Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

I have never heard of Status.im[0], but I&#x27;m glad that the Matrix protocol[1] and it&#x27;s major[2] client implementation Riot.im[3]—received significant financial resources.<p>We, a small group of tech-savvy people, tried to use Riot client in the early summer of 2017, but it was far from being convenient for work needs. Poor UI&#x2F;UX, overcomplicated E2E-keys sharing, sluggish interface (Electron, as you might have guessed) and awful mobile app. I&#x27;m not sure of the current status, but I hope now they&#x27;ll be able to increase the pace of development and quality of the product, since Matrix is an excellent, federated post-XMPP&#x2F;IRC protocol, which we lack today.<p><i>Upd: references and clarifications.</i><p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.status.im&#x2F;The_Status_Network_Whitepaper" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.status.im&#x2F;The_Status_Network_Whitepaper</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;guides&#x2F;faq.html#what-is-matrix" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;guides&#x2F;faq.html#what-is-matrix</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;projects&#x2F;try-matrix-now.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;projects&#x2F;try-matrix-now.html</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;riot.im&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;riot.im&#x2F;</a>

While it&#x27;s great that they found a way to keep working on the project, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth personally because it feels like ultimate capitalism in play even when it comes to protocols like this.<p>Status.im hasn&#x27;t done much other than raised a huge round of ICO, so they&#x27;re sitting on all this money they can use to buy out other &quot;competitor&quot; protocols. Sure, they have a prototype beta and I guess beta testers are using it, but they don&#x27;t even have a working app on the appstore.<p>Their (Status.im) strategy seems to be use their treasure chest of money and gain traction by acquiring other protocols (It may sound like a &quot;partnership&quot; but essentially the whole deal seems to be that these projects that received investment are expected to integrate with Status token)<p>I would have no issue with this approach if they actually HAD launched a product, but like I said, they don&#x27;t even have a production app.<p>Riot has been around for a while, and they have an actual product. I think it sucks that an organization with more money can just buy out another org with less money. I would have loved to see Riot build their own destiny with their own tokens instead of raising capital from a competing messaging protocol.

Cool. I just set up my own Matrix server (Synapse) the other day and have been using Riot.im on my iPhone. To be honest, everything works much better than I expected.<p>Right now, my only complaints are that there are some notification settings that you can&#x27;t change from the app, and that the user interface is a little redundant. I&#x27;m highly optimistic though.

It&#x27;s hard for me to really know what status.im is. It bills itself as an OS, but it&#x27;s not because it runs on iOS and Android. Is it a separate app store and platform? Is it a collection of apps? Is it a library or a set of protocols?<p>Is this a problem with the blockchain community? Repurposing long-established words for their own use (&quot;crypto&quot;, &quot;os&quot;)?

Its good that Riot gets money, but its incredibly damning for Status, an ICO that was meant to produce its own chat platform. This shows status has no technical ability of their own, and has to ride on existing open source products.<p>The status investors paid to build a new platform, and the team is unable to deliver this.<p>By paying an existing open source project, yes we all win, but that is not what people (not myself, are you crazy... lol) paid for.

How are they supposed to make money?<p>I distrust for-profit messenger apps, no matter how good their intentions are. Sooner or later, they&#x27;ll sell my data :(

As a backer of the Purism Librem 5, it&#x27;s nice to see some funding money for Matrix.org, especially after their recent financial troubles. Good stuff!

Any investment in open source makes me happy, especially if there are 5 zeros or more, that means things can get done for a while, which makes things better, longer.<p>The Riot IM site confuses me a bit, I had thought it was an open source client you could run on own server - but I don&#x27;t see anything about that there. Did some digging on matrix and found one mention of vector code on github - not many details...<p>Is there someone I can send $100 that can spend some time explaining to me how to set this up on my own server, and how to mod it a bit so that for example, most logged info is destroyed after 24 hours and things like that?<p>After spending time and money on rocket chat I&#x27;ve come to find the value in hiring an expert &#x2F; professional in the sphere to consult with before drinking the koolaid and going all in on the flashy promises on home pages.<p>added contact info to my profile thing here, I hope it works.<p>Now if someone would put $2 million into buddypress, and mastadon (I think that&#x27;s what its called) I would think we have a future that is possible without the F and G overlords.

Good. Seeing how XMPP basically came to a complete stall, may be Matrix can progress further.

What does this product do?

One of my biggest concerns with Matrix was the amount of device data that it exposes.<p>It&#x27;s extremely easy to fingerprint the devices that someone is using (it literally tells you right within Riot) and by design could make it easy for someone to track you or target your device if there are any known exploits for it.

I&#x27;ve always resisted commenting on project names, but Riot? I was thinking re flash mobs. But OK, it&#x27;s some sort of joke.

Matrix is a good product. I am glad they got finally funded!

Great, another messaging app. My phone and desktop are overrun by them.