The Matrix Foundation tries to fund itself philanthropically by selling sponsorship and memberships at matrix.org/support, but it doesn’t remotely cover the full dev costs.
So there is absolutely no alternative but a) ensure the wider independent FOSS ecosystem can build general purpose apps (which they can and do - eg Cinny and FluffyChat), and b) have Element go off and build apps which people actually pay for (empirically that means govtech & enterprise).
The hope is that if/when Element is profitable doing the latter, then Element can get back to investing in the broader Matrix ecosystem again. (Separately, it’s fascinating to see how little much of the Matrix ecosystem seems to appreciate the $$M that Element has put in over the years. Funny old world.)
edit: oh, and the unable to decrypt errors should be pretty much gone now; we just spent the last 6 months on crypto doing nothing but killing them.
Uh... I can replicate them right now as I speak, I use fluffy chat on my one phone, fluffy on another android, schildichat and cinny on Linux.
I am logged out of my schildichat every few days, cinny breaks a bit, and sometimes messages just show "could not decrypt message".
They "eventually" show on all sessions but I am facing them now.
My old sessions are broken, only new messages are visible across new sessions.
I use matrix as my daily driver so i it doesn't bother me much but I can say an average user might not.
Also,
Fluffychat android doesn't work with audio calls. Notifications are broken, I get "some" notifications, some days, sometimes after a few weeks, sometimes none.
So there is absolutely no alternative but a) ensure the wider independent FOSS ecosystem can build general purpose apps (which they can and do - eg Cinny and FluffyChat), and b) have Element go off and build apps which people actually pay for (empirically that means govtech & enterprise).
The hope is that if/when Element is profitable doing the latter, then Element can get back to investing in the broader Matrix ecosystem again. (Separately, it’s fascinating to see how little much of the Matrix ecosystem seems to appreciate the $$M that Element has put in over the years. Funny old world.)
edit: oh, and the unable to decrypt errors should be pretty much gone now; we just spent the last 6 months on crypto doing nothing but killing them.