I've found cal.com to be a more pleasant experience than calendly. The interface looks more polished, it has a ton of integrations and it works really well.
I could in theory self-host it but I'd rather use a service with a proper team to maintain it.
The free tier does everything I need. I'd be more than willing to pay ~€5/month for it to contribute to its sustainability, but there is no paying tier that makes sense to me as an individual an occasional contractor.
I self-host Cal.com and broadly agree: it works great, has a clean look, and is super customizable.
That said, getting it running was kind of a nightmare. I forget the details, but I had to edit a few different codebases and Docker images. And just the `docker build` required a database running and the frontend build kept OOMing my computer and failing with esoteric errors when I tried Podman.
Thanks for the feedback. The website is long overdue an update, and the donation page is part of it. I'm factoring it in the requests I'm making to designers.
When I publish something I like not shouting into the void so I want comments , but I also don't want to give a platform to anyone and everyone on my blog.
What works best for me is to add a link to the fediverse, linkedin and sometimes HN threads of comments when I publish a post. It's also a very low tech solution :)
At the same time, I am an opportunist — sometimes it is Reddit, sometimes it is ix Xm, and sometimes it is here, the Hacker News. Different posts resonate with different audiences; and I don't want to link to a ghost town.
One issue is that there is no such thing as "the default platform for discussions"—no matter which one you choose, only a small fraction of readers will be interested in participating.
> One issue is that there is no such thing as "the default platform for discussions"
Isn't this what the various linkback mechanisms tried to solve? It seems like the ideal solution: let anyone comment wherever they want, from a tweet to their own follow-up blog post, and connect them all via automated notifications.
> There's a rough cost breakdown available to the Governing Board right now in Discourse, which we'll be polishing and publishing after our first Finance and Fundraising Committee meeting
So the financial report is finally coming together.
We have quite a handful of volunteers and a strong community that is helping us a lot already. But some things cannot be offloaded to volunteers (typically T&S and the SRE team running the matrix.org homeserver).
Can you expand on your doubts for the ability to execute? The Foundation has a narrow set of programs on purpose, and it's not implementing any server or client for example. Most of the budget is going to matrix.org and keeping it safe (which is a lot of invisible and thankless work).
Thank you for sharing that information. It seems like the foundation has been slowly moving in the right direction. I may have written a bit too harshly in my previous comment. I have been checking in on the development of Matrix, the Foundation, and monitoring that Github issue for quite some time.
Questions:
What is the narrow set of programs Matrix.org maintains? Is Trust and Safety referring to moderating the Matrix.org homeserver?
Are there strategies that could offload some of the homeserver hosting/moderation burden to community home server operators?
Are there strategies that could make the Matrix Conf closer to break even or perhaps even revenue positive?
Most importantly, how is the foundation protected and independent of its commercial sponsors? Currently 1/2 of the foundation's "Guardians", its top governance board, are from a single commercial entity. (I am profoundly grateful to Element for their past and continued support of Matrix and its operations, but as we have witnessed in other open source communities, having a single commercial interest having too much control can be disastrous over the long term).
I really, really hope Matrix succeeds in the long term. I am absolutely rooting for it.
> What is the narrow set of programs Matrix.org maintains? Is Trust and Safety referring to moderating the Matrix.org homeserver?
Yes, the Foundation is currently:
- Running the matrix.org homeserver from a technical perspective (servers & services costs + SRE)
- Keeping the matrix.org homeserver free of spam. That's a notoriously difficult task on a tight budget but we're writing tools and working with contractors to get more efficient.
- Maintaining and running several bridges (to Slack, XMPP and several IRC networks)
- Maintaining the matrix.org website
- Working with the community to promote the most active/interesting projects in our weekly post This Week in Matrix and our YouTube show Matrix Live
- Organizing The Matrix Conference, FOSDEM, and contributing to several conferences
The Foundation is not developing server or client software. There is a SDK under the matrix-org/ umbrella for historical reasons but the Foundation doesn't contribute to it.
> Are there strategies that could offload some of the homeserver hosting/moderation burden to community home server operators?
> Are there strategies that could make the Matrix Conf closer to break even or perhaps even revenue positive?
There are two things we can do:
- Either get more sponsors to keep an event of this scale
- Or do some cost compression by doing a smaller scale event, being hosted in a university or some sponsors' offices for free, reducing the catering, etc.
