I have a long list of really bad hotels,but some weren’t responsible for their own badness (if you are in an “almost warzone” area priorities shift), some were known to be bad (and didn’t try to look like they weren’t - and were at least priced like that…so I am okay with that).

The worst one therefore would be one with a formerly fairly posh German chain that is now mostly run down. First they didn’t have my room ready. Then when it was ready, the carpet (ugh,I hate old 80ies carpet) felt squishy…and smelled…turns out the toilet leaked into the carpet. Which housekeeping surely would have noticed if they had cleaned the toilet…which still had the shit stains of whoever was in it before me. So I’ve got another room. It wasn’t much cleaner and had twin beds. Not what I ordered but I didn’t care at this point… extra points: There was a hole in the wall behind the closet which woul allow someone to look into the bathroom of another room. Again I didn’t care,especially as the other room seemed not to be occupied. And I was dead tired. (And yes,i always look behind closets, not for holes, but for bugs and cameras…had encounters with both)

Later the same night a hooker knocked on the door. Which is kind of strange as the elevators required key cards and the stairs were “alarm locked”. So she likely worked with someone on the inside. Which is kind of a security problem.

Now, at around 3 o’clock in the morning the door swings open and a very drunk lady walks in with her baggage. She screams I scream, she needs to puke before I can explain. At least she makes it to the toilet. So here I am, holding the hair of a total stranger puking her soul out. (Hey, as an original Oktoberfest trainer paramedic I am a professional at that!) It later turns out they simply gave her the shit stained room an hour after me, when she complained they promised to give her another room by the time she would come back from her stag night. I really would like to tell you know how this was a big love story, but it’s not. After she had a few more bodily functions and I was sure she would be okay I packed my stuff, screamed at the night desk staff a bit after they accused me of bilking the bill and went to the other side of the street into another (big EU chain) hotel. … whose night staffmember looked at me, asked me if I was also a “refugee from that other hotel” and laughed. Told me I was already the fourth one the same night.

Funny enough they really had the audacity to charge my company for the whole stay, even for things they wouldn’t be able to charge if I left after a full day. (Taxes, breakfast,etc., parking) The company lawyer had their fun with them.

I just looked them up and while the chain still operates the hotel has been closed long ago. And funny enough I even found a newspaper article of the staff complaining that “no other hotel would employ them because they knew we were above their level”. Yeah,no.

Which hype? Matrix as a protocol is used for a decade now, especially by various big governments (French, Luxembourg and German governmental messenger, various German states, German and Polish armed forces, German healthcare messenger, various smaller projects in Latin America), is bridgeable (I currently have it bridged to Whatsapp and Signal amongst others) but I really don’t see a hype - on the contrary I only see people predicting me the immediate apocalypse of Matrix for 5 years now, currently due to matrix.org (one of a hundred instances) introducing a premium account model for the most cost intensive (heavily media sharing)users. (See below for that).

Overdramatic blog post,sorry. I can’t stand the whole “fremmium” crybabies that then literally recommend the next freemium or “non transparent funding model” service… And don’t understand the fundamental difference between the Protocol and one of its implementations.

Matrix as a protocol is solid and is used far beyond the Matrix messenger. (e.g. the French and German governmental messenger, the German healthcare messenger,various armies,etc.) With a lot of commits coming from there - but not enough funding,that is definitely an issue.

The current issue with Freemium is solely limited to the matrix.org instance. There are hundreds of federated instances out there that aren’t Freemium and won’t have the need to go that way as they are funded differently.(e.g. the Lemmy Instance I am currently writing from, feddit - we are financed through other means) As they are federated it doesn’t matter - and honestly, I personally tend to see this as a good thing - it will lead users away from matrix.org towards other instances, making the whole network more reliable and decentralized.

There are two other issues that are relevant, though: The way the foundation is run is not ideal, definitely - there are and were issues and I am not happy with some management decisions, but at least they are getting somewhat better recently (government board). The whole protocol does not evolve as fast as it should be and this is an issue,especially as a it also affects bug fixing. As an executive for a (much smaller) company myself I see management issues and infighting due to lack of leadership within the foundation and I am not happy with that. The second issue is Element as a company that does things companies do - focus on making money. This in theory would be a good thing if Element would send enough money AND effort upstream to seriously bring the whole project forward. For a long time this seemed to be the case,but licensing issues and the “stale” development off Element X(Matrix 2.0) has me questioning that as well - but recent changes show us hope in that regard. We also need to carefully reconsider if element is keeping too much"closed" source code for monetized features and what influence VC really has. In conclusion: We need better leadership for Matrix,more transparency and more funding.

The good news is: It doesn’t mattter too much - if the current foundation fucks up and goes belly up it is not the end of Matrix - the protocol is decentralized enough and the licencing of the core components permissive enough for another (better?) foundation to start over. There are dozends of clients available and we have alternative servers available by now.

The funding part nevertheless is my major pet peeve here. All around Europe governments try to get rid of US tech - and use Matrix protocol based products. But they hardly if ever fund that. If Germany, France, Poland and Luxembourg (the big users) would give 5€ per year for each client they implement all issues with funding would be gone, Matrix 2.0 would be available in a few months, VC could be pushed out of elements AND they could mandate more transparency.

The issue with funding is relevant for all NGOs and especially in tech. Running servers costs a fuckton of money.

Signal has a respectable amount of backers but is a centralized protocol and when Trump does something shady moneywise their infrastructure,money and possibly even people will be gone within 24 hours.

Threema has a more sustainable business model but Switzerland is,well, difficult, in terms of privacy and intelligence services overreach, especially towards traffic pointing to foreign servers or hosts.

Revolt is a centralized service with no federation,limited selfhosting capabilities,with unclear funding(we are waiting for a financial transparency report for ages now).

Polyproto is still not quite there feature wise and funding, etc. is unclear.

Delta Chat is indeed an option but has massive technical limitations.

That leaves XMPP as the sole big competition if you want non-centralised, non-US based, privacy friendly, messaging.

And Switzerlands records in terms of privacy sadly is far worse than most people think - even with the last attack being repelled.

Matrix (preferably on a non-matrix.org instance) currently is the preferable non US and privacy friendly way.

Yeah, a friend of mine literally told them “I’d rather let you fire me than end up in El Salvador”.

They didn’t fire him. The US client was infuriated, but now they meet in Canada or London.