4 ms·

My team started using Matrix/Element after years of frustration with Teams and Slack. It's far from perfect, but using a simple application with no built-in ads

by yabones 8mo ago

My team started using Matrix/Element after years of frustration with Teams and Slack. It's far from perfect, but using a simple application with no built-in ads, AI, bloat, crap, etc is wonderful. I really hope the EU throws some serious money at them to get the bugs worked out, add some minor features, and clean up the UX enough that an "office normie" can onboard as easily as MS. My dream is that Matrix can do for intra-org comms what Signal did for SMS.

Teever 8mo ago
The key is the money. I’ve used matrix for years, ran my own federated server for a while. I’ve been critical of the user experience and issues with how it’s handled by the matrix team before but I acknowledge that by and large these problems can be fixed with money. Big players need to put their big boy pants on and throw a couple coins from their farcically large coin purse and they can drive a stake through the wretched heart that is Teams.
- troyvit 8mo ago
  And this is the part I hope Europe gets. They don't have nearly as much money to throw at Matrix as Microsoft can throw at Teams, but they do have massive resources, and I bet that since Matrix doesn't have many of the same shitty KPIs as Slack and Teams, those resources can go much further.
  - pmontra 8mo ago
    I guess that the European Commission pays a lot of money to Microsoft in licenses. They could pay a fraction of those money to Matrix.
  - parchley 8mo ago
    Are you saying that Microsoft is more wealthy than all of “Europe”? And surely you must mean the EU. The money needed to improve matrix is nothing compared to what is already being spent on Microsoft products.
    - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
      > Are you saying that Microsoft is more wealthy than all of “Europe”? "In 2024, the EU spent €403 billion on research and development" [1]. In 2024, Microsoft spend $29.5bn on R&D [2]. So about 20 Microsofts makes up the entire EU's R&D expenditure. Alphabet, meanwhile, spent $49.3bn on R&D in 2024 [3]. It earned $350bn that year. So it would be correct to say that Microsoft and Alphabet's revenues, alone, rival the total amount Europe spends on research and development. (Non-EU non-British spending is insignificant.) [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=R%26D_expenditure https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... [2] https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar24/ https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar24/ [3] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425000010/googexhibit991q42024.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425...
    - troyvit 8mo ago
      Nah I'm just saying that Microsoft has more disposable money to throw at Teams than Europe has to throw at Matrix because Microsoft is a corporation that is choosing how to spend its money internally and Europe (or the EU, but why leave Switzerland, GB, etc. out of the fun?) would be funding an external entity in a (possibly?) new way. I'm still learning how the EU applies grants to open source projects for specific feature sets, but I'm guessing that there's a lot of friction that could be removed. And yeah, I agree that the money needed to improve Matrix is nothing. It's about getting organized and applying that money well. To me Europe's push for digital sovereignty has the potential to reshape open source software's competitiveness around the world and in turn, Europe's.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 8mo ago
    Microsoft may have money, but it certainly does not seem like it is being spent on Teams in an effective way.
  - ecshafer 8mo ago
    The lack of shitty KPIs is the main thing. Hiring 10 full time devs to work on Matrix would probably be more effective than 500 full time devs on Slack/Teams with most of them stuck on weird Product Manager goals and renaming things to Copilot 365 Teams with Copilot.
    - deleted 8mo ago
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jaredklewis 8mo ago
I don’t know much about Matrix. Maybe in this case the key is money. But having worked at various startups and enterprises, it is very common for lots of money and resources to thrown at projects and for little or no progress to be made. Money might be a necessary condition but it’s definitely not a sufficient one. See Microsoft teams. Again I know nothing about Matrix, but I found your comment about UX concerning. UX is a problem that is almost immune to money. An extremely clear vision is almost always the bottleneck. Money can always help with adding features or performance or scaling, but I feel like it doesn’t usually fix UX. Hope I’m wrong.
- toomuchtodo 8mo ago
  Sometimes good enough is good enough. Slack, Teams, Matrix, whatever, as long as you're meeting most daily driving requirements, everything else is maintenance and long tail quality of life improvement (imho). What else are Teams users going to get out of Microsoft chasing an ever increasing enterprise valuation and stock price target with regards to their user experience? Email just works, make teams comms that just works and is mostly stable. Get off the treadmill of companies chasing ever more returns (which will never be enough) at the expense of their customer base. We have the technology.
  - giovannibonetti 8mo ago
    I think the PowerSync [1] team is missing out on an opportunity to showcase their impressive data sync technology by building a minimalist Slack clone. [1] https://www.powersync.com/ https://www.powersync.com/
  - pembrook 8mo ago
    Yea, if you have to waste an extra 15 minutes per day due to bad UX who cares, it’s much better that you get the self-satisfied feeling of sticking it to “the man” (American big tech). I mean it only adds up to 90 days of your life wasted over a 30 year career. European peoples time has a lower salary value anyways. UX doesn’t even matter that much, the political meme of the day is much more important.
Arathorn 8mo ago
