After several months of work, I recently spearheaded the release of the new matrix.org website. The website refresh was long overdue. It started as a project to pay off tech debt, and I decided to take it as an opportunity to redesign it entirely.

Redesigning a website goes beyond applying a fresh coat of CSS: it can (and maybe should) make your project go through an existential crisis. You need to put words on who you are, what you do, for whom, and who you’re talking to. It requires stepping out of your comfort zone but it rewards you with a better compass for your project. I decided to apply the lessons learnt along the way to my personal website.

The GNOME community has become a Matrix-first community some time ago, and we kept the bridges to our historical IRC network gimpnet as a convenience for people who were more comfortable using it. The GNOME community is going to move away from GIMPnet… which doesn’t mean we’re going to severe ties with IRC entirely.

To avoid all ambiguity, allow me to express my gratitude to the administrators of the GIMPnet network. Each one of them I could talk to was extremely nice and helping. GIMPnet has been a strong asset for a long time to keep the GNOME community together, and I want to sincerely thank them for keeping the network running for all these years.

This article follows one published by a former director, Allan Day, who detailed the evolution of the Board of Directors. The article you’re reading goes further on what I believe is needed to help us scale the Foundation to become an active contributor to the GNOME Project, beyond its traditional support activities.

Some Misconceptions

The Foundation is not the GNOME Project’s vendor, and it’s not the GNOME Project’s shepherd either. For more about the balance of powers within the Project, see Tobias Bernard’s blog series.

This blog post was also posted as a wall of text on GNOME’s Discourse to share the results of the survey with the broader GNOME Community.

The topic of our Instant Messaging platform of choice is quite old. In May 2021 I covered the history of IRC and Matrix in the GNOME Community.