lmfao, Element now has a proprietary version of Synapse that gets performance improvements, guess we plebs get stuck with the slow one

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Their claim is that regular Synapse will also get performance improvements, just only the ones for small instances, which might have been a credible claim if it weren't for the fact that I *am* on a small instance and it performs like shit just because I'm in a lot of rooms, which incidentally has always been the metric for "big instance" with Matrix, so y'know

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@Sven Slootweg Not to defend a commercial enterprise, but I understand why they want an edge over the competition so that they can make a profit to pay the devs to keep developing and improving Matrix.

Are you running your server in monolithic mode or with workers?

@hans I'm sure they want that. But that's of no concern to the broader ecosystem, and this kind of thing is precisely what wasn't supposed to happen. They have been warned many times that their business and developmental model is unsustainable (with assistance offered), and if they insist on continuing it anyway, then I have little sympathy for the decisions that they feel they need to eventually make.

The server in question is running with workers (couldn't keep up in monolithic mode) but I do not administrate it.

@Sven Slootweg I've seen the discussions indeed, and I'm not thrilled by the step they took last year, but again: I can understand it.

What I understand is that if Element can reliably turn a profit every year, development of Matrix (and the broader ecosystem as a result) is secure.

Too many open source projects have died because volunteer developers lost interest and/or donations dried up. That's a very insecure way of growing a project and community.

Again, I wasn't too happy with the fork and switch to AGPL+CLA either, but I think it will benefit all of us in the long run.

@hans "What I understand is that if Element can reliably turn a profit every year, development of Matrix (and the broader ecosystem as a result) is secure."

That is how Element frames it. In practice, this is quite far from the truth - Element's stewardship has caused a *large* amount of volunteers to burn out or bounce off. I have personally spoken to many of them.

Volunteers which would have been able to provide that ecosystem security, which Element is infamously failing to provide, with their continuous technical and stewardship failures, and the increasing closedness of what are functionally the reference implementations.

There was never a lack of volunteer interest or labour availability. The problem has always been that Element did not provide the space for it to grow, and insisted on a highly centralized development model that only works with large amounts of funding.

@hans Or to put it more bluntly: Element has found a solution to a problem that Element has created.

@Sven Slootweg I've seen comments of many of those volunteers too, and I understood most of their frustration. But this is what Element chose to do, a pragmatic step that may collide with idealism.

Volunteer devs who decided not to contribute anymore because of this step, confirm how uncertain relying on unpaid volunteers is.

Again, I wasn't too thrilled either, but the reality of the world we live in requires compromises every now and then. Synapse is still open, and so is the Matrix API, we can still use and develop it, but there's a commercial party involved that not only contributes a lot, but also keeps some bits for itself.

Not the perfect world, but good enough for me.
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