Element is the poster-child of the venture capital long forgotten darling, now struggling for its survival after failing as an investment and as a product so thoroughly. During its first decade, they had to pump hype with overblown promises to keep the funds coming, often dragging the ecosystem into unsustainable and unattainable quests (remember P2P?). Now that this is no longer on the menu, they want to give the pretence of being the “reasonable” alternative and focuses on leeching public grants while completely failing/being late to the party in the corporate space. Even though Matrix saw some non-federating/private deployments at some government agencies in the recent years, little of it has benefitted Element, which pissed them off enough into going with an open-core model (i.e. closed source “Synapse Pro” with a paid subscription for the resource-efficient server). I’ve been following them since the very start, and although “fibbing” might be too strong a word, deception is their MO.