It's a shame it had to come to this but I can see why Element had to make this choice.
To me it feels like they've ended up in a position similar to Docker Inc. where they've spent years of work and tons of resources building the standards and reference implementations, but missed out on the juicy integration and support contracts.
Docker has turned into the OCI standard and most Kubernetes deployment don't even run containerd anymore. The company has massively rate limited Docker hub and recently increased the pricing again, which has had much bigger impact for end users than this pivot by Element.
I really hope this works out as a funding source for future Matrix development, I don't see how its ecosystem can continue to be developed and healthy without Element.
> most Kubernetes deployment don't even run containerd anymore
I assume you mean moby, which was used via dockershim in Kubernetes until support was removed in v1.24.
I can't find a reliable source, but I believe containerd, followed by CRI-O and alternatives, are the common choices of container runtime for Kubernetes.
At the end of the day, the money has to come from somewhere. There's only a handful of companies that make the open source profit game work and last I checked, most of them make their money from B2B deals with support, SLAs, etc. If you want to deploy something at nation scale, surely you can afford to pay for it.
While it's absolutely true that businesses need to make money, the idea that this must therefore logically conclude with a FLOSS and non-FLOSS version is not correct.
If you look at companies like Red Hat, and Nextcloud, neither of these companies sold proprietary versions of their software. Red Hat sold licensed versions of their software, but they were always FLOSS.
Nextcloud's CEO talks about how selling a proprietary version of your code is bad for your customers and puts your company into a Catch 22 with itself. "Do we add this feature to the 'Community' or 'Enterprise' version?" or worse "What do we do when someone makes a FLOSS plugin that competes or is better than our internal version of the same functionality?"
There's a huge need for a good chat system to compete with the likes of Slack, but Matrix has bitten me several times and I don't trust it. In an alternate universe, they could have made Matrix work well for all levels of users and then sold customization and B2B deals with their customers leveraging the community, which has always wanted Matrix to succeed.
Would you be able to point me to the talk or blogpost of nextcloud that talks about their business model in detail?
I would be very interested in how it works in practice, how they differentiate with their enterprise versions and so on.
I agree that their business model sounds like having the best of both worlds, so any material on the details that you could share would help me a lot figuring out how to replicate it for other solutions.
The feature exist in both versions but you pay for additional capacity which is not what they are talking about when they said deciding whether the feature should be in community or enterprise.
I find this comment interesting: https://mastodon.matrix.org/@element/113848890455666110 where IMO it is stated that Deutsche Telekom (with HessenConnect 2.0) did the free-riding and "directly contributed to layoffs at Element in 2022 and 2023". It sounds as if Telekom changed its mind after an initial contract or something. Or was Telekom one of many companies that did a similar thing?
I know from my own experience that making money based on an open source project is extremely challenging.
However, I don't understand why they frame their Pro version in this way and point to failure instead of success. I can't think of a better way (they will have to do the work :)). But it's already a good thing if they've won them as "Matrix believers", and they shouldn't scare them to get there.
I'm pretty sick of Element and Matrix at this point, and I'm pretty sure the enthusiasts are the only ones keeping Matrix relevant. This monetization scheme is not going to work. I think the Matrix experiment is coming to an end.
I'm about to fork Dendrite at its last ASL 2.0 version, because to hell with signing a CLA for Element.
I'm tired of all the issues with Matrix as well. I've never had a message get received or a notification pushed in less than 10 minutes. Went back to XMPP and messages are instant. I want to love Matrix. E2EE, proper federation, voice calls, But the experience is terrible.
Presumably you’re using an overloaded server which is struggling because we have been completely undermanned on synapse maintenance and haven’t been able to do core optimisation work. This is precisely why we’re trying to fund our FOSS work by selling Synapse Pro.
The worst part is the article reads like someone is nervous that the nation states are busting hosting services from somebody doing horizontal scaling via multiple server instances rather than doing the Proper rust implementation. The classic tension of oss vs paid version.
Arathorn, should this message reach you, I want to voice my support of you and your team.
Notwithstanding the naysayers that surface with peculiar predictability any time Matrix is discussed here, know there are people like me that are happy Synapse users (and operators, nearly 5 years now!) that are in your corner, rooting for you [and Matrix]. Keep fighting the good fight.
I don't like this. I only have a handful of family users but I could still benefit from the additional vulnerability proofing of Rust. It's not just about the scaling. My data security matters too. I have not exposed it to the internet for a while now because I already had my doubts. Also, as 0xC0ncord mentioned large federated rooms caused too much load so I wanted to move to standalone anyway. For that too I could have benefited from this.
