I mean if the idea is to get people off of the matrix.org homeserver and onto smaller federated servers, this might accomplish at least half of that.

Yes, that’s insane. I totally understand requiring payments for big attachments (even then I would probably set a bigger limit for individual attachments and instead charge for attachment/message retention a-la Slack)

But paid public rooms just means that people will jump ship from matrix.org; combined with lack of “portable identity” or any other way to easily transfer your account to another server, this may just be the beginning of the end for matrix, which is really sad.

1 MB file size limit. That’s officially worse than email. Ridiculous.
And 100 MB if I pay? Wtf, what year is this, 2002?

It’s reality. They’re not using ads or any other unethical means of profit seeking. Imagine if everyone started using Matrix and no one paid, where do you suppose the money should come from to pay for the servers? It’s like going to the grocery store and being outraged that fruit has a price tag; “what the fuck, I can’t just take this?”

Also, I can’t remember ever sending files nearing 100 ㎆ via chat. Just use a cloud service and send the URL.

All these free services have made us spoiled, lazy, and greedy. I’ve written some related essay about it:

What if I paid for all my free software?
I’ve always felt guilty by taking for granted the rare breed of virtuous humans that provide free excellent software without relying on advertising. Let’s change that and pay, how much would I “lose” anyway? —https://www.arscyni.cc/file/take_my_money.html

1 MB file size limit. That’s officially worse than email. Ridiculous. And 100 MB if I pay? Wtf, what year is this, 2002?

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