In the recent Holiday Update post on the Matrix.org blog Matthew Hodgson gave a great overview of what the foundation had achieved in 2022. Tons of work on the “Faster joins” and “Sliding Sync” features promise a lot of usability improvements in the future. Huge efforts have also been spent on the encryption implementation(s) while reacting to some findings by researchers from the Royal Holloway University London.
Please take a look at the blog post for all the details! For me, the main point was, though, that the foundation is currently lacking funding to stay completely operational and that not many of the public and commercial Matrix-based projects announced over the course of the year have financially contributed back to the foundation.
Personally, I’ve been using Matrix only in a very limited way as my personal notification platform for a couple of side-projects. Previously, I’ve also tried it for family chats but had to move off simply because adoption of and onboarding of new people to Signal was just better. That being said, I think Matrix alongside with Mastodon/ActivityPub are essential projects for the near future and so I’ll use the donation button at the very bottom of that blog post to set up a recurring donation there.
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Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