surveillance

Open-source is popular among software engineers and has been for decades. But far from a silver bullet that automatically makes everything better, open-source is a double-edged sword. It can make wonderful, sustainable projects or break the teams behind them.

The Matrix Foundation is in charge of various activities revolving around Matrix. One of the most important activities to make Matrix a mainstream protocol is lowering the barrier to entry for the general public. The Matrix.org website is a critical step of the onboarding: this is what people will stumble upon when they look up “what is Matrix chat” or “chatting on Matrix” in a search engine.

Our relationship with computers and phones has changed. We used to rely on software installed locally on our computers, and are now shifting towards a model based on services and companion apps, sometimes with free tiers and subscriptions.

I don’t want to self-host, and even worse: I think most individuals shouldn’t host services for others. Yet, I am self-hosting services and I even teach people how to do it.