Sustainable decentralised comms at Element

Описание: At FOSDEM 2026, Neil Johnson (Element’s Chief Engineering Officer) explored the critical role of sustainability in open source software - with a focus on decentralised networks like Matrix.

Element is the most widely deployed Matrix client, built by the team who created Matrix in order to bootstrap the ecosystem. The last few years have been quite a rollercoaster in terms of figuring out how to ensure Element can contribute to Matrix sustainably long-term - a problem faced by many open source projects whose core team works on the project as their day job.

The good news is we think we've now found a sustainable model that works, having moved from Apache to AGPL and having finally released an official Matrix distribution from Element in the form of Element Server Suite (ESS) Community under the AGPL. In this talk we'll give a super quick tour of the journey that we've been on and the learnings encountered along the way, in the hope that other decentralised comms projects can learn from our mistakes and successes. We'll look at the work Element's been doing to sustainably progress Matrix - be that driving forwards Matrix 2.0 spec work, maintaining Synapse, or ensuring that matrix-rust-sdk provides a foundational client SDK suitable for Element X, Fractal, iamb and more.

Finally, we'll take a quick look at how Element has ended up bringing decentralised communication to the heart of public sector open source collaboration suites such as Germany's openDesk from ZenDiS, France's La Suite from DINUM, and The Netherlands' MijnBureau from MinBZK - and take a look at what the future may bring!