alt Hacker NewsIf you don't mind my asking, what are the features that you're working on to become profitable?
I know custom emojis sound dumb, but they are basically the differentiation factor for how Discord gets their billions. People almost literally pay hundreds of dollars for Nitro just to get their emojis/reactions. Other than bigger uploads, that's all the lower Nitro tier does.
Some people just laugh in my digital face when I suggest Matrix, because they will never, ever, countenance losing their emojis. I don't know why they care that much, but they absolutely do.
It feels a bit like trying to sell a car without Bluetooth. You might think it's a trivial frill and a distraction from the best engine ever, but the interest will be lukewarm at the very best. I bought a car without Bluetooth but then I fitted my own adapter. Even that isn't possible here.
So we do care about custom emoji, and they are obviously critical for folks looking for an encrypted Discord alternative.
However, right now we're not focusing on building an encrypted Discord alternative but instead a self-hosted WhatsApp (or Teams) replacement for governments: https://element.io/sectors, on the basis that they are the ones paying. Sure, we could have gone after Discord ~5 years ago and launched our own Nitro equivalent, and perhaps we should have. But instead we observed that governments REALLY want to run their own encrypted interoperable comms systems, and we thought that having Matrix used as the backbone for public sector communication would be a good way to prove and fund it sustainably. Ideally we could then use the public sector as a launchpad into other areas - a bit like how email & the web and even the internet spread from DARPA / NSFNet / academic etc to the rest of the world. After all, what better endorsement for Matrix than someone like NATO using it for comms?
As a result, custom emoji are stuck in the middle of the todo list still.
Some of the other features that we've worked on instead have been:
* Making encryption stable. As hilarious as https://www.reddit.com/r/elementchat/comments/1evz3kk/unable... is.
* Make encryption secure - i.e. migrating from the old C/C++ libolm implementation to the rust vodozemac implementation.
* Instant login/sync/launch - i.e. an entirely new sync mechanism.
* Rather than developing 4 different client stacks (js-sdk, ios-sdk, android-sdk and rust-sdk), converge on a single one: matrix-rust-sdk, and make it excellent.
* Rework the core UX to make encryption invisible (rather than full of confusing unactionable warnings and verification nags etc).
* Native Matrix-encrypted scalable voip/video calling.
* Migrating to OpenID Connect for auth, so getting 2FA/MFA etc
* Public sector enterprise features: antivirus, regulatory compliance, secure border gateways, cross-domain gateways, active directory sync, SCIM sync, kubernetes operators, etc. etc.
Now, the plan is to use the govtech business to get back to funding mainstream Matrix uptake. But first we need to be able to fund ourselves to work on it.