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Comment by 0xC0ncord | Hacker News Reader

This is incredibly disappointing to me.

Performance has always been one of the most glaring issues with using Matrix. The article seems to be intentionally obfuscating the fact that performance and scalability issues stem from the activity a server participates in rather than just the number of users it has. If you're in a rather large room with hundreds of members and it's constantly active, you'll quickly notice your server struggling to keep up.

As a Matrix user, I feel like I'm being rug-pulled because Element HQ decided to gatekeep their solution to this problem that has plagued the community for more than half a decade.

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No, you have this completely wrong.

The reason that small servers struggle today is not because their workers are written mainly in Python rather than Rust. Hell, they typically don’t run workers at all. The slowness comes from state res being slow algorithmically; state storage being slow and inefficient; wasting time trying to talk to dead servers; no support for “thin nodes” but always doing full mesh federation; the fact faster room joins never got finished; etc etc.

ALL of this would get fixed on FOSS Synapse. The point of Synapse Pro is to try to get $ to actually fund that work. Only massive-scalability stuff is in scope for Synapse Pro: all other features, perf optimisations, maintenance, security work etc will land in FOSS Synapse as it has for the last 10 years. Assuming that this gambit works and there’s any $ to fund it, of course.

Thanks Matthew for reassuring that FOSS Synapse isn't getting left behind. I really do want Matrix to succeed and get the funding it really needs. I'm aware it's been a long-standing issue.

My voice is mostly coming from the perspective of someone who has tried repeatedly to bring friends and family to Matrix but every time the experience is subpar. It's frustrating because most of the problems they experienced (including performance) have been known about and complained about for a long time.

Maybe the messaging in the article was a little off. The "attack" it makes on FOSS Synapse reads to me like it will never get the fixes it needs to make using Matrix more approachable to new users.

Don't worry, this is just more deceptive promises for gullible optimists. The people who started Matrix have now spent a whole decade unable to fix those performance issues. The complexity is algorithmic and built into the design. Countless pair of eyes were thrown at the problem, forks and alternative implementations emerged and died, but Matrix is essentially at the same place. A little bit of rust sprinkled on top won't change that.

Whatever you think a “rug pull” is, this ain’t it.

FOSS owes you literally nothing. Go build what you want for yourself, geez. Oh, and feel free to give it away to the world… OR NOT!

No ok but then let's drop matrix completely as the "next-gen" IRC / FOSS collaboration platform.

There's a lot of moral support and ecosystem gain (eg bridges) from the community. Why bother with that anymore if we're just getting the "broken implementation"?

I think part of the issue here is that they're trying to compete with the enterprise IM solutions. That doesn't really work as the others are way better funded and have benefits that element can't deliver (such as the wide Microsoft M365 + EntraID ecosystem). A Microsoft shop is never ever going to choose this over teams (horrible as the latter is).

> Why bother with that anymore if we're just getting the "broken implementation"?

You’re not. All work (other than stuff which primarily benefits scalability for enormous deployments) should land on FOSS Synapse - particularly core performance improvements like faster state res. This is just trying to fund it.

And no, this is not us trying to compete with Teams - this is us trying to force big Matrix deployments to actually route $ to Element to fund upstream dev, rather than use System Integrators who win the big tenders and then mysteriously fail to route any $ to us.

>System Integrators who win the big tenders and then mysteriously fail to route any $ to us.

What did you think was going to happen? That's their profit.

We stupidly thought they wouldn’t saw off the branch they’re sitting on. But they did.

They want to make money just like you do and they will do what they are incentivized to. You can't expect them to give you money just out of the goodness of their heart.

Professional software developers work for the customers that pay them. Doing free work isn't a sustainable businesses model, not for anyone.

Precisely. Which is why we’ve given a this strong incentive to route money to the upstream - to get access to synapse pro.

It's not about routing money or funding a foundation/hobby.

If they're not paying you then they're not your customer and you don't owe them anything.

Professionals build products. Don't waste time/money building anything but the best possible product. The best product creates the most value for users and customers pay for that value. This functions like a corporate tax on profit.

Software has zero marginal cost which let's people who aren't generating much if any economic value benefit. It's nice but it's not a business.

Everyone benefits from a healthy ecosystem where developers are paid and build products that end enriching the public domain sooner or later. Align your incentives with your paying customers and you will prosper.

> All work (other than stuff which primarily benefits scalability for enormous deployments)

But anything that could be considered public infrastructure better be able to scale to millions of users!

I wish you had chosen to gatekeep some other features to differentiate between enterprises (with members numbering in 10^1 -- 10^6) the open version; public infra should ideally be able to handle >>10^6 members.

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