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.
> 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.
Element Software SARL and Element Software GmbH however are not. In practice I believe it's Element Software GmbH providing the European Commission deployment of ESS. (Both are owned by the UK topco, but at the current rate we might flip one of them to be the topco instead).
It's been more than a year, and Element X does honestly look a lot better. But it's been mobile-only for years. And if I'm correct, the desktop/web clients still require you to use embedded Jitsi. And what about non-Element clients?
As a user, I just need stuff like this to be standard, and work for every participant regardless of what client they use.
Element Desktop/Web (and Element X) use Element Call for proper encrypted group VoIP/Video these days rather than Jitsi - since Sept 2024. Meanwhile we're busy upgrading Element Web to use the same rust-sdk engine as Element X (although this will take a year or so).
In terms of non-Element clients... I can't really speak for them, but I hear really good things about Cinny for folks who want a more Discord-like experience on desktop, and we livecoded an Element Call integration for it at the Matrix Conference in October (hopefully it merged). I think FluffyChat also may support the new MatrixRTC calling too.
Element X is in some cases still a downgrade from Element. For instance there doesn't seem to be a way to create local key backups anymore. Also, that calls between Element and Element X are incompatible means both apps need to be installed in order to receive calls from all contacts.
Still, I love Matrix and hope that these issues will be resolved in time.
Manually importing/exporting keybackups is on the todo list (albeit towards the bottom). Supporting legacy calls is not (unless someone contributes it); the intention is to converge asap on native Matrix group calls.
Element’s topco may be UK based for now, but the vast majority of our business and footprint is in the EU - https://element.io/en/about. All but one of our mobile app team is in the EU for instance (and when we started, the UK was too :|)
If you work with lots of other entities who want full control over their own comms (e.g. other governments, other departments, other EU entities like European Parliament and Council, the UN, NATO, etc) then decentralisation or federation is a big deal.
In the public sector it's basically a requirement: it's bananas if your country's critical infrastructure ends up dependent on some a product effectively controlled by another country (e.g. Teams) - and you obviously want to be able to communicate with other govt entities rather than being stuck in an island.
Then it's a natural extension to the private sector - although for now, it feels more folks are on the "nobody got sacked for using Teams" train.
Matrix is a decentralised encrypted chat protocol on which you could build something like Zulip, except decentralised and end-to-end encrypted.
Element is the actual app being trialled here, which feels more like Slack and/or Signal than Zulip. The point is that you get something you can selfhost while also interoperating with other deployments… while also encrypting the data end-to-end with Signal protocol.
I'm sure you could do some of Zulip's features on top of Matrix.
But for what it's worth, as Zulip's lead developer, every time I'm looked at whether we could have built Zulip on top of Matrix, it just feels impossible to me. And a big part of it is the architectural decisions Matrix made to support a decentralized E2EE social network, which are not required for a self-contained chat system like Zulip or Slack (which can still be bridged with other chat systems). Permissions enforcement, performance, and lots of other details really benefit from the more focused goal, where we've explicitly decided we're not building a generic distributed network architecture and are not competing with WhatsApp.
That said, I think it's great that we have multiple OSS chat systems with different strategies that are targeting different collections of niches!
I will never understand why so many organizations entrusted the communications fabric of their organization to Microsoft and SalesForce Cloud services over the last decade. If an organization can succeed in escaping Teams or Slack to Element/Matrix, that's great, even if it's a use case where Zulip would be a better end-user experience for their requirements.
Federation can feel like "just a feature" but the E2E encryption (also in group chats) is a reason for Matrix to exist and a big reason why it's so slow.
"Slow" in what sense? Development? Because I self host a Conduit server and I don't ever notice messages being slow. It would be hard to notice anyway, as in a group chat people usually take some time to type in their responses.
The sync between large groups used to be slow because of amount of data, but Element X and "sliding windows" were rolled out to help with it.
AFAIK, the public Matrix server used to be slow because of a heavy load (I think), but on my self-hosted instance that's not a problem at all.
The experience of using Matrix involves a lot of sluggishness at various points in the client - waiting to decrypt messages or properly sync keys, waiting to join a room or for room search to load - these are the things that have been salient to me using multiple matrix clients with a freshly-spun-up server within the past month.
I more mindfully played a bit with my Element (web UI), and Element X (Android), and while there might something to it, and I suspect the e2e encrypted data model will always lead to some extra work required. Element seems a bit sluggish. However Element X on my Android seems butter smooth.
And event the slower Element seems far better than Discord that I'm forced to use, where I can't even scroll history without the whole thing stuttering.
I hope that at some point a focus of the Matrix project will become why this isn’t being done. A better developer experience would supercharge the ecosystem, IMO.
Matrix should be the default for anyone building a chat app, but for some reason it’s not.
Speaking as the CEO/CTO of Element... the classic Element apps on mobile were buggy, thanks to being a ~10 year old codebase with no shared code between platforms and effectively the 1st generation Matrix client. Which is why we replaced them over the last few years with Element X, with all the heavy lifting shared between iOS & Android via matrix-rust-sdk (effectively a 3rd gen Matrix SDK).
That said, 70% of our users haven't got the memo yet - we'll do a hard-upgrade when the remaining missing features in Element X (Spaces & Threads) are fully out of Labs.
Meanwhile, Element Web is lagging behind Element X - but we're now in the middle of an incremental in-place upgrade (not a big-bang rewrite, thank goodness) to use matrix-rust-sdk - see our talk from FOSDEM last Sunday for the details: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/DZJVTS-an-element-web...
> That said, 70% of our users haven't got the memo yet - we'll do a hard-upgrade when the remaining missing features in Element X (Spaces & Threads) are fully out of Labs.
This isn't users not getting the memo yet, this is users being faced with an unfortunate choice between a buggy, slow client and a new client that doesn't implement important functionality like Spaces and Threads.
Can i ask why is Element Classic even available on the Google Play Store? If you want people to move away from this?
I've only started my Matrix journey, in the form of writing bots using the matrix Python library. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, as the Matrix protocol could be really impactful.
When Element X first launched, the goal was for it to cover the personal messenger use case. This worked just fine for some people, but for many, feature parity with the old apps and parity with the web experience was a hard blocker.
Both Spaces and Threads are about to land, and there are other lower-profile features that also need rounding out. We would expect full parity by April this year. At which point migration should be an obvious choice.
I’m excited to watch the talk. I’m generally critical of Matrix, but that’s because I want it to succeed. Lately I find you’ve been doing a lot of things right, so I hope you keep going!
I assumed it was because people here are constantly telling Arathorn that Element (not ElementX) is slow and buggy, and that when they last tried the default server (circa 2019 or so) is was buggy and full of rough edges
He's (in my mind) always positive, open, and willing to admit the shortcomings of the platform he shephards... but damn does he deal with a lot of undeserved criticism (and deserved criticism, where applicable)
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