Amandine Le Pape

Hi all,

Today is a big day! As you know, over the last few months we’ve been searching for a Managing Director to join the Matrix.org Foundation full-time, focused on managing the Foundation’s finances, organising the Foundation’s membership programme, helping raise funding to support Foundation work, working with the Guardians to ensure the Foundation stays on mission, and ensuring the Foundation can operate successfully as a fully independent entity.

Continue reading…

We shared back in December how we wanted to find a way for people and organisations to support Matrix in a more impactful manner. We wanted it to also enable the Foundation to be more autonomous and more powerful in growing the ecosystem. Well the day has come: the Foundation is now able to formally accept members!

So what is a member of the Matrix.org Foundation? It's an organisation or individual who financially supports the Foundation by paying a yearly membership fee, and in return gets some influence in driving the direction of Matrix and the Foundation's activities.

The key has been to create a balanced governance model, to make sure the Foundation stays aligned with the Matrix manifesto. For this we've created a Governing Board to set the direction of the Foundation whilst the membership fees will fuel our efforts to get us there.

So why become a member?

A common, durable platform

Matrix is an open protocol everyone can contribute to. However we believe that to remain healthy, a protocol is better off having a single spec that needs to be curated. The additions need to be debated, implemented in actual software, and the rest of the specification needs to be adapted to the new changes. Such curation and edition work take time and effort, but the benefits of it are enormous.

A curated protocol benefits individuals, digital rights activists, and philanthropic investors who believe in the fundamental right to control and privacy in online communication. As an open standard for real time communications, Matrix brings the sovereignty, security and interoperability, which are key to having full control over one's own communication. By financially supporting the project, people who are aligned with our beliefs allow us to keep fighting for our collective rights, be it by providing secure software or persuading regulators to protect their citizens (such as our DMA promotion work or our fight against the Online Safety Bill).

A curated protocol benefits profit-making companies building communication products and services. Decentralisation is a hard problem. End-to-end encryption is a hard problem. Decentralised end-to-end encrypted communications are a very hard problem. Matrix is doing the heavy lifting in these areas so companies can focus on building what they do best: creating great user experiences on top of it. By financially supporting the project, organisations building on Matrix rest assured it keeps evolving, being patched and staying secure. In short it ensures Matrix remains a competitive advantage over other products, at a fraction of what it would cost to maintain an in-house solution.

A curated protocol benefits entire governments, and large parts of the public sector, who have both adopted it widely. Public organisations can not only benefit from a sovereign, secure and interoperable solution - they can also ensure public money is spent for public good, not shareholder wealth. By joining the Matrix Foundation, public sector entities contribute to the stability, security and performance of Matrix. Investing into the project ensures that the open standard that is supporting their healthcare, defence and public administration continues to benefit from innovative open source software development.

Stay unbiased & vendor neutral

The Matrix manifesto hasn't changed. We still believe people should have full control over their own communication, not be locked in silos, be able to converse securely and privately, and that communication should be available to everyone as a free and open, unencumbered, standard and global network.

The Foundation maintains the Spec, which formalises the behaviour expected from the various software components of the Matrix ecosystem. We believe it's important for both individuals using the protocol - and organisations building products on top of it - to be part of the decision process when it comes to shaping the evolution and features of Matrix. So we have designed membership tiers catering for all budgets, and mapped the Governing Board representatives evenly across the tiers.

The Spec Core Team appointed by the Foundation's Guardians is particularly vigilant against features which only benefit particular players, or are designed to somehow cripple or fragment the open protocol and ecosystem in favour of competitive advantage. As such it is a guardian of the neutrality of the protocol, making sure it will serve the general public's interests and be a solid base to build robust products on for commercial organisations.

Delivering from the get go

The Matrix.org Foundation wants to take a more active stance in supporting the protocol. The Foundation needs to respond appropriately to the Governing Board's recommendations. We are hiring a Managing Director who will be in charge of identifying and building programmes the Foundation can deliver, obtaining funding for it, building a team and overseeing the delivery with the approval and support of the Governing Board.

Such programmes could include an accreditation process, to give more visibility and credibility to the organisations adopting Matrix seriously, organising more Matrix events, to promote the standard and share experiences amongst the community etc. Their mission will overall be to make the ecosystem thrive and grow.

A Managing Director working full time will also allow us to increase the Foundation's transparency by allowing it to report more often on such programmes, independently from any vendor.