This really sounds like "haha you community members are stuck with a sucky version of our software and you're never getting the good one!". It's not exactly making me feel valued as a community member. And we shouldn't forget this is what put matrix on the map. This feels very bait-and-switch'ey.
Also pointing out the flaws in one's own software doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. I think it would have been a sounder approach to paywall real enterprise features rather than the core product. Such as SSO, auditing, legal holds, that stuff. Basically all the stuff that Microsoft Teams has in Purview. The community won't miss any of that stuff.
Ps I thought dendrite was supposed to be the next big thing? It feels like element is often jumping on new things like big rewrites such as element X instead of improving the existing products.
The way I’m thinking of it is that Synapse (not to mention Dendrite) has been badly starved of development over the last few years due to the freerider problem nuking the $ available to support our dev as the upstream.
By making only optimisations that primarily support massive servers proprietary (for now), the $ from Synapse Pro can hopefully then directly fund the features and maintenance of core FOSS Synapse, including core optimisation work which benefits everyone. Concrete examples include:
* State Res v3, which hopefully should have algorithmic improvements to perf
* State storage, addressing the long standing diskspace consumption problem for state snapshots
* Finishing faster room joins so they are actually fast
* Shared retry hints on federation, to stop wasting time trying to talk to dead servers
* Better than full mesh federation, so small servers can participate in big rooms without melting.
EDIT: to spell it out, as it’s been misunderstood: Fixing these issues will likely happen directly in FOSS Synapse (assuming there’s any $ to work on them at all).
Meanwhile, FOSS Synapse already has Rust as Python codepaths and has done for years, and that will only increase over time. Only stuff for making workers scale to handle hundreds of thousand concurrent users will remain proprietary for now.
Dendrite was meant to be the next big thing, but we (obviously) didn’t have enough $ to work on both it and Synapse. So we focused exclusively on Synapse as of end of Dec 2023, and Dendrite is currently progressing on a best-effort (ie not funded work) basis.
> It feels like element is often jumping on new things like big rewrites such as element X instead of improving the existing products.
Well, Dendrite was a big rewrite like that. Which is why we’ve ended up improving Synapse instead (both FOSS and the new rust workers).
Many of the issues you mention though are real dealbreakers for those trying to use this as a private user. It's really a big adoption barrier not being able to join big rooms without the server 'melting'. Those rooms are big because they have a lot to offer. Those of us promoting matrix as a next gen truly free and federated platform have always expected these to be fixed. It's just not really fit for purpose without those fixes.
It doesn't inspire confidence that we have to wait for this to 'trickle down' to the free version.
And ok yeah I think it's a good idea to kill concurrent product development that does the same thing. As long as it makes the remaining product better.
So there's also a Rust version of FOSS Synapse? I wasn't aware of that. Even the official blog post speaks only of python for the community version.
> By making optimisations that primarily support massive servers proprietary (for now), the $ can hopefully then fund features and maintenance of core FOSS Synapse
Your own blog post about the pro version (and the one about forking synapse) basically said that you wouldn't be working on the community version at all anymore? Unless I misunderstood. But my takeaway from this is 'it's a dead duck, it's time to pay up'. Which is a bit worrying as this is the kind of price only viable for large corporations.
You’ve totally misunderstood me - probably my fault; sorry.
There is no trickle-down happening here: *these issues will be fixed directly in FOSS synapse, which is the core project*. They are nothing to do with rust worker implementations in Synapse Pro, and FOSS will get them first. The only reason they haven’t been fixed before is due to the freerider nightmare meaning there hasn’t been $ to fund the work.
> Your own blog post about the pro version (and the one about forking synapse) basically said that you wouldn't be working on the community version at all anymore?
WHAT?! It’s the opposite! We’re trying to fund the FOSS dev!! Where did it say that?!
Ok sorry for misunderstanding you. I'm glad those will be fixed and in the FOSS implementation <3 I thought this might happen only if things work out with the pro version first.
> WHAT?! It’s the opposite! We’re trying to fund the FOSS dev!! Where did it say that?!
I thought the community version was left for the community to maintain when it was forked. Especially because the foundation said they wouldn't be able to fund further development.
But I see now that it just meant that element would become the official host for synapse.
With the other blog post (the recent one about synapse pro) it just goes into so much detail about the shortcomings of the community version that it kinda implies they won't be fixed. After all, if that were the case one could just wait and the problem would solve itself.
But I apologise for drawing the wrong conclusions and arguing for them here.
