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.
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.
Oh I doubt it, unless you have that person with vision to interpret the results of the usability testing and turn them into a single cohesive design.
Good UX comes from someone that has deeply internalized the problems a piece of software is solving for users and the constraints on those users. Most startups do this without usability testing by doing things like sales or customer support. Anyway, IME usability testing is not the bottleneck to good UI.
I don't disagree with you that you need to have a singe cohesive design vision based on solving for users. But I think that certainly usability testing can lead to even better results and is mostly constrained by cost.
But on the other hand, I think it's reasonable to hope that the "clear vision" for Matrix can largely be cribbed from all the other nigh-indistinguishable team chat apps like Slack, Discord, Mattermost, et al. In that case money to actually make the obvious fixes might be enough.
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft Teams already is already terrible UX, we have nowhere to go but up. Perhaps you are unaware, and if so, you should be thankful you don’t have to lose time using it. There are objectively better solutions available.
I'm in several Slack teams for non profits and professional orgs, Teams for a client or two, IRC and Matrix servers for digital archiving ops, Signal/WhatsApp/GroupMe/Telegram groups, etc. I have been in tech for 25+ years, I am familiar with the extremes. You are right, things can be bad, that is the point of systems engineering: to drive directionally towards continual improvement. Success is never assured, but throwing our hands up and giving up is not reasonable. Make a plan, work the plan. Default to action. Work is hard.
I recommend "Thinking in Systems" by Donella H. Meadows (ISBN13 9781603580557) on this topic [1]. It's ~$10 on Amazon as of this comment, and the PDF is easy to find with a quick web search.
Care to give me an example to satisfy my morbid curiosity? I have used a lot of really bad chat clients over the year and Microsft's rewritten Skype is one of only a handful worse than Teams. Teams is not the worst but it is on my top 3 or 5 worst of the 30+ chat clients I have used. I have heard Lynk also was really bad but I never used it. Microsoft certainly has some of the worst.
Element is bad but it is way better than Teams from my experience.
Matrix is so much worse than Team it will make your head spin. It suffers from design by committee to an unbelievable extent, and its various end-to-end security features are wonderful from a privacy standpoint but make things much much more complicated.
I've used both and written code to integrate into both. You never have to worry about, for example, losing access to all previous messages in your Teams channels if you get a new phone.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
> 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) 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) 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/, 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) 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
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), finishing the Element Web rework, and cough custom emoji). I'm hopeful we'll get here in the end :)
yes, Element is venture-funded, which is where much of the money came to build all this in the first place - see the bottom of https://element.io/en/about.
Stuff like this is why I consider uBlock Origin to be the bare minimum security software for going on the web. The amount of 3rd party scripts running on most pages, constantly leaking data to everybody listening, is just mind boggling.
It's treating a symptom rather than a disease, but what else can we do?
I also have taken to using adguard home on the router. It blocks 15 or 20 percent of all my traffic. It's quite scary how bad the tracking and other nasties has become.
You should try some good homemade lutefisk. No, not just lutefisk, that's like judging burgers by only eating the patty. Rather with all the accoutrements: fried bacon, pea stew, boiled cherry potatoes, and white sauce.
Standing on the breaks frequently is how you end up with warped rotors, so there's some nuance here. Once in a while will stop rust and guck building up, frequently and you're replacing the discs early.
They work best for things that a human has to move, and since a good chunk of humans (at least in US/CA) have iPhones, the movement of the physical thing will be tracked by an iPhone fairly reliably. Any time the critter is outside the range of an i-device picking it up the location will be stale. There isn't really a way around that, since GPS/5G radios are a lot more power hungry than the occasional bluetooth pings an airtag broadcasts.
Isn't massive tech conglomerates locking people into their ecosystems how we got here in the first place? The quest to replace US with EU products is really just treating symptoms of the problems that tech has created in the past 2-3 decades.
Yes, but the cost-to-switch is more important right now than the details, the bigger fear I have is that if such an EU alternative is successful that the US incumbents will swoop in and buy it and then you're back to square 1. That has happened quite a few times already.