It's probably going to be an act of balance. Make the event too modest, and you miss out on potential businesses, make the event too extravagant and you go bankrupt.
> how is the foundation protected and independent of its commercial sponsors?
Can you be more specific of the threats you're envisioning here?
> Currently 1/2 of the foundation's "Guardians", its top governance board, are from a single commercial entity.
Yes, there used to be 5 Guardians before one stepped down. The Guardians are looking for another 5th peer to replace her.
> I really, really hope Matrix succeeds in the long term. I am absolutely rooting for it.
Thank you for your support, and thanks for holding us accountable :)
>Can you be more specific of the threats you're envisioning here?
One open source founder who had complete control over the projects foundation appears to have used access to foundation resources against a commercial competitor- the case is currently in court, but the drama has already had a substantial negative impact on that community.
Some years ago, another open source founder who had great influence over the projects nonprofit removed a long time contributor from the project over commercial perception concerns, not due to a violation of the projects code of conduct- then repeatedly lied about the reason to the community (editing their own posts multiple times to try to cover it up), causing substantial harm to the project and community.
People aren't perfect, they will make mistakes, even without commercial interests. But the foundation, seeking to support all interests equally, can build confidence and security by spreading authority across interests (the Matrix Governing Board is a great step in that direction, but legally it seems like its role is advisory and subordinate to the Guardians, as it is not part of the governing documents of the organization).
> Can you expand on your doubts for the ability to execute?
I have faith that the foundation manages its finance properly. I believe the Matrix protocol (and ecosystem) is full of good, needed, ideas.
But the software produced by the foundation is simply bad. From the clients to the servers. In every single matrix threads, complaints about the UX or performance abound. Usually followed by people from the foundation saying it's fixed in X or 2.0. Or by fanboys saying it's not a real problem and wasting resources on UX is dumb.
That's been going on for almost a decade now. That's a clear demonstration of a lack of ability to execute on a good idea.
> But the software produced by the foundation is simply bad.
The foundation produces things like the spec and the e2ee libs. The last time the foundation produced a client was in 2015, and servers in 2023 - in both instances the wider community builds the implementations, just as W3C doesn’t make web browsers any more.
> Usually followed by people from the foundation saying it's fixed in X or 2.0.
Could this be because… it’s fixed in Element X or Matrix 2.0, perhaps?
I concur! Several of us also subscribe to your blogs' RSS feeds. If you're one of the nice people who put the full content of their blog posts into their feed, you might not see me as a visitor, but I definitely read and enjoy your blog.
As an occasional blog writer myself, I also like to announce manually on my social platforms I use (Mastodon and LinkedIn) when I blogged, and send a link to those socials post. The [full rationale is here][1]. They make it feel less like shouting in the void, which helps me stay motivated. I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the occasional likes and boosts I get from these, too :)
Simon Willison also has [good advice on how to write more][2], that I must admit I'm struggling to follow myself.
Figma has a paid plan that we're happy to pay for.
Penpot currently doesn't even have a paid plan anywhere. And their pricing page says that they are planning to offer paid tiers in a year (Q1 2025). A sibling post has answered some questions that they do have some VC funding, which is good. I was concerned about "how have they paid the bills so far, and how will they pay the bills until a year from now when they start charging?"
I've been burned in the past by open source projects that didn't grow enough to have a critical mass of skilled talent (Ember.js being a big one, finding talent was a supreme headache so we abandoned it after 5 years). So I'm always nervous now about "who is going to know this tool, and who is financially motivated to keep it vibrant and going" and also, "is it worth paying to have someone learn this skill if it isn't growing", all tradeoffs we have to make when picking tools/technologies.
We used Zola for https://matrix.org and it was an overall pleasant experience!
One major upside of Zola is that it's very stable, so you don't end up updating your dependencies every other day.
One significant downside is that Zola seems to be sometimes a bit creative with the slugs generation, which can generate slug collisions where there shouldn't be any. It's possible to override them manually though.
I find it very simple to use as a developer, but there are quite a few things happening behind the scenes to make the site itself faster to load for users (e.g. it inlines the CSS so you don't have to load a separate sheet).
The only downside of it is that it depends on a package manager.
I could in theory self-host it but I'd rather use a service with a proper team to maintain it.
The free tier does everything I need. I'd be more than willing to pay ~€5/month for it to contribute to its sustainability, but there is no paying tier that makes sense to me as an individual an occasional contractor.