I do really understand you're in a difficult position. And I don't have a solution either.
np, thanks for listening to my explanation and for the apology - sorry on my side for yelling.
i’m terrified now that the various blog posts haven’t been clear enough about the plan though - seems like we should have made it much clearer that FOSS synapse is still the primary project, and everything will happen there first (other than optimisations to support massive scalability)
"It's not exactly making me feel valued as a community member"
Neither is not getting paid for work/services. If one works hard on things and can't pay their bills, that's unsustainable. Why is developer time worth nothing to other developers? If you can write it and host it, do it. If you can't, and the folks that can charge for it, hand over your credit card so they can continue to do it. Or watch it die when they have to abandon it to make a living writing code for someone that will pay for it I guess.
I do support many FOSS projects. Obviously I can't provide the kind of funding that element is looking for. And that's really where it rubs, none of us in the community can. It's their choice to position this as a massive enterprise level solution.
Can you actually buy that for a handful of seats? All the benefits they're touting apply only to massive installations. So it sounds to me that they wouldn't be interested in selling this to home users. They'll probably refer you to element one or the community version.
Yea I am also not that familiar with the different editions that are available and the whole ecosystem is confusing to me with matrix/element/dendrite/synapse etc.
I feel like though they would have some accessible paid plan for “smaller” users that want to support the development of the project long term - I believe this is the most sustainable way to build complex “big” FOSS projects - apart from having someone sacrifice themselves for the greater good I guess
Yeah, as a past contributor and long-running homeserver admin I feel pretty rugpulled here. This violates the expectations set in past communications. Synapse was something very different to Element.
(This would at least for me have had a very different taste and reception if the private for-profit alternative would have been done under a different branding than "Synapse Pro" and not hijacking matrix.org community channels to promote it. They don't seem to be able to keep their hats and chairs properly separated)
No, not cancelled. Just not being developed with dayjob funding currently (as there is none). This isn’t the first time it’s been in that state, and it returned before: https://github.com/element-hq/dendrite/graphs/contributors shows rumours of its death are exaggerated. But it’s certainly stuck evolving on a best effort basis for now (thanks to its old team working on it in their free time, basically).
Oh thanks I missed that. I thought it was still stuck in its forever 'nearing feature complete' status :)
Edit: oh ok it's still alive but just not very active. That's ok. I think synapse is fine as long as the long-standing issues would be fixed. Like big federated rooms.
Matrix is an open protocol and is 100% open. Synapse is a server implementation of Matrix and is open source under AGPL.
Synapse Pro is some alternative new worker implementations for Synapse designed to let enormous deployments scale rather than run out of headroom. Those happen to be proprietary.
FOSS Synapse is still the same project, and the main “real” project, and is still FOSS, same as it ever was.
Yes. The article is about how a particular open source Matrix server implementation isn't suitable for millions of simultaneous users, and you should pay for the non-open-source version.
But if you are merely handling tens of thousands of users, no problem. And if you have the budget to handle millions of users, maybe you have the budget to pay development as well as operations staff?
the world using made up of normies, but hacker news isn't. so here a clarification is absolutely necessary.
and which english word would you suggest intuitively communicates the meaning of free as in free to modify and share? there isn't one because the concept itself is unfamiliar to most people.
Element have a perfectly good implementation written in Go called Dendrite. I run it. It's good.
But support is deprioritised in favour of Synapse (Python).
Moving the goalposts with Synapse does not rejuvenate Synspse, it creates a fragmented system.
Get used to being boring. I am not moving to an ever centralised Synapse only ecosystem - a single implementation is not a federated protocol. That the new Element mobile client only supports Synapse was a huge red flag.
If diversity in implementation is not encouraged with action I'm back to XMPP (+ Jitsi).
Performance has always been one of the most glaring issues with using Matrix. The article seems to be intentionally obfuscating the fact that performance and scalability issues stem from the activity a server participates in rather than just the number of users it has. If you're in a rather large room with hundreds of members and it's constantly active, you'll quickly notice your server struggling to keep up.
As a Matrix user, I feel like I'm being rug-pulled because Element HQ decided to gatekeep their solution to this problem that has plagued the community for more than half a decade.
The reason that small servers struggle today is not because their workers are written mainly in Python rather than Rust. Hell, they typically don’t run workers at all. The slowness comes from state res being slow algorithmically; state storage being slow and inefficient; wasting time trying to talk to dead servers; no support for “thin nodes” but always doing full mesh federation; the fact faster room joins never got finished; etc etc.