> It's far from perfect, but using a simple application with no built-in ads, AI, bloat, crap, etc is wonderful. I think there are three main reasons it's not perfect yet: 1. Building both a decentralised open standard (Matrix) at the same time as a flagship implementation (Element) is playing on hard mode: everything has to be specified under an open governance process (https://spec.matrix.org/proposals https://spec.matrix.org/proposals) so that the broader ecosystem can benefit from it - while in the early years we could move fast and JFDI, the ecosystem grew much faster than we anticipated and very enthusiastically demanded a better spec process. While Matrix is built extensibly with protocol agility to let you experiment at basically every level of the stack (e.g. right now we're changing the format of user IDs in MSC4243, and the shape of room DAGs in MSC4242) in practice changes take at least ~10x longer to land than in a typical proprietary/centralised product. On the plus side, hopefully the end result ends up being more durable than some proprietary thing, but it's certainly a fun challenge. 2. As Matrix project lead, I took the "Element" use case pretty much for granted from 2019-2022: it felt like Matrix had critical mass and usage was exploding; COVID was highlighting the need for secure comms; it almost felt like we'd done most of the hard bits and finishing building out the app was a given. As a result, I started looking at the N-year horizon instead - spending Element's time working on P2P Matrix (arewep2pyet.com) as a long-term solution to Matrix's metadata footprint and to futureproof Matrix against Chat Control style dystopias... or projects like Third Room (https://thirdroom.io https://thirdroom.io) to try to ensure that spatial collaboration apps didn't get centralised and vendorlocked to Meta, or bluesky on Matrix (https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean/ https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean/, before Jay & Paul got the gig and did atproto). I maintain that if things had continued on the 2019-2022 trajectory then we would have been able to ship a polished Element and do the various "scifi" long-term projects too. But in practice that didn't happen, and I kinda wish that we'd spent the time focusing on polishing the core Element use case instead. Still, better late than never, in 2023 we did the necessary handbrake turn focusing exclusively on the core Element apps (Element X, Web, Call) and Element Server Suite as an excellent helm-based distro. Hopefully the results speak for themselves now (although Element Web is still being upgraded to use the same engine as Element X). 3. Finally, the thing which went wrong in 2022/2023 was not just the impact of the end of ZIPR, but the horrible realisation that the more successful Matrix got... the more incentive there would be for 3rd parties to commercialise the Apache-licensed code that Element had built (e.g. Synapse) without routing any funds to us as the upstream project. We obviously knew this would happen to some extent - we'd deliberately picked Apache to try to get as much uptake as possible. However, I hadn't realised that the % of projects willing to fund the upstream would reduce as the project got more successful - and the larger the available funds (e.g. governments offering million-dollar deals to deploy Matrix for healthcare, education etc) then you were pretty much guaranteed the % of upstream funding would go to zero. So, we addressed this in 2023 by having to switch Element's work to AGPL, massively shrinking the company, and then doing an open-core distribution in the form of ESS Pro (https://element.io/server-suite/pro https://element.io/server-suite/pro) which puts scalability (but not performance), HA, and enterprise features like antivirus, onboarding/offboarding, audit, border gateways etc behind the paywall. The rule of thumb is that if a feature empowers the end-user it goes FOSS; if it empowers the enterprise over the end-user it goes Pro. Thankfully the model seems to be working - e.g. EC is using ESS for this deployment. There's a lot more gory detail in last year's FOSDEM main-stage talk on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkCKhP1jxdk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkCKhP1jxdk Eitherway, the good news is that we think we've figured out how to make this work, things are going cautiously well, and these days all of Element is laser-focused on making the Element apps & servers as good as we possibly can - while also continuing to also improve Matrix, both because we believe the world needs Matrix more than ever, and because without Matrix Element is just another boring silo'd chat app. The bad news is that it took us a while to figure it all out (and there are still some things still to solve - e.g. abuse on the public Matrix network, finishing Hydra (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Keu8aE8t08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Keu8aE8t08), finishing the Element Web rework, and cough custom emoji). I'm hopeful we'll get here in the end :)
thibaut_barrere 8mo ago
France is leveraging Matrix in Tchap https://element.io/fr/case-studies/tchap https://element.io/fr/case-studies/tchap (part of La Suite Numérique https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/#products https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/#products recently featured on HN). Presumably there is funding or resources because of that.
- lwarfield 8mo ago
  I've always thought the really low bandwidth support they added a few years ago was to support the french subs. It matched all the requirements of VLF/ELF communications.
  - Arathorn 8mo ago
    It wasn't France (and, ironically, it wasn't funded - it was mainly us showing off)
- Arathorn 8mo ago
  France donates to the Matrix Foundation (which helps the protocol retain its neutrality and independence, and is very much appreciated), but doesn't currently financially support Element's dev as their upstream. We're trying to fix that though!
  - forsakenharmony 8mo ago
    better this way than the other way, element doesn't support the matrix foundation enough
    - Arathorn 8mo ago
      Element has put tens of millions of dollars into Matrix over the years and today provides hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of resources per year to support it. Amandine (acting managing dir on the fdn) is preparing the public financial report of the Foundation which will have more details on this; it should be out in a few weeks.
kgwxd 8mo ago
I don't know anything about Matrix. What makes it "far from perfect"? First priority of every business chat should be to move the conversation to something designed for the business concern at hand, because a chat app is a terrible place for it to live.
NedF 8mo ago
[dead]

