[Arathorn]

Firstly, thank you for paying to support the Foundation for so long and for sticking with Matrix & Synapse.

> It's been quite a while since we've seen a new user-facing feature

I'm not sure this is true, as you say yourself in the following paragraphs. On the Element side, we shipped Element X as the much-needed rewrite of the old Element apps. On the Matrix side, Matrix 2.0 is a step change in terms of instant sync/login/launch, QR login, native-OIDC, invisible encryption, etc. From an end-user perspective, my experience of Matrix has improved unrecognisably in the last year. I can see how this might feel different if you're stuck on the old stack.

> All in all, it does not feel like the things I want, and (assuming I'm not a completely unusual case) that the community wants, are high priority for the Element team

We've tried to prioritise usability, stability and performance over everything - including features. I'm sorry if this doesn't match your needs though.

> They're spending what budget they do have on refactors like MAS, which don't seem to impact usability.

Some of the usability improvements that MAS provides are:

* 2FA and MFA (which is frankly embarrassing that we didn't have before)

* QR login (for parity with Discord/WhatsApp/Signal "just scan this QR code to login")

* Refresh tokens, so that leaked access tokens expire rapidly

* Integration with password managers

* Password reset flows which work on all clients (e.g. password reset doesn't exist on the legacy Element mobile apps)

* Huge security improvements by actually following a mature auth standard (OIDC) rather than making up our own one. We've had some near misses on the old auth system for failure modes which OIDC fixed years ago.

> They spend time and effort supporting new features which make Element X faster (Sliding Sync) but have not yet implemented all the core functionality (Spaces) so there's not much reason to move.

Spaces is already there on the SchildiChat Next fork of Element X Android. We'll add it to Element X Android later in the year - but it's been delayed as the paying customers tend not to care that much about spaces (they just want a WhatsApp clone).

> This announcement, and that RAM graph which I will never see on my own server, makes me confident in discontinuing my support.

The hope is that the $ from Synapse Pro allows us to fund FOSS Synapse dev to improve the core perf & resource usage of FOSS Synapse - which in turn will reduce the RAM usage for everyone. (But massive-scale scalability will remain paywalled for now.)

To be clear: the reason small Synapse servers are slow is NOTHING to do with the workers being written in Python rather than Rust. We will use $ from Synapse Pro to speed up Synapse (and Matrix, at the protocol level) for everyone.

> I do not feel like Matrix/Element values its community any more.

Sorry. If we didn't value the community I wouldn't be sitting on HN trying to explain why we've done this. Thanks again for supporting over the years.

[s1mplicissimus]

i ran a synapse instance for a couple years for private purposes, but at this point the ecosystem seems kinda captured by element. self hosting is a pain. in some places it's really hard to tell that mistakes in good faith were made or it's just intentionally complicated to keep "normal" people from running their own instance. Especially the whole worker setup was subject to change multiple times and broke my instance every. single. time. couple that with sparse, out of date documentation and the "pro edition" they now announced suddenly makes a lot of sense (from their perspective at least)

- They own Element, the by far most used client

- They own Synapse, the by far most used server

- They own dendrite, the only matrix server so far that even comes close to spec adherance with synapse, which has been strangled (as evidenced by the last release almost half a year ago [3])

Because everyone is running synapse, everyone needs to keep running synapse or risk losing compatibility with the federation.

This is not what the sales brochure for matrix read like. Like, at all.

Do y'all believe it's random chance that the official synapse docker-compose does not come with async workers? [1]

And now check out the terrible setup process for setting up the whole "workers magic" (which, mind you, is unavoidable the moment you have some bigger rooms joined) [2] - Like who on this godforsaken planet considers this valid even for 2022? Pair that with how easy to handle the base documentation is and things start to smell. They have the stench of trying to artificially create a moot by making it "too hard for non-pros".

I understand synapse and dendrite development need funding, but this is not the way to go. All good will towards Element as a steward of matrix I had is completely eroded by now and I assume that will be the case for many others too. Forks are bound to happen at this point and I'm looking forward to the ecosystem become more diverse again.

Oh, and did you know the Matrix Foundation is infact a UK based Inc. controlled by 5 people in 5 companies, of which 4 companies are residing at the same address [4] and the fifth has an odd interest in NFTs and other BS?

[1] https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/develop/contrib/d...

[2] https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/latest/workers.html - note how this page is already marked as deprecated. Prepare for it to vanish altogether soon. You are not supposed to set up workers, you are supposed to beg element to run a decent matrix server

[3] https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite

[4] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...