Going where we're expected to

The Governing Board is the new compass of the Foundation: it refines the vision of the Foundation and steers the Managing Director and Spec Core Team in the right direction.

This gives the Governing Board a lot of power over the Foundation and Matrix, so we've put in place several safeguards to ensure the Foundation remains healthy.

For example, the Guardians remain the ultimate authority, should the Governing Board take decisions against the interest of Matrix, and the Governing Board cannot appoint or remove members of the Spec Core Team.

To ensure that the Governing Board is representative from every stakeholder in the ecosystem, we've included both representatives from every membership levels, including individuals, but also representatives of those who are rooted in its day to day operations (i.e. the MD and the Spec Core Team), and of the Guardians.

Since the Governing Board sets the direction for the Foundation, continuity is important. Therefore, members of the Governing Board are serving for two years, with yearly elections renewing only half of the board at once. This makes room for fresh ideas without losing context of the previous decisions.

Finally, this membership scheme is also meant to formalise and better distribute the relations of power in the Matrix ecosystem, to make it more independent of specific vendors. We believe this is a major next step to make Matrix thrive, and welcome everyone to join us in our mission. You can also check our Prospective Members presentation here for more details.

In short, become a member today!

Send an email to funding@matrix.org or browse matrix.org/membership

Today the European Parliament, the European Council and the European Commission will meet again for a discussion about the Digital Markets Act (DMA). This is the second of three of these meetings, appropriately called trilogues, where each party exposes their stance on a proposed law and the group tries to agree on the final version.

The DMA is a groundbreaking step forward in shaking the hold a few gatekeepers have on users and the market, in particular because it looks to (among others):

• Require gatekeepers to allow other services to interoperate with their services
• Prevent them to treat their own services and products more favourably (for example by ranking)
• Require them to allow users to uninstall any pre-installed software or app

The interoperability obligation is obviously the one on which we’ve kept a particularly close eye, as if it lands well it could take the success of Matrix to the next level completely overnight.

However, whilst in our mind interoperability automatically implies “open standard”, there are actually different ways of implementing it, depending on how far one wants to go. Typical debates here have been between whether to force gatekeepers to maintain open and well documented APIs, or whether to go full swing and mandate an open standard, and every shade in between.

We’ve been lucky to have had the opportunity to talk to policy advisors from different European member states, and it has been pretty fascinating to realise that it was always the same arguments which were being presented back at us, straight from the gatekeepers partyline.

We’ve ended up just listing them in a quick, high level, Myth Debunking exercise and thought it would be useful to actually publish them for everyone to access, so here they are!