ALL of this would get fixed on FOSS Synapse. The point of Synapse Pro is to try to get $ to actually fund that work. Only massive-scalability stuff is in scope for Synapse Pro: all other features, perf optimisations, maintenance, security work etc will land in FOSS Synapse as it has for the last 10 years. Assuming that this gambit works and there’s any $ to fund it, of course.
Thanks Matthew for reassuring that FOSS Synapse isn't getting left behind. I really do want Matrix to succeed and get the funding it really needs. I'm aware it's been a long-standing issue.
My voice is mostly coming from the perspective of someone who has tried repeatedly to bring friends and family to Matrix but every time the experience is subpar. It's frustrating because most of the problems they experienced (including performance) have been known about and complained about for a long time.
Maybe the messaging in the article was a little off. The "attack" it makes on FOSS Synapse reads to me like it will never get the fixes it needs to make using Matrix more approachable to new users.
No ok but then let's drop matrix completely as the "next-gen" IRC / FOSS collaboration platform.
There's a lot of moral support and ecosystem gain (eg bridges) from the community. Why bother with that anymore if we're just getting the "broken implementation"?
I think part of the issue here is that they're trying to compete with the enterprise IM solutions. That doesn't really work as the others are way better funded and have benefits that element can't deliver (such as the wide Microsoft M365 + EntraID ecosystem). A Microsoft shop is never ever going to choose this over teams (horrible as the latter is).
> Why bother with that anymore if we're just getting the "broken implementation"?
You’re not. All work (other than stuff which primarily benefits scalability for enormous deployments) should land on FOSS Synapse - particularly core performance improvements like faster state res. This is just trying to fund it.
And no, this is not us trying to compete with Teams - this is us trying to force big Matrix deployments to actually route $ to Element to fund upstream
dev, rather than use System Integrators who win the big tenders and then mysteriously fail to route any $ to us.
In short they are saying that if the nation states hadn't opted to use Matrix they would never have bothered developing this Rust version, which only shows that they were never sincere about developing a performant open source version, not to mention their involvement with some suspect Israeli comms companies and the phone home agendas.
Interesting question - will their "nation state" level customers have the right to inspect the source and make changes to it?
Matrix is an open protocol published by a non-profit foundation. It has always had both FOSS (eg Element) and proprietary (eg Beeper) implementations.
You sound like you are getting Element mixed up with Matrix. Element releases almost all of its implementations as FOSS, and to help Matrix grow, will make those as good as possible for average server sizes. It’s only gigantic servers which actually require the new proprietary modules. Given everyone who uses FOSS Synapse can keep doing so, and given FOSS Synapse dev should hopefully improve and accelerate if actually funded by $ from Synapse Pro, it’s not fair to say that “FOSS is essentially a marketing tool for Element”
Isn’t that true for most/all corporate FOSS projects? I don’t think there are many for-profit companies who have some kind of idealistic vision of FOSS. It’s always part of the business model. Would be weird otherwise.
It's a shame it had to come to this but I can see why Element had to make this choice.
To me it feels like they've ended up in a position similar to Docker Inc. where they've spent years of work and tons of resources building the standards and reference implementations, but missed out on the juicy integration and support contracts.
Docker has turned into the OCI standard and most Kubernetes deployment don't even run containerd anymore. The company has massively rate limited Docker hub and recently increased the pricing again, which has had much bigger impact for end users than this pivot by Element.
I really hope this works out as a funding source for future Matrix development, I don't see how its ecosystem can continue to be developed and healthy without Element.
> most Kubernetes deployment don't even run containerd anymore
I assume you mean moby, which was used via dockershim in Kubernetes until support was removed in v1.24.
I can't find a reliable source, but I believe containerd, followed by CRI-O and alternatives, are the common choices of container runtime for Kubernetes.
https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/production-environment/cont...
At the end of the day, the money has to come from somewhere. There's only a handful of companies that make the open source profit game work and last I checked, most of them make their money from B2B deals with support, SLAs, etc. If you want to deploy something at nation scale, surely you can afford to pay for it.
While it's absolutely true that businesses need to make money, the idea that this must therefore logically conclude with a FLOSS and non-FLOSS version is not correct.
If you look at companies like Red Hat, and Nextcloud, neither of these companies sold proprietary versions of their software. Red Hat sold licensed versions of their software, but they were always FLOSS.
Nextcloud's CEO talks about how selling a proprietary version of your code is bad for your customers and puts your company into a Catch 22 with itself. "Do we add this feature to the 'Community' or 'Enterprise' version?" or worse "What do we do when someone makes a FLOSS plugin that competes or is better than our internal version of the same functionality?"