by yabones 8mo ago

Teever 8mo ago

The key is the money. I’ve used matrix for years, ran my own federated server for a while. I’ve been critical of the user experience and issues with how it’s handled by the matrix team before but I acknowledge that by and large these problems can be fixed with money. Big players need to put their big boy pants on and throw a couple coins from their farcically large coin purse and they can drive a stake through the wretched heart that is Teams.

troyvit 8mo ago
And this is the part I hope Europe gets. They don't have nearly as much money to throw at Matrix as Microsoft can throw at Teams, but they do have massive resources, and I bet that since Matrix doesn't have many of the same shitty KPIs as Slack and Teams, those resources can go much further.
- pmontra 8mo ago
  I guess that the European Commission pays a lot of money to Microsoft in licenses. They could pay a fraction of those money to Matrix.
- parchley 8mo ago
  Are you saying that Microsoft is more wealthy than all of “Europe”? And surely you must mean the EU. The money needed to improve matrix is nothing compared to what is already being spent on Microsoft products.
  - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
    > Are you saying that Microsoft is more wealthy than all of “Europe”? "In 2024, the EU spent €403 billion on research and development" [1]. In 2024, Microsoft spend $29.5bn on R&D [2]. So about 20 Microsofts makes up the entire EU's R&D expenditure. Alphabet, meanwhile, spent $49.3bn on R&D in 2024 [3]. It earned $350bn that year. So it would be correct to say that Microsoft and Alphabet's revenues, alone, rival the total amount Europe spends on research and development. (Non-EU non-British spending is insignificant.) [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=R%26D_expenditure https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... [2] https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar24/ https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar24/ [3] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425000010/googexhibit991q42024.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425...
  - troyvit 8mo ago
    Nah I'm just saying that Microsoft has more disposable money to throw at Teams than Europe has to throw at Matrix because Microsoft is a corporation that is choosing how to spend its money internally and Europe (or the EU, but why leave Switzerland, GB, etc. out of the fun?) would be funding an external entity in a (possibly?) new way. I'm still learning how the EU applies grants to open source projects for specific feature sets, but I'm guessing that there's a lot of friction that could be removed. And yeah, I agree that the money needed to improve Matrix is nothing. It's about getting organized and applying that money well. To me Europe's push for digital sovereignty has the potential to reshape open source software's competitiveness around the world and in turn, Europe's.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 8mo ago
  Microsoft may have money, but it certainly does not seem like it is being spent on Teams in an effective way.
- ecshafer 8mo ago
  The lack of shitty KPIs is the main thing. Hiring 10 full time devs to work on Matrix would probably be more effective than 500 full time devs on Slack/Teams with most of them stuck on weird Product Manager goals and renaming things to Copilot 365 Teams with Copilot.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

