Article: The Matrix Holiday Update 2022
matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-upda…
- 44M to 80M Matrix IDs in the main global network
We’ve seen an amazing number of major new players entering the Matrix ecosystem: Reddit appears to be building out new Chat functionality using Matrix; TeamSpeak announced Matrix-based chat in TS5; Discourse is working on adding Matrix support; Thunderbird launched Matrix support;
- Lots of government usage and adoption
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On the other hand, only a handful of these initiatives have resulted in funding reaching the core Matrix team. This is directly putting core Matrix development at risk. We are witnessing a classic tragedy of the commons. We’ve released all the foundational code of Matrix as permissively-licensed open source and got it to the point that anyone can successfully run it at scale themselves. The network is expanding exponentially. ==But in return, it transpires that the vast majority of these commercial deployments fail to contribute financially to the Matrix Foundation - whether by donating directly or supporting indirectly by working with Element, who fund the vast majority of core Matrix development today.==
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The only viable solution to this is for organisations building on Matrix to contribute to sharing the costs of maintaining Matrix’s core projects. We made a proposal to address this a few weeks ago, which we’ll iterate on further in the new year to find an approach which both empowers the community and encourages organisations to participate.
- Funding Matrix via the Matrix.org Foundation Matrix/Foundation #commons funding > To put it in perspective, even though there are over 5000 contributors to github.com/matrix-org - over 90% of the actual committed lines of code come from Element employees. Similarly, while we are enormously thankful for the past and existing generous donations from the wider Matrix community, today they only come to $6,000 a month, relative to the $400,000 a month that Element has been funding.
- Long list of work the Matrix Foundation does, including 240 repos in the GitHub org
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Another big project in 2022 has been to create a general purpose Rich Text Editor to provide WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) message composition for Matrix clients. This has ended up being a very ambitious project to define all the core editing semantics in a shared rust library, with platform-specific bindings to link it into the editing UI available on Web, iOS & Android. The end result lives at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rich-text-editor
- Tried this on mobile and it seems pretty terrible, but I’m excited by the concept of a #Rust -based rich text editor with #Wasm
- OpenID Connect as default login method — and tracking progress https://areweoidcyet.com
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The team also went on a very exciting detour to figure out how to perform login-and-E2EE-setup in a single operation by scanning a QR code (MSC3906), and how it might integrate into OIDC in future.
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Another massive new initiative this year has been the process of proposing Matrix to the IETF as a candidate for use in interoperable instant messaging standardisation. The MIMI (More Instant Messaging Interoperability) working group emerged earlier in the year within IETF as an initiative to define how MLS could be used to interoperate between different instant messaging silos