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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Matrix is a protocol. There's a lot of tooling and applications to be made around said protocol, plenty of which could be sold on on a license basis, support for enterprises etc.

Matrix has a fantastic B2B potential. It's just early.

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It should be mentioned that it also allows for distributed authentication providers (home servers). A very important feature and big tech strategy is not hiding this. But you can keep Google, Apple, Microsoft and similar completely out of the loop.

The name of the protocol is very badly chosen though.

Do you know if they have a mechanism for hosted servers with your own domain name yet? This feels like a big thing missing for wider enthusiast adoption.

To be honest, I am no expert on Matrix, but I thought you can just host your own server on your own domain. That was the base assumption for my comment and I hope that is correct. They have a server reference component (synapse) that you could host anywhere I think.

Right but maybe you don't want to host your own server, but do want your own domain. Like emails.

That's not possible yet, see

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/neilalexander/...

That's not possible yet, see this proposal

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/neilalexander/...

The proposal that you linked is all about portable identities, tied to public keys. Is that really necessary for Element to host a server on a user's domain?

I would have thought it would work just like outsourcing your web server or your email service. You generate a DNS name and point it at their IP address. Then they get a certificate and start serving traffic for your domain. Easy peasy.

Element's primary paid service is Element Matrix Services [1] which is exactly for that. They run a Matrix server for you, optionally on a domain that you provide.

[1]: https://ems.element.io/

Yeah, they've had that for a long time. I ran my own server on my own domain name a couple years ago or so.

That does not answer the question.

Exactly. The Matrix ecosystem is already used by governments in European countries and healthcare providers as well so that justifies the valuation of this fundraising round.

The enterprise potential for the Matrix ecosystem which includes Element is almost like what GitLab has done but for Git services and much more.

> The majority of the core team is now employed by Element, an independent company set up to hire the team and support Matrix's development. Other contributors are funded by their own employers or donate their own time to the project.

At least they are not fully reliant on donations and they have a solid way of making money.

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