A Call to Arms: Supporting Matrix
(oops, the blog link melted under all the attention but it's fixed again now).Just wanted to say that of all the communities on the 'net, HN has been one of the most enthusiastic about the potential of Matrix.  Trying to build an entirely open decentralised network that can support better-than-Slack style collaboration is a tonne of work; I'd estimate it's about 6x more work than building the equivalent centralised service.  Plus the amount of effort that we've put into decentralised end-to-end encryption (https://matrix.org/git/olm/about etc) is enormous, and now very nearly complete, having got solutions in place for (optionally) sharing message history on demand between devices, handling race conditions during splitbrains, etc.In short, we've put a lot of work into Matrix and we really want to continue doing so with at least the same level of momentum we've had to date.  But as of next week, this is going to require support from the community - both donations and corporate sponsorship, at least in the short/medium term.  So if you believe in the promise of decentralisation and restoring power over communication back to the users, your support would be hugely appreciated.Also, folks may be specifically interested in the 'Reflections' section at the end of the post, which points out that in the near future Matrix is going to be forced to address an even bigger issue than open comms - namely the ability to handle propaganda and let users filter their content (to avoid spam, propaganda, abuse, etc) without being trapped in an invisible filter-bubble or echo-chamber.  This stuff is still vapourware right now, but could be literally world-changing if we get it right.Anyway, thanks for reading, and thanks to those who consider supporting directly.-- Matthew / Arathorn