Truth is, to get right to the point, the fact that Matrix was accompanied by a for-profit entity, funded by venture capital was the biggest mistake that Matrix as a project has ever made.
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Second biggest mistake next to them working for law enforcement.
So if FBI has an internal Lemmy instance we should start boycotting Lemmy?
As far as I know Lemmy didn’t profit off of making their instance, nor do they have contracts with law enforcement to implement it for them. The same cannot be said for Matrix Foundation.
The Matrix Foundation and Element/New Vector are different orgs, and it’s Element with the government contracts
This seems a bit of an odd take. Matrix.org making their server freemium is up to them - charging some users to use the service (not the software) is a way of keeping the lights on. Better that than ads or selling user data. Lots of privacy focused orgs do the same - Proton, Tuta, Mailbox, Mullvad, IVPN. If people also have an issue with Element - don’t use Element, use one of the other apps.
If people are this upset, its not impossible (or even that hard) to migrate to a different server - or host your own.
I think the problem is that the Matrix Foundation (non-profit org) is being slowly cannibalized by Element (for-profit, VC-funded) which ends up making their costs and profit expectations a lot higher.
Right now this is only impacting the matrix.org homeserver. However, this could eventually end up impacting protocol-level design choices that harm other instances as well. Sure, you could fork the protocol and clients, but now we’re talking about taking up the work that an entire organization had previously been doing. Not impossible if an existing organization like the FSF or Linux Foundation started backing something, but not a great place to be in either.
Edit: grammar
“slowly being cannibalised” at the start the foundation was just new vector/element putting on a funny hat. It’s got less bad as time has gone on tbh
