halfdanwashere

> The reason Third Room has persisted is because there are enterprise folks willing to pay for it and support the team as a standalone thing - you can see the enterprisey showreel video at the end of the OP. It’s also very useful when fundraising for Element and Matrix to be able to point at an exotic shiny project to show Matrix’s long-term potential - a bit like Beeper have their Beepberry device. You can almost think of it as a marketing tool.

That makes sense, thanks for the details. Though I would still argue that the way Third Room is communicated on sends mixed signals to anyone somewhat familiar with the space.

For example, having entire foundation-authored blog posts dedicated to updates to Third Room (which I did not think was a project owned and maintained by the foundation?), with demos published on foundation-owned channels, where other projects (e.g. Synapse, bridges, etc) don't get as much as a tweet nowadays (apart from the spec, i.e. Matrix itself), really sends me the signal that Third Room is one of the few projects the foundation is heavily investing on, with a higher priority than anything else. I'm aware that this blog post does mention where the project sits with regards to the foundation's resources, but I'm not really sure a lone paragraph is enough to shift the balance.

> Separately, “the entire Matrix trust & safety team” was not laid off

You implied otherwise back in December though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34130243

To be clear, I'm not commenting on the situation as it is right now (and I'm in no position of doing so, I'm only operating on publicly-available info and there isn't much to describe what's going on at the moment). What I'm commenting on is the decision back when Element laid off part of its staff to, according to the information available publicly, lay off the trust and safety team, but keep the third room team on board. Which imo sounds like Third Room being prioritised over moderation/t&s.

There's still something I can't wrap my head around. Over 6 months ago, Element laid off the entire Matrix trust & safety team, citing budget and funding concerns (and kinda throwing them under the bus at the same time, but that's a separate matter). And this seems to imply that a similarly sized team has been kept on payroll at the same time to work on a Matrix-powered metaverse experiment (Third Room).

Given the blog post mentions that Matrix and Element are still suffering from lack of funding, it would mean that Element and the Matrix.org Foundation are considering that niche experiment as way more mission-critical for Matrix than moderation/trust & safety. Which feels absolutely insane to me. And it definitely does not make me confident in the fact that, should I decide to provide financial support to the foundation and/or Element, they would spend this money wisely in a way that improves Matrix as a whole rather than trying to make a niche point (that metaverse/AR use cases are possible on Matrix).

I love Matrix, and have been for years, but this does not make me feel confident in the future of the project.

> In 2023 we’re resetting our trust & safety work

That's quite a creative way to say the trust & safety team has been impacted by the layoffs mentioned at the beginning.