Yeah, it would've been good if gematik (german health care) was more than a silver member. At least they are a member, compared to the german defense forces.
Ercom might be the company providing matrix for France, so France might also be a silver member.
This pretty much. The article makes it clear by making one of the pictures a sorta representation of a black hole but yes, Matrix is quite intensive. XMPP runs on a potato.
They should stop trying to do everything at once. This whole game of trying to maintain a huge server is nonsense for such a small team. I believe they should drop it completely and focus on improving the protocol and technologies around it to make it smoother for people to host their own servers.
Yeah matrix.org is just too damn big and thus centralizing the network quite a bit. You have to federate with matrix.org if you want anyone to be able to contact you on your instance since it's like 70% of matrix users.