alt Hacker NewsI see your point, and it sounds like an invidious and existential position to be in and you have my sympathy to be fighting uphill against legacy like that.
Honestly though, I would contest the logic here:
> bit like how email & the web and even the internet spread from DARPA / NSFNet / academic etc to the rest of the world.
It spread because it was useful and revolutionary, not because DARPA specifically used it. Yes there were network effects, but the network effect overlap today between "NATO" and "a friend group hangout" is pretty minimal.
> what better endorsement for Matrix than someone like NATO using it for comms?
Honestly, if all I knew was NATO funded and used it, I'd assume it was enterprise-grade cost-plus shitware 15 years behind the curve, and with zero organisational interest, if not outright hostility, to it being used by anyone without a governmental chequebook and service contract in hand, and steer well clear.
It's OK to write software for NATO and governments for the foreseeable future, but the website still says "communicate with friends, family, communities and co-workers", so you can see why people might think it's still targeted at them and then wonder why it doesn't even provide the baseline of human-interest features people have been getting from other platforms for about a decade.
Not that it helps pays the bills to court Brian Everyman and his Warhammer group chat, I do realise that.
yeah. i'm not saying we've made the optimal choice here: for instance, we could have focused on growing mainstream usage at all cost without distractions of enterprise or govtech (similar to Bluesky), and assume that once we have enough users we'd be able to figure out monetisation somehow via a Discord Nitro style scheme.
However, we're at where we are now, and we're committed as to the current path as a way to get sustainable and then go back to supporting mainstream users (including Brian and his Warhammer clan). Perhaps a profitable govtech business can subsidise mainstream FOSS Matrix without having to do Nitro style value gates (which are tough to enforce anyway in a decentralised world).
> but the website still says "communicate with friends, family, communities and co-workers"
That was the messaging prior to early 2023, when we shifted gear to "get sustainable by focusing on govtech". Which is why the frontpage of the website currently doesn't say anything about friends/family/communities, sadly.
I just had to fish around to find out where you saw the old wording - i'm guessing it's in the footer for element.io/blog? ...which is a snafu due to the blog being Ghost and the website being Webflow.