5 karma · joined February 14, 2024
That kind of users aren't worth the hassle if they have no money.
I personally have better relationships with people that enjoy learning something new, and coming up with solutions for issues themselves, eventually contributing to the ecosystem.
Still, I run Matrix servers since inception of the project (10 years now \o/), and for an experienced system administrator this is not something difficult to do.
If you think running a Matrix server is difficult, you are probably not the intended audience: running an IRC server, an email server, or some other server, is mostly similarly difficult.
Matrix is a communication protocol, and it is not intended to be touched by end-users. If your goal is to just communicate on the matrix network as an enduser, stay away from matrix. I haven't seen an email enduser who browsers to https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321.html, to figure out how to sign up for hotmail.....
Element on the other hand, IS intended to be userfriendly, and there is obviously a lot of room for improvement. But through the years I experienced that users who want to use Element to stay in touch with their loved once, have no problem with that.
Lastly I think comparing an open source project like Matrix/Element to Publicly traded corporations like Slack or Meta, is not fair. They operate with totally different business models. If you'd compare the quality of Matrix/Element to Slack in relation to annual budget, Slacks ROI would be depressing.