There's a huge need for a good chat system to compete with the likes of Slack, but Matrix has bitten me several times and I don't trust it. In an alternate universe, they could have made Matrix work well for all levels of users and then sold customization and B2B deals with their customers leveraging the community, which has always wanted Matrix to succeed.
Would you be able to point me to the talk or blogpost of nextcloud that talks about their business model in detail? I would be very interested in how it works in practice, how they differentiate with their enterprise versions and so on. I agree that their business model sounds like having the best of both worlds, so any material on the details that you could share would help me a lot figuring out how to replicate it for other solutions.
Last I checked they ratelimit push notifications using a proprietary push gateway, unless you’re a paying customer.
The feature exist in both versions but you pay for additional capacity which is not what they are talking about when they said deciding whether the feature should be in community or enterprise.
I find this comment interesting: https://mastodon.matrix.org/@element/113848890455666110 where IMO it is stated that Deutsche Telekom (with HessenConnect 2.0) did the free-riding and "directly contributed to layoffs at Element in 2022 and 2023". It sounds as if Telekom changed its mind after an initial contract or something. Or was Telekom one of many companies that did a similar thing?
I know from my own experience that making money based on an open source project is extremely challenging.
However, I don't understand why they frame their Pro version in this way and point to failure instead of success. I can't think of a better way (they will have to do the work :)). But it's already a good thing if they've won them as "Matrix believers", and they shouldn't scare them to get there.
> Or was Telekom one of many companies that did a similar thing?
This.
> However, I don't understand why they frame their Pro version in this way and point to failure instead of success.
It’s really trying to spell out the risks of freeriding, given the severity of the situation. But you’re right that it may well be too negative.
> I can't think of a better way (they will have to do the work :)).
Someone proposed a better positioning in the OP thread at: https://ioc.exchange/@troed/113843356547707182
I'm pretty sick of Element and Matrix at this point, and I'm pretty sure the enthusiasts are the only ones keeping Matrix relevant. This monetization scheme is not going to work. I think the Matrix experiment is coming to an end.
I'm about to fork Dendrite at its last ASL 2.0 version, because to hell with signing a CLA for Element.
I'm tired of all the issues with Matrix as well. I've never had a message get received or a notification pushed in less than 10 minutes. Went back to XMPP and messages are instant. I want to love Matrix. E2EE, proper federation, voice calls, But the experience is terrible.
> I've never had a message get received or a notification pushed in less than 10 minutes.
I receive messages < 10 seconds. What's your setup?
Element (Later ElementX) On android, and same on iOS. Tried various other clients like Fluffychat, and SchildiChat.
Presumably you’re using an overloaded server which is struggling because we have been completely undermanned on synapse maintenance and haven’t been able to do core optimisation work. This is precisely why we’re trying to fund our FOSS work by selling Synapse Pro.
The worst part is the article reads like someone is nervous that the nation states are busting hosting services from somebody doing horizontal scaling via multiple server instances rather than doing the Proper rust implementation. The classic tension of oss vs paid version.
Arathorn, should this message reach you, I want to voice my support of you and your team.
Notwithstanding the naysayers that surface with peculiar predictability any time Matrix is discussed here, know there are people like me that are happy Synapse users (and operators, nearly 5 years now!) that are in your corner, rooting for you [and Matrix]. Keep fighting the good fight.
I don't like this. I only have a handful of family users but I could still benefit from the additional vulnerability proofing of Rust. It's not just about the scaling. My data security matters too. I have not exposed it to the internet for a while now because I already had my doubts. Also, as 0xC0ncord mentioned large federated rooms caused too much load so I wanted to move to standalone anyway. For that too I could have benefited from this.
This really sounds like "haha you community members are stuck with a sucky version of our software and you're never getting the good one!". It's not exactly making me feel valued as a community member. And we shouldn't forget this is what put matrix on the map. This feels very bait-and-switch'ey.
Also pointing out the flaws in one's own software doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. I think it would have been a sounder approach to paywall real enterprise features rather than the core product. Such as SSO, auditing, legal holds, that stuff. Basically all the stuff that Microsoft Teams has in Purview. The community won't miss any of that stuff.
Ps I thought dendrite was supposed to be the next big thing? It feels like element is often jumping on new things like big rewrites such as element X instead of improving the existing products.
The way I’m thinking of it is that Synapse (not to mention Dendrite) has been badly starved of development over the last few years due to the freerider problem nuking the $ available to support our dev as the upstream.
