The "portable Matrix" idea is currently nicknamed Tachyon, and is earlier stage at this point, although I did a Matrix Live about it a few months back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc7yfec3iIQ

Speaking as the CTO at Element (and proj lead for Matrix), i feel like i've spent a bit too much time coming to chat about Matrix on HN over the years ;)

That said, I agree that Bluesky is doing well in terms of breaking through into mainstream awareness - much more so than Matrix (although obviously big-world-social-media is something of a different beast to distributed-instant-messaging).

The reason Matrix hasn't done better here is primarily economic: we spent too much time and money building out Matrix for everyone in the early days... and not enough time focusing on building either consumer (as Bluesky has) or enterprise or government specialised products. We then got traction at Element on the government side of things (https://element.io/en/matrix-in-europe etc) as it turns out governments love their digital sovereign communications - which in turn meant that in order to get sustainable and survive we had to focus hard on building stuff for that market. Now, ideally the stuff which works for Govt would work for mainstream too (after all, we're generally competing with Signal and WhatsApp, which are of course mainstream apps) - but in practice it has been hard to get that balance right. You can see my TED Talk FOSDEM 2025 talk about the road to mainstream matrix here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkCKhP1jxdk

Meanwhile, the plan on Matrix is to get to profitability via Govtech and then invest the money back into improving Element (and Matrix) so it also works well for mainstream usage - so hopefully we'll get back on the radar then. It's a long haul though. Meanwhile, kudos to Bluesky for getting to focus on the mainstream use case; I'm jealous, and I hope they find a good sustainability model!

* Projection (it seems to love to describe one data structure as a projection of another)

* Strand (if some data gets isolated/stuck, it's "on a strand" or simply "a strand")

* Load-bearing (obviously)

* Frontier (the leaf on a tree)

* Quiescence (waiting for an algorithm to settle - I guess this one is legit)

* Honest (obviously)

* Residuals (any kind of data which hasn't been consumed by an algorithm)

* Rescission (something which has been rescinded; rather than saying "a rescinded offer" it enthusiastically calls it A Rescission!)

* Supersession (it's not a session which is a superset of another session... it's the word supercession; something that supercedes; similar to preferring the participle form of rescind).

I wonder how much of this is due to it mirroring proximate things to my code's own weird vocab though.

My favourite so far has been that I accused it at one point of playing whackamole by patching issues rather than getting to the bottom of a problem, and a few hours later it started to say things like "and i found mole 2 in CI" etc. For one minute I thought it was talking about the avogadro constant or backdoors or something until I realised it had committed to start calling newly discovered bugs 'moles' in its ongoing game of whackamole...

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-content-scanner

https://github.com/element-hq/matrix-content-scanner-python

etc.

This is nothing to do with ChatControl or Online Safety Act where you can see our position here:

https://element.io/blog/the-online-safety-bill-an-attack-on-...

Meanwhile the rest of Europe (and much of the rest of Germany) seems to have converged on Matrix as a genuine open standard with various different commercial vendors (Element, Rocket Chat, Famedly, connect2x etc), avoiding vendor lock and so giving actual digital sovereignty: https://element.io/matrix-in-europe

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47868846

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

(There are still a few scenarios where e.g. if you delete your identity keys by logging out of all your clients, you may get "expected" decryption errors. We're still working on those.)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47310169

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

Auth for clients is also specified in the spec - there is some scope for homeservers to freestyle, but nowadays they have to implement OIDC: https://spec.matrix.org/latest/client-server-api/#client-aut...

Whereas I literally select count(*)'d from the destinations table on matrix.org, filtered on servers which had been federating in the last week(?) in order to get the specific stats above. (And then count(*) of all time for the 150K figure).

The problem is more that Element team is seriously stretched (particularly after the various misadventures outlined here: https://youtu.be/lkCKhP1jxdk?t=740) - so even if there was a pot of money to (say) merge custom emoji PRs... the team is more than overloaded already with commitments to folks like NATO and the UN. Meanwhile, onboarding new folks and figuring out how to do the Discordy features and launch a separately Discordy app under a Discordy server would also be a major distraction from ensuring Element gets sustainable by selling govtech messaging solutions.

So, we're caught in a catch-22 for now. One solution would be for other projects to build Discordy solutions on top of Matrix (like Cinny or Commet), or fork Element to be more Discordy (and run their own crowdfunders, perhaps in conjunction with The Matrix Foundation). Otherwise, we have to wait for Element to get sustainable via govtech work so it can eventually think about diversifying back into consumer apps.