alt Hacker News> Maybe some day I will be less bitter. I mean, Matrix is free, how much can I really be angry if it didn't work how I wanted it to. But, it's hard. I tried to buy in hard, and wound up making a lot of trouble for me and a small group of people that I inadvertently looped into my own mess. I trusted Matrix because it seemed to be the leading option, but definitely I will now be much, much more careful before adopting an ecosystem into my life and the life of people around me. For example, I still have no ActivityPub server... Maybe it's better if I just wait and see what happens there before jumping in, if I'm going to.
Sorry this is your experience - my only small comment on this last part is here: if there's no financial incentive to keep things running then it is very possible that they won't. Money isn't some evil thing we should alternatives to. It's how we value relatively our time and effort vs other people's time and effort.
In a healthier ecosystem with many stakeholders and sponsors this is less of a concern. However, instead of Matrix Foundation gaining more independence, it seems like almost everything moved out of the Matrix Foundation and into a for-profit company. Clearly, things didn't go according to plan.
Most of us just running homeservers are just random people who have no power over this situation and not enough money to make a dent in their budget needs. For us, Matrix was sold as an open E2EE chat system, and we bought in. Does us buying in do anything for Matrix Foundation/Element? I dunno. Maybe it helps sell Matrix to get broader adoption. Either way, we took a gamble on it, potentially instead of other solutions.
Now the free and open source Matrix homeserver has to compete with a closed source commercial one. I sort of hope there's a happy ending on this one, but it sure looks dicey to me right now.