While I can certainly understand why whatever organization published this wants free money to work on whatever they want to work on, the reality with all that other infrastructure they cite, bridges, roads, sea defense, is they aren't just publicly funded. They're publicly owned as well. This means the public also gets to say how they're run. The government doesn't just give unconditional money to someone who happened to build a bridge a while back and opened it to public use with no warranty (which presumably isn't even legal to do in most places).
hey, this is my blog post. I wouldn't expect public money to be routed to Matrix (or Mastodon or similar projects) without the funder having input into the governance of the project, just as any other funder would. https://matrix.org/membership/ is how it works for Matrix.
