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Comment by benatkin | Hacker News Reader

Well, I haven't heard of any and your comment doesn't help me to find any. I had heard of Cinny but currently I am assessing Element.

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The whole point of matrix, though, is that it’s an open protocol. If Element were proprietary, that wouldn’t be the same sort of problem as we have with discord/slack because anyone could just implement the protocol according to the specs and be an equal participant at the table.

This is a list of public home server instances: https://joinmatrix.org/servers/

Great, thanks. I didn't think to look there since a Matrix homeserver is a different thing, but that shows a bunch of self-hosted Element instances!

matrix.org has a listing of clients. There are plenty if you only need basic features, but Element is the only feature-mostly-complete client.

I had to look up each of them. This looks to be the only one that is based on Element:

https://schildi.chat/

Is it a requirement that you use an Element-based client?

No, but since Element led by some of the same people as Matrix, I want to observe the type of open core project it is. Is it more like GitLab or more like Supabase? GitLab has a lot of help for self-hosting, while with Supabase if you want to run its components on your own it's up to you.

Unlike GitLab, Matrix is not open core, and so isn't Element or Synapse, they properly and fully open source.

Also, Element is just some JavaScript in your browser or electron shell, there's no need to self-host it really, although you can (just put some HTML+CSS+JS up on a webserver) — you want to self-host Synapse, and that's trivial to do (there's a Debian package, a Docker image and so on).

Scalar (the integration manager) is not open source [1] (though there was some effort to reverse-engineer its protocol [2]); and some of their anti-abuse scripts aren't public [3]

[1] https://github.com/vector-im/element-meta/issues/260

[2] https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-dimension/blob/master/do...

[3] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues/557

> Matrix is not open core

I'm comparing Element.

> and so isn't Element

It sure seems to be. Look at the red X's and green checkmarks in the comparison: https://element.io/pricing There are different opinions on what Open Core means though.

Some of their bridges (e.g. Teams bridge) aren't open source. But those are separate software projects. AFAIK synapse and element aren't open core but fully open source (with apache licensing).

This is in fact a bit of a problem wrt. funding: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/01/funding-matrix-via-the-ma...

I think that comparison is just heir hosted offerings, not what the software (open source code) supports.

https://github.com/vector-im/element-web

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