Where I started
I started my journey in Matrix somewhere around 2016. At the time, Matrix was still young, and I was still in school. It also was probably the biggest Open-Source project I ever was able to work with by that time, and the first time I felt really at home.
As a result of this, I ended up quickly making my very first contribution to Vector, which these days is better known as Element-Web. Of course as a young enthusiastic person I got nerd sniped by someone to add i18n support to Vector. This also was the first time I got to meet the wonderful people over at the New Vector (now called Element) team. This was great, and I am happy to still have contact with many people from back then.
As Matrix grew up over the years, so did I get older. Not much longer I did various Matrix projects, helped in things like Nheko, and got approached by Famedly to be one of their initial devs together with people like Krille. As a result, I learned to develop a Matrix Client properly and was able to work on things like Fluffychat. At this time, I was becoming strongly connected to Matrix, and it became my passion to work on.
After working at Famedly for a few years I then transitioned over to Nordeck instead where I am working to this day. On the Matrix side, Element did a few rebrands of their clients. From Matrix Console to Vector to Riot to Element. I eventually got into the position of helping with This Week in Matrix (TWIM) and being one of the people that did the initial matrix.org website rewrite over to Zola. Later I got into the position of being the Chair of the Website and Content Working Group together with Kim and Thib to maintain the website, TWIM and various other content related places across the ecosystem for the Foundation. I am deeply grateful for everyone who allowed me to do this.
What is Matrix these days for me?
This is a question I keep asking myself, especially in the past 2 years. I have seen it all, I tried almost all the things by now. So where can I still put work in? What makes it exciting for me? And most importantly, what makes it feel unpleasant at times?
These are what I want to explain here, especially as some might have noticed that I got a lot more critical about Matrix, especially this year.
Matrix to me is still mostly a playground, but I also got a lot of input from enterprises and other users over the years. I was able to see it from various views and most importantly I don’t have investors behind me that blur this view. (Though of course I am aware that I am working for a Company which builds Matrix solutions). Many of these views caused me to rethink how professional and usable our ecosystem is and if the movement of the last years helped with this or made it even worse.
The good
The good things we got is for sure that we matured. Our website got more professional, we have a proper Conference with superb quality streams this year, we got a proper Governing Board instead of a Group of Friends, and we got an independent Foundation finally.
On the side of clients, we got more variety now. We got Cinny, Element, Fluffychat and many more solving different use cases for different people.
We also got a lot more backing from governments which have seen the potential Matrix gives them as a flexible backend. As an example, I am currently in my day job working for FITKO to build a way to do government <> Citizen communication.
All of this is very nice to see and makes it for a very pleasant experience as a developer and user. I hope the next 10 years from now this got even better with more people using Matrix, more people helping Matrix financially, and more companies diversifying the ecosystem to solve different needs.
The bad
However, in Matrix, not everything is great. We over the years had massive issues with abuse, spam, being an open CDN for media and more.
I am going to, however, not focus on these things here. Instead, what I want to call out is the problem with Matrix seemingly forgetting who uses it, possibly due to investors. Of course, I get that people require money to do things and that people want to expand their customer group. That’s all fine, but sadly not what seems to happen.
As a result of choosing to speak about this part of Matrix, I must call out Element. Despite agreeing that they are the reason Matrix got this successful, they also are probably the biggest source of enshitification in the past 5 years of Matrix.
This started with things like Flairs and tags being lost, but quickly spread to other things. The new design system which wants to focus on enterprise customers seems to have been developed in many ways without thinking about their existing users. The new room list has caused massive negative comments from basically all sides of the community. Of course, the core idea of modernizing the room list was much needed, but the execution feels like trying to put mobile UI into a desktop application. That just won’t be successful in my opinion.
Then there are other things coming from the same corner, like Dendrite. It had been for a while promised as the next gen Homeserver. Just for it to never arrive and the team seemingly not being part of Element anymore. While Synapse certainly also improved, it is clear that Dendrite still had more performance headroom than Synapse currently seems to have. It would have been a great addition to the ecosystem.
But It’s not just Element. There are also issues on the Matrix Spec front. Things the community are using actively are not merged for multiple years now, while PRs from other bigger companies have roundtrip times of months. This from the outside often looks like people are prioritised because of their name rather than the feature. This also numerous times had caused people to not want to contribute to spec since it’s a very slow and unpleasant experience most of the time to this day. The roundtrip time specifically is why I won’t be contributing to spec anymore unless it is something I get paid for.
In the end, I also don’t want to exclude things I am working on, though. Matrix lacks docs. A lot of docs. The spec is long and difficult to read, the docs on matrix.org are sparse and not well maintained by the original authors. This is something that falls under the Website and Content WG hat, at least to the level where we are supposed to coordinate this more. I am hoping that this can be improved a lot in the following years, since it hinders numerous people from starting. I heard multiple times at work about people that stopped working on Matrix due to this issue. This is sad because we got many knowledgeable people which easily could write documentation, tutorials, or guides about Matrix.
Conclusion
So what do I think about Matrix is not just a perfect flower paradise yet. But it’s also not the devils’ kitchen, where everyone is bad. We are something in between currently.
What we should do is to think about things more and maybe review the ecosystem some more. I would love to have an ecosystem wide questionnaire, for example. What do people actually want? What’s their favourite client? What is the biggest pain point? Things like this might help everyone in the ecosystem in the long run, but it is also a lot of work to set up and then plot the results in a meaningful way.
Matrix has a bright future, but it also is currently likely in its most important years. If we do A we might replace XMPP in what XMPP was around 2010 where everyone used it to build their chat. If we do B however, we might be that cool startup which never really took off.
I, however, decided to do less coding, more documentation and more advocacy in the next year. This means I will continue working on my Connectivity Tester for Matrix. I want to speak to more people on how to bring more content to matrix.org, and I want to myself publish some documentation I deem necessary to be successful. I especially started to work on comparing things like XMPP docs to Matrix doc to figure out why some people enjoy it more than Matrix Spec. This led me to a slowly ongoing process of working out a Matrix variation of XEP-0479 aka Compliance Suites.
I hope people got a good overview now over some of my thoughts of what Matrix to me is and what I hope it would actually become in the future.
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