The road to mainstream Matrix

Matrix provides an open network for secure, decentralized communication. It has enjoyed some success over the last few years as an IRC replacement and real-time chat for a number of open-source projects. But adoption by a subset of open-source developers is a far cry from the mainstream adoption that Matthew Hodgson, Matrix project lead and CEO of Element (the company that created Matrix), would like to see. At FOSDEM 2025, he discussed the history of Matrix, its missteps in chasing mainstream adoption, its current status, as well as some of the wishlist features for taking Matrix into the mainstream.

Hodgson said that the mission for Matrix is to build the real-time communication layer for the open web so that "no single party owns your conversations". Matrix is an open standard for a decentralized communication protocol. Often, when people refer to Matrix, though, they may be referring as well to the server and client implementations, or the providers, such as Matrix.org, that offer servers for users. The Try Matrix page is a useful start for those who have not yet dipped their toe in the Matrix waters.

Quite a few people have taken the plunge already, though the numbers are small when compared to other systems like Slack, Discord, and Microsoft Teams, which Hodgson named as competitors to Matrix. Hodgson displayed a slide with the number of "retained users" across reporting servers. Retained users are the users who have been "actually hanging around for at least 30 days on the platform". If the user disappears, they are no longer counted. In 2019, the retained user count was in the tens of thousands. In the six years since "it's been growing fairly linearly" to reach nearly 350,000 users by early 2025.

The dream

The rest of the talk, Hodgson said, would be about the road to making Matrix mainstream, "and this is a road with a past and a future". It started in May 2014 with the dream of building the missing communication layer for the web. At the time Hodgson worked at Amdocs with a team of "about ten folks who'd been working together about ten years doing lots of [session initiation protocol] SIP" work. The team wrote its own voice over IP (VoIP) stacks and that sort of thing. The idea was that the team would build an implementation first (called "Project Synapse" originally) and then use that implementation to prove that the protocol works. "Then, having implemented it, we would spec it, updating the One True Spec. This would keep us anchored in reality. Hopefully."

Project Synapse was publicly launched, using the Apache License version 2.0, in September 2014 at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference after an all-night hackathon. At Disrupt, the project shipped Synapse (the server) and a client called Syweb (later renamed Matrix Console). Hodgson said that it actually had a lot of features when launched. "You'd have chat, you'd have one-to-one VoIP, you'd get federation in there too. I think VoIP got added literally at the last hour." The whole idea was to prove the implementations and then create the spec. After the launch, the team then went around the world to tell people about it and convince them to use it. That included a talk at FOSDEM 2015.

Hodgson said that the team really wanted Matrix to be more than chat, and wanted it to be mainstream "not just for geeks. No offense." For that, the project needed a killer app to bring funding for development. "We figured out there were 75 different products you can build on Matrix [the protocol]". He said that one idea was to create a "visual chat application" that featured something like Apple's Animoji, but four years before Apple had shipped the concept. Other product ideas included virtual worlds, government communications tools, or dating apps. In the end, the team decided to converge on a professional collaboration application it originally code-named "Skype done right". It was named Vector on launch—as in "a vector to push Matrix out into the world". That was launched in 2016. Then Vector was renamed Riot, and ultimately became Element in July 2020.

The original sin and mainstream miss

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) work started about the same time that Vector was launched. Hodgson called the E2EE work "the original sin of Matrix" because it slowed development velocity down significantly. People who remembered Matrix before E2EE development began may have felt "oh my God, this thing is going incredibly fast". Then everything ground "not to a halt, but probably ten times slower than we'd been going before". As it turns out, decentralized encryption is rather hard.

At the same time, Matrix was getting real attention. People were excited about a new protocol that would liberate them from the silos of proprietary applications. "Entirely my fault for hyping it to the heavens and back," he said. There was lots of pressure from the community to improve the spec, because it was "very much following what we were implementing". Unfortunately, the governance for a spec process wasn't there. The team behind Matrix wound up investing a lot of time into trying to make the spec something everyone could build on rather than shooting for mainstream adoption with a killer app people could use.