jaredklewis 8mo ago

I don’t know much about Matrix. Maybe in this case the key is money. But having worked at various startups and enterprises, it is very common for lots of money and resources to thrown at projects and for little or no progress to be made. Money might be a necessary condition but it’s definitely not a sufficient one. See Microsoft teams. Again I know nothing about Matrix, but I found your comment about UX concerning. UX is a problem that is almost immune to money. An extremely clear vision is almost always the bottleneck. Money can always help with adding features or performance or scaling, but I feel like it doesn’t usually fix UX. Hope I’m wrong.

toomuchtodo 8mo ago
Sometimes good enough is good enough. Slack, Teams, Matrix, whatever, as long as you're meeting most daily driving requirements, everything else is maintenance and long tail quality of life improvement (imho). What else are Teams users going to get out of Microsoft chasing an ever increasing enterprise valuation and stock price target with regards to their user experience? Email just works, make teams comms that just works and is mostly stable. Get off the treadmill of companies chasing ever more returns (which will never be enough) at the expense of their customer base. We have the technology.
- giovannibonetti 8mo ago
  I think the PowerSync [1] team is missing out on an opportunity to showcase their impressive data sync technology by building a minimalist Slack clone. [1] https://www.powersync.com/ https://www.powersync.com/
- pembrook 8mo ago
  Yea, if you have to waste an extra 15 minutes per day due to bad UX who cares, it’s much better that you get the self-satisfied feeling of sticking it to “the man” (American big tech). I mean it only adds up to 90 days of your life wasted over a 30 year career. European peoples time has a lower salary value anyways. UX doesn’t even matter that much, the political meme of the day is much more important.

