41–50 of 169 posts
Back when WhatsApp's business model relied on subscriptions rather than ads, it sold for $1/year. What justifies this being 120x more expensive? Is it just economies of scale?
Back when WhatsApp's business model relied on subscriptions rather than ads, it sold for $1/year. What justifies this being 120x more expensive? Is it just economies of scale?
WhatsApp was selling you access to your account. Element is selling you access to an instance which you can share with as many users as you want.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
server as in the server daemon, not server as in the physical server.
I would phrase that as 'server instance.' Their language like "you’re sharing minimal infrastructure with anyone else" does reinforce the idea they mean physical server. Maybe "dedicated" and "infrastructure" are being abstracted into meaninglessness as cloud computing matures.
> This agreement does not apply to Matrix servers run by anyone else - Matrix is an open network like the Web and this agreement only applies to the server provisioned by the Customer and provided by Element.
What do other Matrix servers matter to my hypothetical Element Home server or my selfhosted matrix-synapse server?
>The Customer must ensure that all Authorised Users are at least 16 (sixteen) years old to use both our Hosting and Communication Services or such greater age required in their country to register for or use our Hosting and Communication Services.
So no using it with your younger family or school for example?
I appreciate a service being offered but would prefer a solution that enables an out of the box package for self hosted consumer NAS systems. Maybe something to provide dyndns, a domain and a quick setup.
Why home vs nickle? Nickle seems to be the same with the addition of your own DNS for the same price.
The exact same features are listed for the same price, on the feature comparison page - https://element.io/pricing - except Nickel has one extra.
Why would anyone choose to have one less feature, all-else being apparently equal?
Either the comparison page is wrong/missing something, or...?
Isn't the point of decentralization that I don't have to choose some centralized party to trust?
This seems like a great move forward for Element, looks like this is angling to replace the New Vector offering they had a while back? The pricing is certainly odd, though. For 5 bucks a month I run my own server with almost a dozen folks on it, which requires basically zero maintenance (I can count the number of times I've had to go in and restart it over the past two years on one hand). Double that for a limit of 5…
That stood out to me as poorly phrased, as well. They're assuming I trust them. Even if I do/would have, it's a turn-off.
> You can just enjoy the fact you know you chose someone you trust (us!) with your data. Isn't the point of decentralization that I don't have to choose some centralized party to trust?
The biggest downside of this kind of hosted service is that they use subdomains of their own service. That means that you can't take your exact username to another service if you do end up switching. For most people, this makes switching from Element Home to something else as much of a problem as switching from Whatsapp to Signal.
The same is true for other federated services like email, of course, but the service would be a lot more portable if, for example, you could buy a domain, have the folks at Element set up the necessary DNS config (they can require one particular domain provider for their API services for all I care), and then later be able to switch to another host with the same contacts, usernames and services. Because of data portability laws, Element is forced to make this possible in the EU anyway, so it might as well be a feature of the Matrix ecosystem to be able to transfer your domains and accounts without hassle.