However, these bridges require regular maintenance as the bridged platforms evolve their APIs, and significant engineering and moderation support to run. Luckily, the Matrix ecosystem is now more mature than it was at the time we spun up those public Slack, XMPP and IRC bridge instances. There are now commercial players like Beeper providing a user-friendly offering for people who want to get all their conversations in a single app, or IndieHosters and Fairkom offering hosting for Matrix server and bridge instances (and much more).
So unless the Foundation manages to raise $100,000 of funding by the end of March 2025, we will have to focus our resources on the critical lines of work, and consequently we will have to shut down all the remaining bridges hosted by the Matrix.org Foundation. This includes bridges to Slack, XMPP, OFTC (IRC), and Snoonet (IRC). We will also mark the software behind those bridges as archived, as we don’t have the resources to accept new contributions.
In practice, the Foundation needs an additional $610K in revenue to break-even, but this $100K would extend our runway 1 month while we work on landing grants and new members. To put this in context, we nearly doubled our revenue in 2024, reaching $561K, but it was also the first year in which we carried the full cost of our operations: $1.2M. To make ends meet, we liquidated $283K worth of cryptocurrency donations and ended the year with a $356K deficit. We are currently on target for $587K revenue in 2025, with a modest increase in expenses.
They failed to provide a transparent financial report in the last 6 years. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/571
Not to say that they are misusing the funds, but if they can’t get the basics right as a foundation it doesn’t inspire confidence in them.