And I think it's an interesting and very controversial viewpoint, which will probably get people to throw rotten fruit at me, that perhaps in retrospect we should have ruthlessly prioritized polishing the app or an app to drive mainstream adoption. Rather than, perhaps prematurely, focusing on the open ecosystem.

One thought example, Hodgson said, was that Matrix itself should not have been primarily positioned as a protocol. It could have been the name of an app "which was a Trojan horse, unashamedly, for a protocol". Rather than setting expectations from the outset that Matrix would be the missing communications layer of the web, "you could have just shipped a really, really good thing like, say, Skype". He noted that the Bluesky social-media service is taking this approach with its Authenticated Transfer Protocol (atproto). This has been "pretty controversial, but it seems to be working out for them" in that they are effectively smuggling a decentralized protocol under the guise of a centralized communication network.

Hodgson said that he knows the people developing Bluesky and believes that they are "genuinely aiming to decentralize things", but they are following the track that Matrix did not follow. As a result, they have a mainstream, successful, decentralized social-media app "whereas we've been on this Escher-like infinite staircase".

Most of the initial work on Matrix was funded by Amdocs until 2017 when the team set up a company called New Vector, which was a subsidiary of Amdocs. In 2018, the Matrix.org Foundation was established to ensure that Matrix would be independent from commercial vendors. In 2020 the company took the name Element, and adopted the Element naming for its products as well. Hodgson said that the company spent 70 to 80 percent of its funding on building out Matrix for many years before transferring its IP to the Matrix Foundation.

1.0 ships

From 2018 to 2021 Matrix entered what Hodgson called its "halcyon days", with many open-source communities—and government entities in France, Germany, and elsewhere—rolling out their Matrix presence. There were hints of killer apps forming, such as one of the forks of Element, Beeper. Lots of projects and products were being built on Matrix, like peer-to-peer Matrix applications, low-bandwidth versions, Gitter integration, virtual-reality demos, and other applications beyond chat. "All of this inspirational work made for some fun demos at FOSDEM, but it did steal a lot of energy from writing that killer mainstream app."

In 2022, "the wheels come off". The markets crashed post-COVID, there was no more zero-interest-rate policy, and "no more investment, really". Element is not yet profitable, and not in a position to raise more money, but it is seeing adoption in the public sector. "Governments realize that the idea your country is operationally dependent on a private US tech company like Microsoft is bananas." So Element decided to focus on government implementations to become more profitable and sustainable.

That, said Hodgson, has two big failure modes. The first is losing bids on contracts to large system integrators. A government entity would put out a tender for a Matrix deployment, which would wind up going to the integrators because they have local staff, existing contracts, and know all the right people. The integrators then pick up the open-source Synapse off GitHub and support it themselves, without any of the money being routed to the upstream development. That happens again and again, Hodgson said.

Basically, almost every deal, I think, that we had on the Element side for providing Matrix to governments ended up disappearing to somebody who basically could win it because they didn't have the cost of developing Matrix.

The second failure mode is that a government is willing to put public money toward open-source feature development, but not toward maintenance or support fees. The upstream gets paid to do features, which is good, he said. For example, all of the Matrix 2.0 work on the Element X Matrix client app for iOS and Android been funded by government contracts. But those features may not be applicable to a mainstream client. Or the government client may say "here's $500,000, go and implement threads or whatever." But, Hodgson said, threads, which allow users to visually branch their conversations in a Matrix room, are a maintenance nightmare and no one is paying for continued development and maintenance of that feature.

Survival time

By the end of 2023, Hodgson said that Matrix was being taken for granted as a commons. The creators of open-source implementations were cut out of paid implementations, as there was little incentive to pay for Matrix's development. "So it started to get fairly drastic at the end of 2023". At this point Element started to focus on being sustainable and switched from the Apache License-2.0 to the AGPLv3 for its contributions to Synapse and other backend Matrix projects. The research and development projects were shelved in favor of focusing purely on stability and quality, which was "arguably a good thing for the ecosystem overall". Even with those changes, though, free riding is still posing an existential threat to the whole ecosystem.

