Brussels / 1 & 2 February 2025

schedule

The Road to Mainstream Matrix


We are living in incredibly exciting times for open source social and communication apps - with the likes of Signal, Mastodon and bluesky showing that open source alternatives can go viral with a mainstream audience, and genuinely challenge and indeed displace the traditional proprietary centralised options.

While Matrix has good uptake with open source communities, chat powerusers and public sector deployments, Matrix has still been laying the groundwork for mainstream uptake. In this talk, we'll explore where Matrix uptake has worked so far, and why, and what we're doing to ensure Matrix will fulfil its promise as the open communication layer of the web for everybody.

We'll cover:

  • Current Matrix traction in the Public Sector & FOSS communities

  • The remaining feature delta with typical mainstream chat apps

  • The challenges of private contact discovery, key verification, and anti-abuse tooling

  • Matrix's relationship to other decentralised communication initiatives

  • The plan for closing the remaining gaps to get Matrix in the hands of the masses!

Matrix (matrix.org) is an open protocol for secure decentralised communication, hopefully familiar as the primary chat system used for online FOSDEM since 2021.

Speakers

Photo of Matthew Hodgson Matthew Hodgson

Links