Arathorn 8mo ago

> It's far from perfect, but using a simple application with no built-in ads, AI, bloat, crap, etc is wonderful. I think there are three main reasons it's not perfect yet: 1. Building both a decentralised open standard (Matrix) at the same time as a flagship implementation (Element) is playing on hard mode: everything has to be specified under an open governance process (https://spec.matrix.org/proposals https://spec.matrix.org/proposals) so that the broader ecosystem can benefit from it - while in the early years we could move fast and JFDI, the ecosystem grew much faster than we anticipated and very enthusiastically demanded a better spec process. While Matrix is built extensibly with protocol agility to let you experiment at basically every level of the stack (e.g. right now we're changing the format of user IDs in MSC4243, and the shape of room DAGs in MSC4242) in practice changes take at least ~10x longer to land than in a typical proprietary/centralised product. On the plus side, hopefully the end result ends up being more durable than some proprietary thing, but it's certainly a fun challenge. 2. As Matrix project lead, I took the "Element" use case pretty much for granted from 2019-2022: it felt like Matrix had critical mass and usage was exploding; COVID was highlighting the need for secure comms; it almost felt like we'd done most of the hard bits and finishing building out the app was a given. As a result, I started looking at the N-year horizon instead - spending Element's time working on P2P Matrix (arewep2pyet.com) as a long-term solution to Matrix's metadata footprint and to futureproof Matrix against Chat Control style dystopias... or projects like Third Room (https://thirdroom.io https://thirdroom.io) to try to ensure that spatial collaboration apps didn't get centralised and vendorlocked to Meta, or bluesky on Matrix (https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean/ https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean/, before Jay & Paul got the gig and did atproto). I maintain that if things had continued on the 2019-2022 trajectory then we would have been able to ship a polished Element and do the various "scifi" long-term projects too. But in practice that didn't happen, and I kinda wish that we'd spent the time focusing on polishing the core Element use case instead. Still, better late than never, in 2023 we did the necessary handbrake turn focusing exclusively on the core Element apps (Element X, Web, Call) and Element Server Suite as an excellent helm-based distro. Hopefully the results speak for themselves now (although Element Web is still being upgraded to use the same engine as Element X). 3. Finally, the thing which went wrong in 2022/2023 was not just the impact of the end of ZIPR, but the horrible realisation that the more successful Matrix got... the more incentive there would be for 3rd parties to commercialise the Apache-licensed code that Element had built (e.g. Synapse) without routing any funds to us as the upstream project. We obviously knew this would happen to some extent - we'd deliberately picked Apache to try to get as much uptake as possible. However, I hadn't realised that the % of projects willing to fund the upstream would reduce as the project got more successful - and the larger the available funds (e.g. governments offering million-dollar deals to deploy Matrix for healthcare, education etc) then you were pretty much guaranteed the % of upstream funding would go to zero. So, we addressed this in 2023 by having to switch Element's work to AGPL, massively shrinking the company, and then doing an open-core distribution in the form of ESS Pro (https://element.io/server-suite/pro https://element.io/server-suite/pro) which puts scalability (but not performance), HA, and enterprise features like antivirus, onboarding/offboarding, audit, border gateways etc behind the paywall. The rule of thumb is that if a feature empowers the end-user it goes FOSS; if it empowers the enterprise over the end-user it goes Pro. Thankfully the model seems to be working - e.g. EC is using ESS for this deployment. There's a lot more gory detail in last year's FOSDEM main-stage talk on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkCKhP1jxdk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkCKhP1jxdk Eitherway, the good news is that we think we've figured out how to make this work, things are going cautiously well, and these days all of Element is laser-focused on making the Element apps & servers as good as we possibly can - while also continuing to also improve Matrix, both because we believe the world needs Matrix more than ever, and because without Matrix Element is just another boring silo'd chat app. The bad news is that it took us a while to figure it all out (and there are still some things still to solve - e.g. abuse on the public Matrix network, finishing Hydra (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Keu8aE8t08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Keu8aE8t08), finishing the Element Web rework, and cough custom emoji). I'm hopeful we'll get here in the end :)

thibaut_barrere 8mo ago

France is leveraging Matrix in Tchap https://element.io/fr/case-studies/tchap https://element.io/fr/case-studies/tchap (part of La Suite Numérique https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/#products https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/#products recently featured on HN). Presumably there is funding or resources because of that.

lwarfield 8mo ago
I've always thought the really low bandwidth support they added a few years ago was to support the french subs. It matched all the requirements of VLF/ELF communications.
- Arathorn 8mo ago
  It wasn't France (and, ironically, it wasn't funded - it was mainly us showing off)
Arathorn 8mo ago
France donates to the Matrix Foundation (which helps the protocol retain its neutrality and independence, and is very much appreciated), but doesn't currently financially support Element's dev as their upstream. We're trying to fix that though!
- forsakenharmony 8mo ago
  better this way than the other way, element doesn't support the matrix foundation enough
  - Arathorn 8mo ago
    Element has put tens of millions of dollars into Matrix over the years and today provides hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of resources per year to support it. Amandine (acting managing dir on the fdn) is preparing the public financial report of the Foundation which will have more details on this; it should be out in a few weeks.

kgwxd 8mo ago

I don't know anything about Matrix. What makes it "far from perfect"? First priority of every business chat should be to move the conversation to something designed for the business concern at hand, because a chat app is a terrible place for it to live.

NedF 8mo ago

[dead]