Apologies if my timings are off in this comment. They should be close enough to make my point, but it can be hard to find the actual dates.

I have run a Synapse server for almost 8 years, by my reckoning. For most of that time I have been a $15/mo supporter.

For several years, I had been hoping Dendrite would be released, along with a migration path to get my users over there. Synapse's resource usage is not great. I do run workers in order to improve performance.

I'm waiting for an official migration path because I don't want to have to migrate my community again like I did when we moved from Slack to Matrix. It takes a lot of work just to move people over, and you always lose a couple people, which is a serious cost.

Early last year I learned that they had put that on ice due to money issues. So there wasn't much hope of moving to a lower-cost Matrix implementation without a lot of headache. This makes sense. Building a homeserver implementation while maintaining an older one is expensive.

For a year or more we've had quite a few blog posts saying that there's not enough money and that large organizations join the Matrix Foundation. This makes sense. Those organizations have enough money to keep it going, unlike my small monthly donation, which doesn't really matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.

It's been quite a while since we've seen a new user-facing feature, and longer since we've had a selling point (which I could use to answer the question "why should I move to Matrix?"). It makes sense to prioritize functionality over new features, particularly when you've got a limited budget. But we still don't have some features which are very popular in Discord and Slack, like custom react images; these are implemented in other clients, like Cinny, but not Element.

Last year they released Sliding Sync in Synapse, deprecating the Sliding Sync Proxy which I had been running to support clients who wanted to use Element X (a new client implementation). I personally haven't switched since Element X does not support Spaces. Moving Sliding Sync into Synapse saved me some resources supporting those clients. It was a little hard to tell when it was safe to remove the Sliding Sync Proxy; I had to track a couple Github issues. Matrix used to have a public roadmap, but it's no longer updated, so it's hard to keep up with the status of different features in development.

After that they released Matrix Authentication Service (MAS), which is an additional service to deploy that moves the internal authentication functionality out of Synapse and interfaces with Synapse using OIDC. I haven't deployed it yet. They say it will eventually get rolled into Synapse, so I'm intending to wait for that.

All in all, it does not feel like the things I want, and (assuming I'm not a completely unusual case) that the community wants, are high priority for the Element team. Donations the size of mine don't make a difference for their budget. They're spending what budget they do have on refactors like MAS, which don't seem to impact usability (though perhaps they do if you have a massive homeserver). They spend time and effort supporting new features which make Element X faster (Sliding Sync) but have not yet implemented all the core functionality (Spaces) so there's not much reason to move.

I concluded a few months ago that our interests are not aligned any more and stopped donating. I know I'm not owed anything for my donations. I donated to support a project which I was excited about. This announcement, and that RAM graph which I will never see on my own server, makes me confident in discontinuing my support.

I do not feel like Matrix/Element values its community any more.