Free riding is the technical economic term for this failure mode when people take the free thing and milk it for all it's worth and don't maintain it.

Hodgson said that the simple answer is that organizations buying a commercial Matrix deployment should also mandate that the upstream project is funded by buying that upstream's products. He suggested that organizations should "only buy from people who are actually going to fund upstream maintenance" and normalize paying for open-source products as much as they pay for proprietary ones.

Licenses for things like Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft products are in the billions of Euros per year for government agencies, but then the same agencies say "we don't have the two million a year that would be needed to provide some support for the Matrix stuff". People might feel that this is just "evil Element trying to force people to buy their thing", he said, but there are other open-source implementations out there. If the upstream isn't suitable, then switch, and that would be "true public money for public code."

Some organizations, such as the Center for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDiS), do get it right in Hodgson's book. It provides openDesk collaboration software and has worked with Element, Nextcloud, Open-Xchange, and others to incorporate those projects into the product. ZenDiS's ground rules, he said, were "we will just go and pay for their professionally supported product, full stop". Hodgson said that a lot of Matrix vendors, including Element, have ended up focusing on government and healthcare initiatives to survive. As a result, "you end up with enterprise features prioritized over the mainstream consumer and community-centric features". But sometimes what is good for government adoption is good for mainstream uptake as well.

Matrix 2.0

Hodgson introduced Matrix 2.0 in 2023 at FOSDEM. Previously the idea had just been to make Matrix work right, but with Matrix 2.0 the idea is to "make it not suck". That means making Matrix fast and usable—and that means a number of proposals to enhance the spec. Proposals to change or enhance the Matrix specification are offered as spec change proposals, known as MSCs, which follow a process that is likely familiar to anyone who has worked with a standards process before. Hodgson said that implementations of the MSCs for Matrix 2.0 "that prove that 2.0 could work" landed in September 2024.

One of those is MSC3861, which lays out next-generation authentication for Matrix. It adds industry-standard OpenID Connect (OIDC), QR login, two-factor authentication, and more. Currently, Matrix's OIDC implementation is merely "ODIC-ish", according to Thibault Martin, who wrote a useful blog post in 2023 to explain some of the authentication changes for Matrix 2.0. According to Hodgson, MSC3861 is implemented in the Matrix Authentication Service and many Matrix clients. He said that the plan is to turn next-generation authentication on after it passes the final comment period in the MSC process "so that we drag everybody on the Matrix.org instance, kicking and screaming, into the brave new OIDC-world future".

Simplified Sliding Sync (MSC4186) is a feature that will, Hodgson said, provide "instant login, instant launch, and instant sync" of a user's chat history and rooms. As an occasional user of Matrix, I can attest that this is a sorely-needed feature. The wait for Matrix to load is painful. He said that it is close to entering the final comment period, but has an edge case that needs to be sorted out, and is already implemented in the Synapse and conduwuit servers.

Matrix real-time communication (MatrixRTC) is a set of MSCs that define native encrypted group VoIP and video calls with pluggable media engines. Hodgson said that this is already implemented in Element Call, Element Call Web, and Element X clients as well as a WhatsApp-like client called Famedly that is aimed at German healthcare providers, but that "we are still incorporating feedback" on the specification.

Finally, there is the "invisible crypto" specification, which is laid out in MSC4153 ("Exclude non-cross-signed devices") and others. The idea behind this specification is to make E2EE "invisible" to users, as it is on systems like Signal, iMessage, and others. Hodgson said that there are people who don't understand the specification and say "this is crap, they're removing all the warnings, it won't be safe anymore". That is the opposite of what invisible crypto is. "The whole idea is to make it more safe by removing the unactionable cryptic (see what I did there?) warnings" about unverified devices and message authenticity. It will require users to identify their devices at login and then it will simplify the experience of using E2EE massively.