• MYTH #1 - "It is impossible to have a standard that is open, decentralized and secure at the same time"
  ⇒ false: HTTPS did it, Matrix did it.
• MYTH #2 - "It is difficult and expensive to make existing services compatible with a standard"
  ⇒ false: Gitter was integrated into Matrix in less than a month, with a single developer
• MYTH #3 - "Interoperability is incompatible with end-to-end encryption"
  ⇒ false: services just have to speak the same language, email has proved this with S/MIME and PGP - where different vendors can and do interoperate with E2EE. It’s even better when the protocol is E2EE by default.
• MYTH #4 - "It may work for messaging, but less so for social networks"
  ⇒ false: it's still about managing content and users. Even though social networks have more varied content, it is already well modelled for their own APIs, ready to be expressed in a common language. The key is in the fallback option on unsupported features, as well as the ability to have moderation tools (more on that later).
• MYTH #5 - “Interoperability is not compatible with data privacy”
  ⇒ false: Interoperability gives the ability to users to choose who is hosting their data and as such choose providers they trust. Besides, the DMA doesn’t live in a vacuum: it will exist alongside horizontal regulations like the GDPR and the Data Act, which give people sufficient control over their data to rectify their choices if they are not happy. Because the possibility of interoperability is there, it does not mean it will become mandatory for users to use it: they will still have their own threat models and will make decisions accordingly, just as they do today. But enshrining interoperability in law will at least ensure gatekeepers need to provide recourse for people to have further control over their data, which will be an improvement from the landscape today.
• MYTH #6 - "There is no user need"
  ⇒ false: most haven't had a taste of interoperable chat/social media (but they know email), others are demanding bridges between services: 25% users of 2 communication apps lose contact with friends because they are using too many apps. And this figure doubles for people using more than 5 apps. There was no demand for cars when they were created: people only wanted faster horses.
• MYTH #7 - "There is no demand from European companies"
  ⇒ false: The fact it is so hard for European companies to remain competitive enough to stay alive means there are few of them to complain about what is killing them! However these companies are gathering to push for interoperability (like the Coalition for Competitive Digital Markets). It will enable them to be more innovative in the product they develop by benefiting from an existing open network rather than being slowed down by having to build one from scratch. Companies will compete on the value they add rather than the size of their network. An open standard also gives an open field for innovation from a business model perspective. The Web is an excellent example of how much an open network fuels innovation and growth.
• MYTH #8 - "It is better to require providers to have open and stable APIs than define a single open standard"
  ⇒ false: this is the best way to leave gatekeepers at the center of the ecosystem as it means that each player has to multiply its effort to interface with every single other player, but every player will only have the resources to interface with a few of its counterparts and will logically default to the bigger ones, effectively not solving the problem. In addition, if providers are not aligned on which encryption to use it will just break end-to-end encryption and create risk for the user in every bridge. In practice the DMA is about forcing the gatekeepers to interoperate only, but we strongly believe that everyone should be interoperating if we are about improving the user’s experience and control, and giving more space to companies to innovate. Limiting it to the gatekeepers is a first step, but only a defensive one.
• MYTH #9 - “An open standard limits innovation if it defines a lowest common denominator”
  ⇒ false: the lowest common denominator should match what users consider as table stakes in a messaging or social media app. Providers can innovate on top by providing different features which go beyond table stakes, for example by targeting niche use cases, like messaging services focused on elderly and disabled users, or focused on healthcare, warehouse workers, or integrated in a CRM for call centers, or creatives… Providers also can implement a profile of the standard which is a subset of its full scope, ensuring the standard remains a highest common denominator..
• MYTH #10 - “It will be impossible to moderate social networks built on an open standard”
  ⇒ false: decentralised networks actually have driven the adoption of much more sophisticated moderation techniques than the coarse approaches of centralised silos. Appropriate moderation means have to be part of the open standard definition, and some are already used in Matrix. It would also empower victims who today have no choice but get in touch with providers one by one. Each provider will also have control over their own users, and users can select providers whose T&Cs are aligned with their ethics. The world is not black and white, unlike what Silicon Valley tries to make us believe.
• MYTH #11 - “It will take years before being able to define an open standard”
  ⇒ you don’t have to: You could leverage existing technologies which are being used by the industry. Matrix, XMPP and ActivityPub exist today. For instance, Matrix has been managed by its own standard body (The Matrix Foundation) and could be ratified by a more established one like IETF, ETSI or W3C if needed.

Obviously the devil will be in the details of the way the final text is formulated, as well as the limits, obligations and controls put in place, but overall it should be an improvement for all European users and companies and we’re looking forward to seeing how today’s trilogue goes!

We'd like to share a guest post from Dmitriy Volkov (who's been using Matrix almost since day 1!) - announcing the Goto::Hack event at the Tor Onionspace in Berlin in January.  The Onionspace will be on fire as folks attack the New Year by tackling the critical problem of internet decentralisation. A week long brainstorm and hack feels like the right way to go after the Christmas break! GNUnet, Tor, Matrix, pick your topic, or mix them all, and join the gang!  Hopefully we'll have someone there from the Matrix core team too (although it depends on funding and timings).

-- Amandine

We'd like to invite you to discuss and hack all things decentralized internet: from conceptual issues like identity and foundational tech like network stack to most practical questions, e.g. "What do I advise people at Cryptoparty in lieu of WhatsApp?" or "How do I make a GNUnet app?".

Broadly, we'll do networks, distributed systems, infosec and telecom - with GNUnet / secushare and Matrix developers, find out more here.

Time : 02-09 Jan 2018 Space : Onionspace, Gottschedstraße 4, Aufgang 4, 13357 Berlin

It's well known Big Brother has been listening to our phone calls, reading texts and partnering with companies like Amazon or Google for a while now; more and more countries start censoring Internet - it's not just China. Most "secure" communications solutions like Threema or Telegram suffer conceptual issues, like being unsecure-by-default or controlled by single commercial entity. Decentralized systems - the proposed technical part of the solution - bring forth their own challenges: how do we conveniently identify an entity (considering revocation and squatting), and why do blockchains as innovative as Bitcoin and Ethereum churn through gigawatts of energy while handling miserable tens of transactions per second? What can serve as practical, scalable infrastructure for a decentralized network alternative to current Internet: on physical and channel levels, in terms of routing, etc.? How do we forge convenient XMPP, free Signal, a WhatsApp that can be both used universally and trusted?

