While unfortunate for consumers I get it. Usually consumer customers use more support than business ones while paying significantly less and element still has to make enough money to keep going.
Yeah, I hope Element manages to become sustainable. It feels like they are running out of funding from what they did in the last month.
I don’t see the reason we need a venture capital funded bloated protocol anyways. Just switch to XMPP. It’s much more lightweight and it’s the internet standard for instant messaging.
Let’s clear something up:
- Matrix is a free and open protocol.
- Element is one of several free and open source Matrix clients.
- Vector Limited is a company funding the development of the Element client, that also sells a Matrix homeserver.
- There are several other free and open source Matrix homeservers.
You DO NOT NEED to pay a dime to Vector Limited for a Matrix homeserver, or use the Element client.
Meanwhile, XMPP is a “built by committee” nightmare, with a committee that didn’t commit (pun intended) to basic features, leaving file transfer, audio, or video calls, to be defined as “protocol extensions” (aka: incompatible) by each client.
TL;DR: use Matrix, with the Element client or any other, leave Vector Ltd. for the businesses.
“protocol extensions” (aka: incompatible)
Reality shows that implementations can very well implement the same extensions. If you don’t use extremely outdated clients you will find they do have compatible file transfer and A/V calls. ActivityPub works the same way.
Meanwhile Matrix Ltd. cooks up a completely new, incompatible protocol instead of building upon existing internet standards.
There is no “Matrix Ltd.”, the Matrix protocol is being worked on by the “Matrix Foundation”, a UK CIC (kind of NGO), with adoption by French an German governments.
XMPP clients “appear” to have compatible file transfer and A/V calls… until you try using them and find out they sometimes lose bytes from one client to another, but not the other way around, sometimes calls only work one way, and so on. That’s the effect of not having a minimum common ground defined in the protocol spec.
The NGO is a decoy organization with exactly the same people (minus one) as the VC funded startup. Go look at the “core spec team” and find out which organization they belong to.
Your information on XMPP seems to be quite outdated. File transfer in XMPP is now mostly done by uploading the file via HTTP and sending the URL. Audio calls are done using WebRTC and work two ways.
But on the other side, existing customers don’t use much support, once everything is set and working, it’s all profit for them.
Kicking out customers equals to giving up money. I don’t think many of them would start paying double (from $3 per user to $5 per user) or more (you gonna pay for 20 users even if you have 10) instead of just renting a VPS and do it for free
I can assure you existing customers(non business) do still use a disproportionate amount of support. Things like feature requests, lost passwords, new user on boarding, any time anything doesn’t work as the user expects, etc
As for the finances here sure it gives up some income but will also free up a lot of time for someone who is currently doing support so they could focus on other things
Big deal, just self host in a VPS if you’re willing to pay $$$.
Don’t make the mistake though of self hosting (Dendrite) as it will just choke, in my case it was a single user instance subscribed to only a handful of channels but apparently that was too much for my server to load messages in any manner that would be considered quick.
I’ve self hosted several services at once on there but apparently Matrix is just too heavy too handle compared to other things.