Implementations of invisible crypto were launched with the Element X client and Element Web but "we kind of forgot to actually ship this in a community-friendly distribution". He said that there would be AGPLv3 Helm charts (a packaging format for deploying software on Kubernetes) "coming soon" to allow community users to deploy the feature.

Hodgson talked a bit about the first Matrix conference, which was held in September 2024, and noted that there were many independent, production-grade implementations of Matrix available and discussed at the conference. "This is a properly heterogeneous ecosystem" with totally separate stacks without any shared code. That demonstrated, he said, that Matrix was a true ecosystem and not controlled by Element.

The next ten years

Hodgson briefly discussed State Resolution 3, and Chaos. State Resolution 3 is an overhaul of the way that Matrix replicates state (such as room membership and permissions) between servers. The plan for State Res 3 involves the Time Agnostic Room DAG Inspection Service (TARDIS), which provides a "time-traveling debugger" for Matrix room directed-acyclic graphs (DAGs). Chaos is a fault-tolerance-testing tool for Matrix servers, in the vein of Netflix's Chaos Monkey. While Hodgson did not go into detail on these during his talk, they were the topic of another talk at FOSDEM by Kegan Dougal, "Demystifying Federation in Matrix".

Message-layer security (MLS) (RFC9420) defines efficient key exchange across a set of devices. "If I had another three hours, I would talk about MLS in great detail", Hodgson said. There are two proposals to add proper MLS to Matrix, and it is an active area of research, but both proposals are blocked on funding. There is also a pull-request to add the post-quantum extended Diffie-Hellman (PQXDH) protocol to Matrix, which was mentioned at the last FOSDEM. Hodgson said that "we assumed that somebody would leap out of the audience" to offer funding for that work, but a year later nothing has happened. Element is also experimenting with post-quantum group messaging but again, he said, progress is blocked on funding. There are lots of missing features needed for mainstream support on the client and server, Hodgson said. For example there is lots of trust and safety work to be done. "We are expanding the team there and making some progress". He did not discuss other features, but his slides listed features like custom emojis, voice rooms ("for Discord folks"), and safety tooling to hide things like invite spam.

The Matrix Foundation, he said, is key to the future of Matrix. "The next ten years of Matrix will be nurtured the foundation if it has funding". He asked the audience to join the foundation, or "even better, bully your employer to join if they like Matrix and use Matrix". There was no time left for questions, but he invited the audience to join the Matrix state of the union talk immediately after his. The video and slides for Hodgson's talk have been uploaded to the road to Matrix talk page on the FOSDEM 2025 web site.

Coda

On February 20, Martin and Robin Riley posted an update to the Matrix.org blog with a plea for funding.

The Matrix.org Foundation has gone from depending entirely on Element, the company set up by the creators of Matrix, to having half of its budget covered by its 11 funding members, which is a great success on the road to financial independence! However half of the budget being covered means half of it isn't. Or in other words: the Foundation is not yet sustainable, despite running on the strictest possible budget, and is burning through its (relatively small) reserves. And we are at the point where the end of the road is in sight.

The bottom line, according to the post, is that the foundation needs to raise $100,000 of funding by the end of March, or it will have to shut down bridges to other networks that are hosted by the foundation. This includes bridges to Slack, XMPP, and IRC.

Raising $100,000 would extend the runway by one month, but the foundation says that it needs to raise an additional $610,000 to break even. The full cost of operations is $1.2 million, but the foundation is only bringing in about $561,000 currently. The post lists a number of ways individuals or organizations might help fund the foundation.

Seeing open-source projects build their communication strategies around proprietary tools, like Discord and Slack, is discouraging. Some of us might even say short-sighted. Whatever warts Matrix may have, it is one of the few open alternatives that is viable and relatively simple for projects to adopt. One hopes that the foundation will find ways to be sustainable.

[I was unable to attend FOSDEM in person this year, but watched the video for the talk when it became available. Many thanks to the video team for their work in recording all the FOSDEM sessions and making them available.]