How do we make the Internet less centralized and what can be done to make existing distributed technologies more popular? Why is Tor not enough and how long are we going to continue communicating in plaintext? How do we cook identity, and can we better consensus?

During the event we will discuss, hack, code, debug and develop - both systems (GNUnet, Tor, Matrix, etc.) and applications based on them, fix UX and write docs. The goal is to make a measurable contribution to solving some of the described problems through the course of the week, meet in person with the people tackling the issues you care about and return home with the desire to continue hacking.

Please register at our website if you'd like to come - also, if you're not local, we are doing a group booking at a hostel and will be having some Berlin hacker community tours! (Use this if the first link didn't work for you - that's an IPNS issue and one thing in scope for the event.)

-- Dmitriy

Some updates on the conferences Matrix attended over the last 3 weeks: WebRTC Summit in Santa Clara, TAD Summit in Istanbul, WebRTC World West in San José and fOSSa in Rennes. Great shows, ending in lots of interesting discussions and new excitement in Matrix!

WebRTC Summit (Santa Clara, November 4-6)

Matrix was a sponsor at the Santa Clara WebRTC Summit at CloudExpo, and opened the WebRTC track alongside our friends at Open Peer / Hookflash. Matthew presented Matrix as the missing signalling layer for WebRTC and as a good federated complement to MQTT and COAP for IoT use cases: you can find his presentation here.

Great techie discussions and debates down there, the stand was flooded with interested people and John had a hardtime answering everyone by himself on day 2!

But he still found a few minutes to do a TV interview for SYSCon TV on Tuesday evening! :)

[embed]http://youtu.be/JVq6S9V1Jcg[/embed]

TAD Summit (Istanbul, November 12-13)

Matrix was a partner at TAD Summit in Istanbul this year, a great opportunity to meet a very good mix of developers, industry players and mobile networks! TAD mixes conferences and technical workshops where everyone gets involved to create a vibrant ecosystem for Telecom Application Developers. Again really productive discussions and meetings as we continue our search for partners to help support the uptake of Matrix.

Matthew's talk was fully recorded so just watch the video to get the real pitch!

[embed]http://youtu.be/ER3g4-4bFYk?list=PLO-gJ4-4x_IIYVTuLmVr8iUedvVdduYY4[/embed]

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As-5vVdXhu0[/embed]

WebRTC World (San Jose, November 18-20)

Matrix's attendance at WebRTC World in San Jose was more rewarding than expected! The team was ready to be part of the expo and give a talk on FOSS WebRTC options... but didn't hesitate to jump at the opportunity when a demo slot opened up! And that was a worthwhile decision as Matrix ended up winning not one but TWO awards from the demo: The Audience Choice Award as the audience's favourite demo of the 10 shown on Tuesday, and also the overall Best Social Integration Award from the Jury! So a big congrats to the dev team who were rushing to get the fine details ready in time and to Matthew for getting the audience's attention! And of course a even bigger thank you to everyone who voted for us, including in the Jury!

Of course this drew lots of interest, and WebRTC Expo ended up the busiest show ever for the team who pitched solidly at the booth for 2 days in a row!

fOSSa (Rennes, November 20)

And eventually, while Matthew and John were celebrating in San José (or flying home, more accurately), Amandine was also evangelising at home in Rennes (France), where fOSSa was gathering experts from the opensource world for 3 days. Matrix was presented within the Serendipity section on the conférence, "Le Carrefour des Possibles": 6 minutes to pitch an open project that making dreams possible.

So if you speak French or are not afraid to only read from the slides, check out the video the team made of the pitch. The official one should be available soon!

[embed]http://youtu.be/DyL9Ue0KlBU[/embed]

Crazy session tonight at 5pm UK time (12 Noon Eastern Time; 9AM Pacific) on VUC as Matrix, Truphone and Jitsi were crazy enough to hack a federated demo in 48h!

Join us live for the demo from the inside by using Matrix to attend the conference (see steps below)! No browser supporting WebRTC at hand but still willing to play with Matrix? You can also follow the chatroom (bridged to IRC) by entering #vuc:matrix.org.

