kinda throwing them under the bus at the same time, but that's a separate matter). And this seems to imply that a similarly sized team has been kept on payroll at the same time to work on a Matrix-powered metaverse experiment (Third Room). Given the blog post mentions that Matrix and Element are still suffering from lack of funding, it would mean that Element and the Matrix.org Foundation are considering that niche experiment as way more mission-critical for Matrix than moderation/trust & safety. Which feels absolutely insane to me. And it definitely does not make me confident in the fact that, should I decide to provide financial support to the foundation and/or Element, they would spend this money wisely in a way that improves Matrix as a whole rather than trying to make a niche point (that metaverse/AR use cases are possible on Matrix). I love Matrix, and have been for years, but this does not make me feel confident in the future of the project.

Arathorn 3y ago
The reason Third Room has persisted is because there are enterprise folks willing to pay for it and support the team as a standalone thing - you can see the enterprisey showreel video at the end of the OP. It’s also very useful when fundraising for Element and Matrix to be able to point at an exotic shiny project to show Matrix’s long-term potential - a bit like Beeper have their Beepberry device. You can almost think of it as a marketing tool. Separately, “the entire Matrix trust & safety team” was not laid off - today there are somewhere between 3 to 5 people working one way or another on T&S (between tooling and operational) on behalf of Matrix at Element. I don’t blame folks who are laid off for feeling aggrieved though, but we categorically did not throw anyone under the bus (or, if we did, it wasn’t intentional).
- halfdanwashere 3y ago
  > The reason Third Room has persisted is because there are enterprise folks willing to pay for it and support the team as a standalone thing - you can see the enterprisey showreel video at the end of the OP. It’s also very useful when fundraising for Element and Matrix to be able to point at an exotic shiny project to show Matrix’s long-term potential - a bit like Beeper have their Beepberry device. You can almost think of it as a marketing tool. That makes sense, thanks for the details. Though I would still argue that the way Third Room is communicated on sends mixed signals to anyone somewhat familiar with the space. For example, having entire foundation-authored blog posts dedicated to updates to Third Room (which I did not think was a project owned and maintained by the foundation?), with demos published on foundation-owned channels, where other projects (e.g. Synapse, bridges, etc) don't get as much as a tweet nowadays (apart from the spec, i.e. Matrix itself), really sends me the signal that Third Room is one of the few projects the foundation is heavily investing on, with a higher priority than anything else. I'm aware that this blog post does mention where the project sits with regards to the foundation's resources, but I'm not really sure a lone paragraph is enough to shift the balance. > Separately, “the entire Matrix trust & safety team” was not laid off You implied otherwise back in December though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34130243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34130243 To be clear, I'm not commenting on the situation as it is right now (and I'm in no position of doing so, I'm only operating on publicly-available info and there isn't much to describe what's going on at the moment). What I'm commenting on is the decision back when Element laid off part of its staff to, according to the information available publicly, lay off the trust and safety team, but keep the third room team on board. Which imo sounds like Third Room being prioritised over moderation/t&s.
  - Arathorn 3y ago
    > having entire foundation-authored blog posts dedicated to updates to Third Room (which I did not think was a project owned and maintained by the foundation?) TR is a Foundation project - its repo is github.com/matrix-org/thirdroom (not github.com/vector-im); its copyright is by the Foundation, etc. And the point is to provide spatial collaboration building blocks for Matrix (just like Olm provides e2ee building blocks; matrix-js-sdk provides IM & VoIP building blocks) etc. > where other projects (e.g. Synapse, bridges, etc) don't get as much as a tweet nowadays (apart from the spec, i.e. Matrix itself) That’s my bad; the projects seem to have fallen into the habit of publishing and tweeting/tooting/skeeting their updates in TWIM (eg friday’s 1.0.0 release of the IRC bridge) rather than via individual tweets and blog posts like we used to. The reason is that the various projects prefer to write software than blog posts/tweets, and I’ve lapsed in writing the posts/tweets myself (given I spend my life trying to fix funding and get Element X shipped) and haven’t successfully handed over to someone else to do it. It doesn’t mean the work isn’t happening though; we’re just failing to show off about it. > Which imo sounds like Third Room being prioritised over moderation/t&s. The rationale is that if TR generates money, that money can be put to more T&S and the rest of Matrix. It’s a way of trying to fix the funding nightmare. If it doesn’t generate money (by attracting innovation funding from people who actually like the idea of open spatial collaboration), then obviously folks won’t be able to work on it as their dayjob as there won’t be $ to do so. I guess one way of thinking about is that we model TR’s funding as separate from the rest of the Foundation - it has to be able to fund itself, and it is not stealing resources from elsewhere. (You could argue it steals focus, but in turn it exercises large chunks of Matrix - VoIP, Hydrogen SDK, SFUs etc, which I believe compensates for that, in combination with the marketing value). TL;DR: if TR doesn’t pay for itself via its own funding or by generating cash, then we won’t have $ to pay for it.

