> The reason Third Room has persisted is because there are enterprise folks willing to pay for it and support the team as a standalone thing - you can see the enterprisey showreel video at the end of the OP. It’s also very useful when fundraising for Element and Matrix to be able to point at an exotic shiny project to show Matrix’s long-term potential - a bit like Beeper have their Beepberry device. You can almost think of it as a marketing tool.
That makes sense, thanks for the details. Though I would still argue that the way Third Room is communicated on sends mixed signals to anyone somewhat familiar with the space.
For example, having entire foundation-authored blog posts dedicated to updates to Third Room (which I did not think was a project owned and maintained by the foundation?), with demos published on foundation-owned channels, where other projects (e.g. Synapse, bridges, etc) don't get as much as a tweet nowadays (apart from the spec, i.e. Matrix itself), really sends me the signal that Third Room is one of the few projects the foundation is heavily investing on, with a higher priority than anything else. I'm aware that this blog post does mention where the project sits with regards to the foundation's resources, but I'm not really sure a lone paragraph is enough to shift the balance.
> Separately, “the entire Matrix trust & safety team” was not laid off
You implied otherwise back in December though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34130243
To be clear, I'm not commenting on the situation as it is right now (and I'm in no position of doing so, I'm only operating on publicly-available info and there isn't much to describe what's going on at the moment). What I'm commenting on is the decision back when Element laid off part of its staff to, according to the information available publicly, lay off the trust and safety team, but keep the third room team on board. Which imo sounds like Third Room being prioritised over moderation/t&s.
That makes sense, thanks for the details. Though I would still argue that the way Third Room is communicated on sends mixed signals to anyone somewhat familiar with the space.
For example, having entire foundation-authored blog posts dedicated to updates to Third Room (which I did not think was a project owned and maintained by the foundation?), with demos published on foundation-owned channels, where other projects (e.g. Synapse, bridges, etc) don't get as much as a tweet nowadays (apart from the spec, i.e. Matrix itself), really sends me the signal that Third Room is one of the few projects the foundation is heavily investing on, with a higher priority than anything else. I'm aware that this blog post does mention where the project sits with regards to the foundation's resources, but I'm not really sure a lone paragraph is enough to shift the balance.
> Separately, “the entire Matrix trust & safety team” was not laid off
You implied otherwise back in December though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34130243
To be clear, I'm not commenting on the situation as it is right now (and I'm in no position of doing so, I'm only operating on publicly-available info and there isn't much to describe what's going on at the moment). What I'm commenting on is the decision back when Element laid off part of its staff to, according to the information available publicly, lay off the trust and safety team, but keep the third room team on board. Which imo sounds like Third Room being prioritised over moderation/t&s.