By making only optimisations that primarily support massive servers proprietary (for now), the $ from Synapse Pro can hopefully then directly fund the features and maintenance of core FOSS Synapse, including core optimisation work which benefits everyone. Concrete examples include:
* State Res v3, which hopefully should have algorithmic improvements to perf
* State storage, addressing the long standing diskspace consumption problem for state snapshots
* Finishing faster room joins so they are actually fast
* Shared retry hints on federation, to stop wasting time trying to talk to dead servers
* Better than full mesh federation, so small servers can participate in big rooms without melting.
EDIT: to spell it out, as it’s been misunderstood: Fixing these issues will likely happen directly in FOSS Synapse (assuming there’s any $ to work on them at all).
Meanwhile, FOSS Synapse already has Rust as Python codepaths and has done for years, and that will only increase over time. Only stuff for making workers scale to handle hundreds of thousand concurrent users will remain proprietary for now.
Dendrite was meant to be the next big thing, but we (obviously) didn’t have enough $ to work on both it and Synapse. So we focused exclusively on Synapse as of end of Dec 2023, and Dendrite is currently progressing on a best-effort (ie not funded work) basis.
> It feels like element is often jumping on new things like big rewrites such as element X instead of improving the existing products.
Well, Dendrite was a big rewrite like that. Which is why we’ve ended up improving Synapse instead (both FOSS and the new rust workers).
Many of the issues you mention though are real dealbreakers for those trying to use this as a private user. It's really a big adoption barrier not being able to join big rooms without the server 'melting'. Those rooms are big because they have a lot to offer. Those of us promoting matrix as a next gen truly free and federated platform have always expected these to be fixed. It's just not really fit for purpose without those fixes.
It doesn't inspire confidence that we have to wait for this to 'trickle down' to the free version.
And ok yeah I think it's a good idea to kill concurrent product development that does the same thing. As long as it makes the remaining product better.
So there's also a Rust version of FOSS Synapse? I wasn't aware of that. Even the official blog post speaks only of python for the community version.
> By making optimisations that primarily support massive servers proprietary (for now), the $ can hopefully then fund features and maintenance of core FOSS Synapse
Your own blog post about the pro version (and the one about forking synapse) basically said that you wouldn't be working on the community version at all anymore? Unless I misunderstood. But my takeaway from this is 'it's a dead duck, it's time to pay up'. Which is a bit worrying as this is the kind of price only viable for large corporations.
You’ve totally misunderstood me - probably my fault; sorry.
There is no trickle-down happening here: *these issues will be fixed directly in FOSS synapse, which is the core project*. They are nothing to do with rust worker implementations in Synapse Pro, and FOSS will get them first. The only reason they haven’t been fixed before is due to the freerider nightmare meaning there hasn’t been $ to fund the work.
FOSS Synapse has had Rust in it for years now: https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/tree/develop/rust/src
> Your own blog post about the pro version (and the one about forking synapse) basically said that you wouldn't be working on the community version at all anymore?
WHAT?! It’s the opposite! We’re trying to fund the FOSS dev!! Where did it say that?!
Ok sorry for misunderstanding you. I'm glad those will be fixed and in the FOSS implementation <3 I thought this might happen only if things work out with the pro version first.
> WHAT?! It’s the opposite! We’re trying to fund the FOSS dev!! Where did it say that?!
Ah sorry it looks like I also misunderstood this blog post from 2023: https://matrix.org/blog/2023/11/06/future-of-synapse-dendrit...
I thought the community version was left for the community to maintain when it was forked. Especially because the foundation said they wouldn't be able to fund further development.
But I see now that it just meant that element would become the official host for synapse.
With the other blog post (the recent one about synapse pro) it just goes into so much detail about the shortcomings of the community version that it kinda implies they won't be fixed. After all, if that were the case one could just wait and the problem would solve itself.
But I apologise for drawing the wrong conclusions and arguing for them here.
I do really understand you're in a difficult position. And I don't have a solution either.
np, thanks for listening to my explanation and for the apology - sorry on my side for yelling.
i’m terrified now that the various blog posts haven’t been clear enough about the plan though - seems like we should have made it much clearer that FOSS synapse is still the primary project, and everything will happen there first (other than optimisations to support massive scalability)
"It's not exactly making me feel valued as a community member"
Neither is not getting paid for work/services. If one works hard on things and can't pay their bills, that's unsustainable. Why is developer time worth nothing to other developers? If you can write it and host it, do it. If you can't, and the folks that can charge for it, hand over your credit card so they can continue to do it. Or watch it die when they have to abandon it to make a living writing code for someone that will pay for it I guess.
