Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home

In addition to that though, there's also the aspect of being able to choose to host your homeserver on your own infrastructure, using your own domain, should you want to.

In Matrix your homeserver (domain) name is "baked in" to every event created by your homeserver, which means that you can't change it after setup. If your homeserver is set up on, say, "foo.ems.host", you can take a snapshot of the data at any point but you couldn't just set it up to run on your domain. If you start hosting with your own custom DNS pointed at EMS then you can take over and host on your own infrastructure at any point.

As mentioned in this thread, Element home is intended to make it as easy as possible for people to get up and running with their own Matrix homeserver. To do this we've really reduced the number of configuration steps in initial setup as much as possible, including hiding custom DNS setup which can be quite complicated.

This won't be a problem for most people, but if you're interested in custom DNS (and want EMS to host it for you), you'd probably want to start with the EMS Nickel package, with custom DNS, rather than Element Home.

It's worth noting that we're currently working on "account portability" which would allow you to decouple homeservers from specific domains. So, once this is available you should be able to change domain names etc. at any point.

I think that you've got it already, but just to clarify the pricing, the costs and constraints for Nickel and Element Home hosts are the same - $10 per month for up to 5 active users. Additional users can be added at an additional cost of $2/per user/month.

(Disclaimer - I head up Element Matrix Services)

If I wanted lower latency, I would add WebRTC-based P2P chat for those who support it, to connect directly between servers.

While Matrix is open-source, Element Matrix hosting gives you no option to modify the source code, not letting you install add-ons or modifications. There's no way to say, "Hey, check out this cool chat patch, just install it on your homeserver!" With proprietary service, if you want a feature, all you can do is say, "Ugh, I wish they would add it." With a freedom-respecting service, you could just hire someone to add it.

Therefore, EMS is not a freedom-respecting service. It's as freedom-respecting as proprietary ElasticSearch.

The headline explains that it violates the most fundamental principle of free software:

- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

It does not even attempt to give you this freedom:

- The freedom to... change the program so it does your computing as you wish.

OSS that's not FLOSS doesn't have any of the ethical benefits: A locked-down Android phone is "open-source" but not free software, as you can't modify it.

There should be a way to be able to upload patches onto your server. If corruption ensues, Element Matrix Services should not be held responsible. Let users be responsible for their software! Stop treating them like babies.

It also generally makes it much harder for open-source contributors to experiment, as you must go through a centralized repo to gain adoption.