matrix

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.

The Matrix.org Foundation is a non-profit. It carries out costly programs which are only supported by donations. The Foundation’s biggest donor by far has been Element since the Foundation’s early days. Individual donors have supported the Foundation since the very beginning as well, before the Foundation opened up more recently to corporate sponsorship.

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.

I self-host a few services. It’s easy to put services online, but self-hosting properly in the long run is difficult. A part of self-hosting properly is having backups and monitoring. In this article I’m going to show you how I make sure to get off-site backups, with a Raspberry Pi at home pulling data from my VPS. There’s room for improvement, and if you have constructive comments on how I can do better I’d be happy to hear them!

When we deployed our Matrix instance for GNOME, we were really used to IRC. We did not think through all the ways people would use an account for, and left registrations too open. As a consequence, many people created an account on our instance because they like the GNOME Project, and started using it as a personal account.

This post follows an introduction to Matrix with e-mails, where I explain that Matrix is a federated system.

The Matrix protocol is full of concepts sometimes hard to grasp. In this post I’m going to try to cover how it’s used in the context of messaging, how close to e-mail it can feel, and how decentralisation is achieved in the open safely. For the sake of simplicity and ease of understanding I might lie to you sometimes: this post is aimed at non-experts.

Like many, I started my involvement in the GNOME community as an end-user. Eventually, I wanted to give back to this project I loved. I wanted to see both the project and the community strive. We already had and still have many excellent developers who work hard to implement the vision of our talented design team. Those are not areas where my contribution would make a difference. I started helping with translations. For this activity I have regularily been chasing maintainers for string freezes, or to ask for explanations when strings didn’t make sense for me.

First, of course, we know that despite what the spam indicated the spam did not actually come from Libera Chat teams. It comes from imbeciles who obviously wanted to give Libera Chat a bad image by flooding all sorts of disgusting messages.

I’ve come to talk with you about instant messaging platforms and peaceful coexistence. This is a pretty heated issue, so I count on everyone to keep the conversation constructive so we can shape our future platform together in a positive way!