Arathorn 3y ago

The reason Third Room has persisted is because there are enterprise folks willing to pay for it and support the team as a standalone thing - you can see the enterprisey showreel video at the end of the OP. It’s also very useful when fundraising for Element and Matrix to be able to point at an exotic shiny project to show Matrix’s long-term potential - a bit like Beeper have their Beepberry device. You can almost think of it as a marketing tool. Separately, “the entire Matrix trust & safety team” was not laid off - today there are somewhere between 3 to 5 people working one way or another on T&S (between tooling and operational) on behalf of Matrix at Element. I don’t blame folks who are laid off for feeling aggrieved though, but we categorically did not throw anyone under the bus (or, if we did, it wasn’t intentional).

halfdanwashere 3y ago
> The reason Third Room has persisted is because there are enterprise folks willing to pay for it and support the team as a standalone thing - you can see the enterprisey showreel video at the end of the OP. It’s also very useful when fundraising for Element and Matrix to be able to point at an exotic shiny project to show Matrix’s long-term potential - a bit like Beeper have their Beepberry device. You can almost think of it as a marketing tool. That makes sense, thanks for the details. Though I would still argue that the way Third Room is communicated on sends mixed signals to anyone somewhat familiar with the space. For example, having entire foundation-authored blog posts dedicated to updates to Third Room (which I did not think was a project owned and maintained by the foundation?), with demos published on foundation-owned channels, where other projects (e.g. Synapse, bridges, etc) don't get as much as a tweet nowadays (apart from the spec, i.e. Matrix itself), really sends me the signal that Third Room is one of the few projects the foundation is heavily investing on, with a higher priority than anything else. I'm aware that this blog post does mention where the project sits with regards to the foundation's resources, but I'm not really sure a lone paragraph is enough to shift the balance. > Separately, “the entire Matrix trust & safety team” was not laid off You implied otherwise back in December though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34130243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34130243 To be clear, I'm not commenting on the situation as it is right now (and I'm in no position of doing so, I'm only operating on publicly-available info and there isn't much to describe what's going on at the moment). What I'm commenting on is the decision back when Element laid off part of its staff to, according to the information available publicly, lay off the trust and safety team, but keep the third room team on board. Which imo sounds like Third Room being prioritised over moderation/t&s.
- Arathorn 3y ago
  > having entire foundation-authored blog posts dedicated to updates to Third Room (which I did not think was a project owned and maintained by the foundation?) TR is a Foundation project - its repo is github.com/matrix-org/thirdroom (not github.com/vector-im); its copyright is by the Foundation, etc. And the point is to provide spatial collaboration building blocks for Matrix (just like Olm provides e2ee building blocks; matrix-js-sdk provides IM & VoIP building blocks) etc. > where other projects (e.g. Synapse, bridges, etc) don't get as much as a tweet nowadays (apart from the spec, i.e. Matrix itself) That’s my bad; the projects seem to have fallen into the habit of publishing and tweeting/tooting/skeeting their updates in TWIM (eg friday’s 1.0.0 release of the IRC bridge) rather than via individual tweets and blog posts like we used to. The reason is that the various projects prefer to write software than blog posts/tweets, and I’ve lapsed in writing the posts/tweets myself (given I spend my life trying to fix funding and get Element X shipped) and haven’t successfully handed over to someone else to do it. It doesn’t mean the work isn’t happening though; we’re just failing to show off about it. > Which imo sounds like Third Room being prioritised over moderation/t&s. The rationale is that if TR generates money, that money can be put to more T&S and the rest of Matrix. It’s a way of trying to fix the funding nightmare. If it doesn’t generate money (by attracting innovation funding from people who actually like the idea of open spatial collaboration), then obviously folks won’t be able to work on it as their dayjob as there won’t be $ to do so. I guess one way of thinking about is that we model TR’s funding as separate from the rest of the Foundation - it has to be able to fund itself, and it is not stealing resources from elsewhere. (You could argue it steals focus, but in turn it exercises large chunks of Matrix - VoIP, Hydrogen SDK, SFUs etc, which I believe compensates for that, in combination with the marketing value). TL;DR: if TR doesn’t pay for itself via its own funding or by generating cash, then we won’t have $ to pay for it.