TL;DR: All Fyra Matrix rooms will be deleted and unbridged. Discord will become our sole communication medium from now on. We can't justify the maintenance burden and infrastructure cost to support a platform relatively few people used, built in an ecosystem veering towards unsustainability. (it's joever)
Why?
I don't intend this to be a comprehensive takedown of the Matrix project, ecosystem, or other actors. However, for the sake of transparency, I'll summarize our rationale (don't expect this to be polished or formal):
- Lack of usage. Not many people used the rooms/bridge in the first place. Additionally, most of those who did, also had accounts in the Fyra Discord server.
- Matrix was never good. Have you met a person who actually enjoyed using Matrix? Because, I haven't. This isn't to say that Matrix isn't more usable than other open alternatives, but that's a low bar. There's a reason why "Unable to decrypt message" is a common gag in the FOSS community. The promise of what Matrix could become, plus, being already more accessible than other open alternatives, was what kept me there. I'm willing to bet it's the same for many others. However, I've come to terms that these ambitions will not be realized, at least in the current direction, which brings us to....
- Poor governance. While I'm not actively involved in Matrix's ecosystem or governance, I've been watching from afar. I won't elaborate too much here, as I don't want to mischaracterize the situation, but personally, it doesn't inspire confidence.
One of the most worrying moments for me was when Element (the company) essentially took over the Synapse and Dendrite projects from the Matrix Foundation, relicensing them as AGPL (with a dual commercial license), and mandating a CLA for future contributions. This is especially worrying, considering Synapse's de facto role as the reference implementation for Matrix. - Spam/lack of moderation. Self-explanatory. For instance, a few days ago, a spam attack (of CSAM & gore), hit public rooms across the network, affecting projects like GNOME and KDE. Because of Matrix's lack of moderation tools, we can't effectively protect our communities, especially during severe events like these.
- Matrix's puppygirl era is over. Conduwuit, the homeserver software we used, is dead. With no other actively maintained and featureful option outside of Synapse, notorious for poorly performing, well... we're out of options. Performance isn't a theoretical issue either, our Synapse instance struggled on our relatively modest workload (wow, we're growing), which is why we migrated to Conduwuit in the first place. (Even Element agrees!) I would highly recommend reading June's (Conduwuit's primary maintainer, not our June) writing on the situation. (We seem to be in agreement in terms of the future of Matrix.)
Okay, but...
Isn't it hypocritical for a company invested and focused on libre software to be using a proprietary platform like Discord?
While we would prefer to use something libre, we also have to be pragmatic. For a growing community of our size, we need a platform that fits the bill. It so happens that's Discord. Network effect is also a major factor.
What about supporting alternative platform X (IRC, XMPP, etc...)
Ping me on our Discord, or shoot an email to [email protected]. We want to have options, assuming there's demand and the capacity to support them.
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