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What greedy matrix admin...
The enshitification is real. Thank goodness it's federated, just use a different instance or self-host your own.
Well, that's literally the point - the majority of costs for them are hosting related, so they're trying to push people to use their own or other servers, which is overall better for the health of the federated network.
It's not enshittification if you were never paying for it/supporting in the first place, lol.
It’s not enshittification if you were never paying for it
Cf. every free service whose enshittification was called enshittification, starting with Reddit.
But I agree this is not enshittification. It's grasping at straws.
They're telling you to pay or leave. I just don't get why you think it should be free - who is paying for it?
Because matrix is an open ecosystem, most companies that use it just deploy a server and then contribute nothing back to the spec (be it funding or code). Individuals seem to be in the same boat.
Like, I'm not trying to be dense, here - what is the correct path? Where is this money supposed to come from? (I'm genuinely not trying to incite an argument with this comment; I'm just passionate about the Matrix spec and am frustrated with the responses to this post)
And please don't give me the "user donations will be enough" drivel - I've been donating (a small amount) to the matrix foundation for years, even though I run my own server and don't rely on them for any infra, and know quite well how many users are with me in the lowest tier of contributors room. Spoiler: it's less than 300.
I get your point. It would be better to save the money and use it for actually developing the platform because it needs to be worked on.
or alternatively, stop pretending Matrix is any good and trying to hang on until they make it good (2030? 2035? ever???) and use something which actually works.
Matrix is actually really good. It's my only hope for using iMessages in a cross platform manner, I can self-host my own iMessages bridge.
Since most of my friends use iMessages and they are not super willing to change.
1 MB file size limit. That's officially worse than email. Ridiculous.
And 100 MB if I pay? Wtf, what year is this, 2002?
1 MB file size limit. That’s officially worse than email. Ridiculous.
And 100 MB if I pay? Wtf, what year is this, 2002?
It's reality. They're not using ads or any other unethical means of profit seeking. Imagine if everyone started using Matrix and no one paid, where do you suppose the money should come from to pay for the servers? It's like going to the grocery store and being outraged that fruit has a price tag; "what the fuck, I can't just take this?"
Also, I can't remember ever sending files nearing 100 ㎆ via chat. Just use a cloud service and send the URL.
All these free services have made us spoiled, lazy, and greedy. I've written some related essay about it:
What if I paid for all my free software?
I've always felt guilty by taking for granted the rare breed of virtuous humans that provide free excellent software without relying on advertising. Let's change that and pay, how much would I “lose” anyway? —https://www.arscyni.cc/file/take_my_money.html
1 MB file size limit. That’s officially worse than email. Ridiculous. And 100 MB if I pay? Wtf, what year is this, 2002?
... Paying for public rooms? They are never gonna challange discord like that.
I mean if the idea is to get people off of the matrix.org homeserver and onto smaller federated servers, this might accomplish at least half of that.
Yes, that's insane. I totally understand requiring payments for big attachments (even then I would probably set a bigger limit for individual attachments and instead charge for attachment/message retention a-la Slack)
But paid public rooms just means that people will jump ship from matrix.org; combined with lack of "portable identity" or any other way to easily transfer your account to another server, this may just be the beginning of the end for matrix, which is really sad.
holup, you can't send fucking images with a free account!? def no videos with that "limit".
I'm already in the process of moving my corpo stuff to XMPP but this should precipitate a total exodus, both private and business shit.
That's only on their server, you can send whatever you want on your own.
Why not just move to your own server? I mean, XMPP is fine too, just curious what made you jump to a completely different protocol instead of just changing servers.
maybe the truly god-awful UX?
Having used both, I don't think XMPP is any better. It lacks some features of Matrix and apps are about as buggy.
A paid plan on a chat application? Needs a catchy hook... Matrix Nitro, perhaps?
Matrix Reloaded
Matrix Multiplier (you know, matrix multiplication, to worsen SEO even more than just using terms like "matrix" and "element")
Matrix Division, so any chatbot you ask about it can confidently tell you that's not a thing.
It might make some kind of sense if there was anything close to feature parity, but at this stage in development, it just isn't worth paying for at all.
Matrix doesn't measure up to discord, signal, or telegram in terms of what you can do with it. If it's going to be paid, it damn well needs to offer something useful for the money, not just lifting arbitrary limits.
I think it does offer something unique - a modern, federated IM experience. But hiding it behind a paywall will just destroy the community.
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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