No one owes us their time and effort for nothing.
I do support many FOSS projects. Obviously I can't provide the kind of funding that element is looking for. And that's really where it rubs, none of us in the community can. It's their choice to position this as a massive enterprise level solution.
It looks like they have a 5 and 10€/user/month tier. While that is not insignificant it also isnt that much if you really care about it.
It does not seem to me like the only choice is either FOSS or massive enterprise 5-figures/year here - what am I missing?
Can you actually buy that for a handful of seats? All the benefits they're touting apply only to massive installations. So it sounds to me that they wouldn't be interested in selling this to home users. They'll probably refer you to element one or the community version.
But I have not asked, that's true.
Yea I am also not that familiar with the different editions that are available and the whole ecosystem is confusing to me with matrix/element/dendrite/synapse etc.
I feel like though they would have some accessible paid plan for “smaller” users that want to support the development of the project long term - I believe this is the most sustainable way to build complex “big” FOSS projects - apart from having someone sacrifice themselves for the greater good I guess
Yeah, as a past contributor and long-running homeserver admin I feel pretty rugpulled here. This violates the expectations set in past communications. Synapse was something very different to Element.
(This would at least for me have had a very different taste and reception if the private for-profit alternative would have been done under a different branding than "Synapse Pro" and not hijacking matrix.org community channels to promote it. They don't seem to be able to keep their hats and chairs properly separated)
Dendrite was officially cancelled late last year. The repo was archived.
https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite
It continues to be developed by matrix https://github.com/element-hq/dendrite
No, not cancelled. Just not being developed with dayjob funding currently (as there is none). This isn’t the first time it’s been in that state, and it returned before: https://github.com/element-hq/dendrite/graphs/contributors shows rumours of its death are exaggerated. But it’s certainly stuck evolving on a best effort basis for now (thanks to its old team working on it in their free time, basically).
Oh thanks I missed that. I thought it was still stuck in its forever 'nearing feature complete' status :)
Edit: oh ok it's still alive but just not very active. That's ok. I think synapse is fine as long as the long-standing issues would be fixed. Like big federated rooms.
Perhaps this should point instead to the actual blog post this link references: https://element.io/blog/scaling-to-millions-of-users-require...
So matrix is commercialized now and the "real" software version is as expensive as Slack/Rocket? That's really disappointing...
Matrix is an open protocol and is 100% open. Synapse is a server implementation of Matrix and is open source under AGPL.
Synapse Pro is some alternative new worker implementations for Synapse designed to let enormous deployments scale rather than run out of headroom. Those happen to be proprietary.
FOSS Synapse is still the same project, and the main “real” project, and is still FOSS, same as it ever was.
Is there an alternative? Can you set up your own server and it's free (as in beer)?
Yes. The article is about how a particular open source Matrix server implementation isn't suitable for millions of simultaneous users, and you should pay for the non-open-source version.
But if you are merely handling tens of thousands of users, no problem. And if you have the budget to handle millions of users, maybe you have the budget to pay development as well as operations staff?
Side note: why do people still say free as in beer? Do people not assume free automatically means price, unless there’s a qualifier?
Within the programmer circle, "free software" implies FOSS, which is something more than just no-cost. A normie would assume free in cost though.
But the world is made up of normies and has no idea about the free software movement.
And I believe the free software movement is lamenting that?
Maybe clear communication would work better? Use words in a meaning, people understand intuitivly?
the world using made up of normies, but hacker news isn't. so here a clarification is absolutely necessary.
and which english word would you suggest intuitively communicates the meaning of free as in free to modify and share? there isn't one because the concept itself is unfamiliar to most people.
Are you complaining because the phrase "free as in beer" is too clear? I don't understand your position at all.
A standard XMPP server could be an alternative. Apparently WhatsApp (~2 billion users) use a fork of ejabberd as their backend.
Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook should be required to integrate XMPP into their messaging products.
Matrix is a cool idea but we now have like 1 server implementation that isn't somewhat gimpy, and its closed source... XMPP is much more compelling.
Element have a perfectly good implementation written in Go called Dendrite. I run it. It's good.
But support is deprioritised in favour of Synapse (Python).
Moving the goalposts with Synapse does not rejuvenate Synspse, it creates a fragmented system.
Get used to being boring. I am not moving to an ever centralised Synapse only ecosystem - a single implementation is not a federated protocol. That the new Element mobile client only supports Synapse was a huge red flag.