For other connection means:

• Live video http://live.vuc.me or http://vuc.me
• Live audio: http://vuc.audio
• sip:200901@login.zipdx.com
• Skype:vuc.me
• Or from a regular telephone or cell call ZipDX (+1 (646) 475-2098) or see the Voxbone International Dial-in List.

Steps to join the call from Matrix:

1. Register on Matrix from Chrome if not already done :)
2. Start a chat with @vucbot:matrix.org by entering the ID in the appropriate textfield at the bottom of the public rooms list on http://matrix.org/beta and click on "Message User"
3. In the chat room start a voice call by clicking on the mic icon in the top right corner. Don't forget to allow your browser to access your mic and speakerphones!

Matrix has been showing off in various places these last months. But whilst drowning in the launch we haven't managed to keep the blog updated with what's been going on! We are now much more back on track and able to catch up at last, as well as start on new ground for upcoming events!

So you'll find here a summary of the 4 events Matrix attended in September and October as well as all the presentations we gave!

Disrupt San Francisco (September 6-10)

 

Disrupt SF was the launchpad of Matrix! We participated in the Hackathon as both a sponsor and a competitor (see our live update!), and exhibited at the conference as a Product Sponsor.

Three teams announced that they were using Matrix to build their hack but eventually only Go Social presented their project: a social network for travelers with a very nice UI! Go Social used Matrix APIs to add chat to their platform. The video of Go Social's presentation is here.

Matrix team worked on Animatrix: a chat app allowing you to build your own 3D animated cartoon and share it with any other friend using Matrix-compliant app using Unify. We had to hack together a basic Matrix Android client in order to do the demo .... You can see our project's presentation here!

The three days conference was great in terms of reaching out to devs and getting good feedback on Matrix! We love seeing people's eyes lighting up and people saying "Eventually someone is doing it!" when we explain what Matrix is about :) So thank you all for your support!

Disrupt Europe (London, UK - October 18-21)

After getting public in SF, Disrupt London was the next steps to release a more stable version of Matrix and encourage even more people to build on Matrix. Again we sponsored both the Hackathon and the Conference and we brought with us a very cool PhantomX robot from Trossen Robotics which was also the price we gave away during the hackathon.

Two teams pitched a Matrix project at the Hackathon this time:

Hujambo is a very cool chat app allowing you to chat in your native language to someone who is going to read you in their own native language.

Movidiam did a very ambitious hack, modelling the trends of conversation in the Matrix ecosystem and displaying them a force-directed graph visualisation using D3.

Matrix team worked on a MIDI to Matrix bridge allowing to share and display music you play in a chatroom and jam together even if in different places. Here is the demo video:

http://youtu.be/LXDBoHyjmtw

Another great time to meet a lot of interesting people and build partnerships!

WebRTC Summit Europe and Rich Communication Conference (Berlin - October 27-29)

Matrix was a Silver sponsor at WebRTC Summit and the Rich Communication events and it was a great opportunity to show the multiple ways that Matrix can be considered.

The first day was the WebRTC Summit where the focus was on the challenges and next steps of the standard. Matthew presented Matrix explained how it can be used as the missing signaling layer to WebRTC raising lots of questions and interest. You can see the presentation here.

The two next days were focusing more on Rich Communication Services (RCS) and again Matrix didn't go unnoticed, and not only because of the lightspeed presentation from Matthew waking everyone up on Wednesday morning! This time Matthew addressed Telcos and RCS vendors with the compelling proposition of using Matrix as the bridge between RCS/IMS/PSTN and the world of over-the-top applications.  The presentation is downloadable here.

Again some great feedback and lots of animated discussions over the future of the IP communication world!

WebRTC Summit (Santa Clara - November 4-5)

Beginning of November Matrix was back on the West Coast  to sponsor the WebRTC Summit, collocated with the CloudExpo. Matthew opened the WebRTC track with another presentation again raising a lot of interest and question, and greatly supported by Hookflash in their following session. The presentation is available here.

And the tour continues: this week Matrix sponsored the TADSummit in Istanbul and next week we will be in San José at the WebRTC World Conference & Expo: meet us there and watch out for the upcoming TADSummit news!

Hey,

We realized we're missing a high level overview highlighting the key points of the specifications and architecture of Matrix, which could be useful for those who don't feel like going straight into the specs. So here is a quick presentation to fill in some of the gaps!

