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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sick of Element and Matrix at this point, and I'm pretty sure the enthusiasts are the only ones keeping Matrix relevant. This monetization scheme is not going to work. I think the Matrix experiment is coming to an end.

I'm about to fork Dendrite at its last ASL 2.0 version, because to hell with signing a CLA for Element.

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I'm tired of all the issues with Matrix as well. I've never had a message get received or a notification pushed in less than 10 minutes. Went back to XMPP and messages are instant. I want to love Matrix. E2EE, proper federation, voice calls, But the experience is terrible.

I've used matrix a lot and this doesn't sound normal.

> I've never had a message get received or a notification pushed in less than 10 minutes.

I receive messages < 10 seconds. What's your setup?

Element (Later ElementX) On android, and same on iOS. Tried various other clients like Fluffychat, and SchildiChat.

Presumably you’re using an overloaded server which is struggling because we have been completely undermanned on synapse maintenance and haven’t been able to do core optimisation work. This is precisely why we’re trying to fund our FOSS work by selling Synapse Pro.

Proprietary licenses don't align developer incentives with customers. Instead you should consider non commercial licenses that convert to open source after some time, eg 5 years.

Customers won't pay for development unless forced to and it creates a tragedy of the commons. No large commercial deployment will accept 5 year out of date broken insecure software.

Non paying users won't care that they can't use it commercially

There's Zulip. Better to avoid the protocol at this point, after Matrix transferred Synapse to Element.

Last I checked, zulip doesn't "federate"? I suspect this is a bigger deal for people who landed with Matrix than just "open source rooms with pretty UI" (rocket chat, mattermost, revolt, .. the alternatives there are many, while I see only XMPP being a compelling one for federated chat)

Why not fork from the latest version? It's provided as AGPL, and you don't need to sign the CLA as you are not going to contribute to the upstream anyway.

Because they haven't done anything terribly interesting anyways, so unless I prefer AGPL there's no point. I'm pretty sure I will wind up diverging very quickly if I actually commit to this.

And upstream doesn't have significant intentions for dendrite right now... Relevant btw re: licensing:

https://stgraber.org/2023/12/12/lxd-now-re-licensed-and-unde...

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