If diversity in implementation is not encouraged with action I'm back to XMPP (+ Jitsi).
This is incredibly disappointing to me.
Performance has always been one of the most glaring issues with using Matrix. The article seems to be intentionally obfuscating the fact that performance and scalability issues stem from the activity a server participates in rather than just the number of users it has. If you're in a rather large room with hundreds of members and it's constantly active, you'll quickly notice your server struggling to keep up.
As a Matrix user, I feel like I'm being rug-pulled because Element HQ decided to gatekeep their solution to this problem that has plagued the community for more than half a decade.
No, you have this completely wrong.
The reason that small servers struggle today is not because their workers are written mainly in Python rather than Rust. Hell, they typically don’t run workers at all. The slowness comes from state res being slow algorithmically; state storage being slow and inefficient; wasting time trying to talk to dead servers; no support for “thin nodes” but always doing full mesh federation; the fact faster room joins never got finished; etc etc.
ALL of this would get fixed on FOSS Synapse. The point of Synapse Pro is to try to get $ to actually fund that work. Only massive-scalability stuff is in scope for Synapse Pro: all other features, perf optimisations, maintenance, security work etc will land in FOSS Synapse as it has for the last 10 years. Assuming that this gambit works and there’s any $ to fund it, of course.
Thanks Matthew for reassuring that FOSS Synapse isn't getting left behind. I really do want Matrix to succeed and get the funding it really needs. I'm aware it's been a long-standing issue.
My voice is mostly coming from the perspective of someone who has tried repeatedly to bring friends and family to Matrix but every time the experience is subpar. It's frustrating because most of the problems they experienced (including performance) have been known about and complained about for a long time.
Maybe the messaging in the article was a little off. The "attack" it makes on FOSS Synapse reads to me like it will never get the fixes it needs to make using Matrix more approachable to new users.
Whatever you think a “rug pull” is, this ain’t it.
FOSS owes you literally nothing. Go build what you want for yourself, geez. Oh, and feel free to give it away to the world… OR NOT!
No ok but then let's drop matrix completely as the "next-gen" IRC / FOSS collaboration platform.
There's a lot of moral support and ecosystem gain (eg bridges) from the community. Why bother with that anymore if we're just getting the "broken implementation"?
I think part of the issue here is that they're trying to compete with the enterprise IM solutions. That doesn't really work as the others are way better funded and have benefits that element can't deliver (such as the wide Microsoft M365 + EntraID ecosystem). A Microsoft shop is never ever going to choose this over teams (horrible as the latter is).
> Why bother with that anymore if we're just getting the "broken implementation"?
You’re not. All work (other than stuff which primarily benefits scalability for enormous deployments) should land on FOSS Synapse - particularly core performance improvements like faster state res. This is just trying to fund it.
And no, this is not us trying to compete with Teams - this is us trying to force big Matrix deployments to actually route $ to Element to fund upstream dev, rather than use System Integrators who win the big tenders and then mysteriously fail to route any $ to us.
Nation scale is Synapse “Pro”. Next level is multi-nation scale at “Pro+”. Then global scale version available at “Pro Max”.
Universe scale at Synapse “Event Horizon”
edit: what’s to stop community from re-implementing the worker component in rust and contributing it to the “pro” version?
Matrix have always been suspect.
Disappointed but not surprised.
In short they are saying that if the nation states hadn't opted to use Matrix they would never have bothered developing this Rust version, which only shows that they were never sincere about developing a performant open source version, not to mention their involvement with some suspect Israeli comms companies and the phone home agendas.
Interesting question - will their "nation state" level customers have the right to inspect the source and make changes to it?
Just waiting to have this post flagged.
So FOSS is essentially a Marketing tool for Matrix?
Matrix is an open protocol published by a non-profit foundation. It has always had both FOSS (eg Element) and proprietary (eg Beeper) implementations.
You sound like you are getting Element mixed up with Matrix. Element releases almost all of its implementations as FOSS, and to help Matrix grow, will make those as good as possible for average server sizes. It’s only gigantic servers which actually require the new proprietary modules. Given everyone who uses FOSS Synapse can keep doing so, and given FOSS Synapse dev should hopefully improve and accelerate if actually funded by $ from Synapse Pro, it’s not fair to say that “FOSS is essentially a marketing tool for Element”
Isn’t that true for most/all corporate FOSS projects? I don’t think there are many for-profit companies who have some kind of idealistic vision of FOSS. It’s always part of the business model. Would be weird otherwise.