Matrix

Matrix.org

I want to change the way people communicate.

The currently dominant silos like WhatsApp only let me talk to the friends who are willing and able to subscribe to that company’s terms and restrictions. When that company decides to stop me using their service a certain way, or display advertising to me, I have no good way out: I can’t change it, I can only leave. When they stopped supporting my mother’s not-terribly-old phone, she had no good way out: buy a new phone, or leave the walled garden. If she leaves, she leaves all her contacts and message history behind.

To me, that is like some historical feudal system in which we live as tenants in the estate. We may not meet up with our friends without permission from the Lord and Lady of the manor.

That is not how I want to conduct my life.

We need and deserve better than that. We need modern communications systems that are Open in the sense of freedom. Freedom to talk to our friends and business contacts under our own rules. Freedom to choose what software we use, what bots and tools we connect to the service, and what kind of phone or computer we use.

Email served that role up to the beginning of the 21st century. Matrix now serves that role for the era of instant messaging.

I enjoy making computers work for me. I build software tools. I work with the community of open-source developers. I read and think around this subject.

I will be the change I want to see.

I will build the world I want to live in.