Please fire away with any questions :)

Hi, I'm Amandine and I look after the businessy bits of Matrix.org. I have a technical background and have always had the need to see the bigger picture. My motivation in starting Matrix has mainly been to make my dream of ubiquitous real-time communications come true and fix what felt broken in the industry. Here is the story.

When studying telecoms I was fascinated by converging networks, the “Next Generation Network” as we called it. Wow, imagine! Having fixed lines, mobiles and computers able to communicate with each other? Call a number and have the ability to answer seamlessly on any device? And the capability to do video calls and share files? That was definitely Next Generation at the time! Especially given the best we could do with a mobile was bad GSM, MMS and WAP if you were lucky.... A decade later video calling is possible on any device; I can share anything I want with my contacts (pictures, videos, files, random stickers) thanks to hundreds of different apps; sometimes my history is even synced across several devices! And if I choose my mobile provider carefully I can even have a “One Number” service! :)

But still, we're far away from the ubiquitous dream of 10 years ago. None of my apps are talking to each other. One number is more often “one login per app”. My conversation history is scattered across all the apps (who never experienced the “Did you tell me on Facebook, Whatsapp, Skype or SMS???” question followed by 10 minutes of intense fiddling with your phone which of course is running out of battery?). My address book and profile data is stored everywhere by companies like Facebook, Google and random startups, but who knows how much they really value your privacy...

Is the tech not good enough yet? Only partially: most of the features, typically IM, video, VoIP,  are already available and widely used. However it is a reality that no tech has really imposed itself as an interoperability standard. What about economic blockers then? A better bet: what are the incentives for big companies and small startups to share their communities? Most of these corporations choose a business model that locks their users into walled gardens, directly linking their valuation to this user base. But ultimately this is bad for competition and bad for the users.

What about phone networks then? Why don't they do anything? Well, they have tried. It's called RCS (Rich Communication Services), or joyn. It's a good initiative designed by committee and implemented as a functionality deeply embedded in the network rather than a light over-the-top deployment and consequently very expensive and time-consuming to put in place. Similarly as per telco's historical positioning, RCS is more focused on quality of service than quality of user experience. But RCS is facing a few challenges: communications over IP must be free for the user to compete with the Skype & WhatsApp of this world, which limits a lot the return on investment of the deployment of an expensive network update, limiting the adoption of RCS by mobile networks. Besides quality of service is not necessarily what will trigger a success when competing with over the top apps which are 100% focused on providing the best user experience... And despite the GSMA's best efforts implementing interoperability between networks is proving very painful, limiting the growth of the ecosystem.

But ultimately we all know that today success is driven by users. This multitude of minds which decides the exact split of fun and usefulness that will define the value of a product and make it crazily successful overnight. So why are users not pushing for this ubiquity? I see two reasons: first they often don't realize how useful it could be and second: there is nothing to push! Indeed it can easily be considered as handy to have one app per group of people I want to communicate with: Facebook messenger with my school friends, Whatsapp with international friends, Skype with my family, Snapchat with my boyfriend, Voxer with my best friend... But why can't I have only one app, the one I prefer, to get in touch with everyone, whatever they are using? And if I want a fancy Tango-like video experience then I couldstill launch Tango for this scenario and have the whole chat history there. I truly believe that once fragmentation will be over everyone will wonder how we could ever live with it.

And what about privacy? Isn't it bad enough that the second I send an email to my friend asking if he's booked his flights to Madrid I get a flurry of airline adverts for flights to Spain? Even without going into the debate of whether governments should file every citizen, it's a question of principles - I'd rather have my communication history and my contacts stored by someone I trust and avoid useless adverts.  Some of you will say “Oh but you're French. ‘Vive la Révolution!' is your default motto...” - but think about it for a minute:

Imagine: only install the apps you want on your phone for communication. Use the ones you prefer because the UX is great or you love their smileys. Your whole address book is there, correctly merged. All the conversation history with your friends and family is there. And you don't care what app they're using. Or how they logged in: your app discovers them based on any ID (email, phone number, Facebook): you just need to have them in your address book. You know where your data is - perhaps stored by a new startup using renewable energy for their data center, just because you want to save the planet. Or by your geeky brother running his own server under his bed (using end-to-end encryption if you think he might be nosy!). You can still have many apps but each allows you to do different fun stuff: fancy video, crazy pictures, drawings, imaginative stickers. You control your communication.  You decide what to you want to use, who you want to trust. Welcome to Matrix.