> the bigger fear I have is that if such an EU alternative is successful that the US incumbents will swoop in and buy it
That's usually what happens indeed. There is a lot of great tech coming from [the rest of the world] and being bought by the US.
> the cost-to-switch is more important right now than the details
I kinda disagree there. The lack of competition is the problem today. If, instead of AWS, there were 50 services all over the world and companies were distributed amongst them, then it would be much less of a problem. The problem right now is that the US can bully entire countries because those countries 100% rely on US services.
Instead of building a European replacement for AWS, I would like to see open standards allowing companies to easily switch, and different providers competing behing those standards. Or even better: companies could even mix the services: say "I want my backups replicated between this French company and this Croatian one".
There is in France. They have a government investment arm that will invest relatively small amounts but with a string attached: a veto on any majority acquisition. This was used for instance to block the takeover of Dailymotion by Yahoo iirc.
It's a double edged sword: it may help in some cases but it hurts the investment scene overall because an exit to the USA is what most EU investors dream about because their returns overall are pretty crappy. Fragmented markets are a lot harder for investors than uniform ones.
There was absolutely nothing about your comment that indicated this intent. Open questions can be asked for discussion, not closed yes/no factual questions with a singular, well-known answer.
I'm not convinced. If a company owner can get rich by selling their company to the devil himself, they will rationalise it so well that the employees will think it's helping humanity.
And the EU governments will be advertising it.. already happened in Greece… few companies with strong core tech were bought by Microsoft and the gov was “so happy” for the “success story”.
That's not as simple as it may seem. I've been running my own mailserver on an alternate domain for decades now and it is one thing to be receiving mail there but to send it is a nightmare. Google, Microsoft etc have made it all but impossible to get through their anti-spam measures to the point that they reject tons of perfectly good mail.
Why not? I said "get your own domain", not "self-host your server". You are the one saying that it doesn't work so well to self-host your server, I never asked about it.
In theory yes, in practice the messages from your random domain way too often end up in spam for Gmail and Outlook users, if they get delivered at all.
The task of governments is to stop this. Just like how Musk is prohibited from buying EasyJet.
Do you think China wouldn't have bought ASML if Europe would let them? They would've done so a decade ago. The exact same reasoning now needs to be applied to the likes of OVHCloud.
Exchange online is down down. All the MX records are returning SERVFAIL, so something has gone quite badly on MS's side. It could be load shedding, or their authoritative DNS has blown up.
IMAP seems to also be having some sort of problem... Thunderbird has been stuck at "Looking up outlook.office365.com..." for a while.
American trade policy has gone so far in the direction of Mercantilism that both the Neoliberal and the Keynesian economists can agree on something. That's not a good thing.
Keynsian economists are in favour of reducing global imbalances. While tariffs are a crude and disruptive tool to achieve it, the US ultimately can unilaterally close the gap.
What is misleading is labeling a global system marked by large, persistent imbalances as benign or indicative of "free trade". A healthy free trade system should have balanced trade, and the reasons that are not are unfortunately the fault of surplus nations like China or the EU. I know, its unintuitive, but going back to Bretton Woods to IMF analysis will back this point.
P.S if one wants to note the grocery shop analogy, a better analogy is that if you count up all your transactions, your income should exceed your spending, or else you're probably in trouble. That's roughly the problem here, but made more complex with the shenanigans of the US dollar.
Mercantilism is bad in itself, but the unpredictably is another special factor, leading to lower business confidence and lower investment. Why would anyone do anything when the rug might get pulled? Better to save and wait a few years. It's no surprise the US is seeing weak manufacturing investment.
I don't think anybody would earnestly argue that anything is "completely safe" because that's not how risk management works.
The exhaust of 250 years of fossil fuel energy production is stored in your lungs and bloodstream. It kills five million people every year. As bad as some of the nuclear accidents have been, it's minuscule compared to what happens on a daily basis in the oil/gas/coal industry.
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