As a backer of the Purism Librem 5, it's nice to see some funding money for Matrix.org, especially after their recent financial troubles. Good stuff!
Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im
11–20 of 90 posts
Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im
#12Great, another messaging app. My phone and desktop are overrun by them.
Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im
#13How are they supposed to make money? I distrust for-profit messenger apps, no matter how good their intentions are. Sooner or later, they'll sell my data :(
> Sooner or later, they'll sell my data
Digital oil. Makes the world go 'round.
Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Riot.im is an open source Android/iOS/web messaging app. It uses the Matrix protocol, which is also open. There is a reference Matrix server called "Synapse", which I actually just started running the other day. With these components, you can host your own messaging platform.
Who will I message?
It's federated.
Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im
#15How are they supposed to make money? I distrust for-profit messenger apps, no matter how good their intentions are. Sooner or later, they'll sell my data :(
I'm not sure. But I'm also not sure they need to have any of your data. The riot.im client lets you connect to your own Matrix server rather than an "official" one, so they're not really able to monitor your usage or know who you are unless the app is phoning home. Maybe it's collecting analytics data? Would love to know. I only use the Riot.im app on mobile and use other clients for desktop usage.
Analytics is there, depending on platform it's either opt-in or opt-out. Android is opt-out for now, desktop seems to be opt-in. Not sure about web.
Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im
#16Cool. I just set up my own Matrix server (Synapse) the other day and have been using Riot.im on my iPhone. To be honest, everything works much better than I expected. Right now, my only complaints are that there are some notification settings that you can't change from the app, and that the user interface is a little redundant. I'm highly optimistic though.
And who are you talking to? The problem with Matrix (or other messenger technologies) is not that they're not good enough (in most cases nowdays) but that if not enough people are using them, they're useless, even if technically superior. I have pretty great working Jabber server but the issue is I have literally 2 people left I can talk to using it nowdays and both hardware and maintenance costs when compared to benefits are not looking good.
Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im
#17While it's great that they found a way to keep working on the project, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth personally because it feels like ultimate capitalism in play even when it comes to protocols like this.
Status.im hasn't done much other than raised a huge round of ICO, so they're sitting on all this money they can use to buy out other "competitor" protocols. Sure, they have a prototype beta and I guess beta testers are using it, but they don't even have a working app on the appstore.
Their (Status.im) strategy seems to be use their treasure chest of money and gain traction by acquiring other protocols (It may sound like a "partnership" but essentially the whole deal seems to be that these projects that received investment are expected to integrate with Status token)
I would have no issue with this approach if they actually HAD launched a product, but like I said, they don't even have a production app.
Riot has been around for a while, and they have an actual product. I think it sucks that an organization with more money can just buy out another org with less money. I would have loved to see Riot build their own destiny with their own tokens instead of raising capital from a competing messaging protocol.
Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im
#18Cool. I just set up my own Matrix server (Synapse) the other day and have been using Riot.im on my iPhone. To be honest, everything works much better than I expected. Right now, my only complaints are that there are some notification settings that you can't change from the app, and that the user interface is a little redundant. I'm highly optimistic though.
And who are you talking to? The problem with Matrix (or other messenger technologies) is not that they're not good enough (in most cases nowdays) but that if not enough people are using them, they're useless, even if technically superior. I have pretty great working Jabber server but the issue is I have literally 2 people left I can talk to using it nowdays and both hardware and maintenance costs when compared to ben…
Matrix has a big community of people with a lot of active rooms to chat in, and beyond that it has bridges to other networks like IRC, Gitter, and Slack. See voyager.t2bot.io for a graph of a whole lot of public Matrix rooms (created by a crawler bot).
Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Riot.im is an open source Android/iOS/web messaging app. It uses the Matrix protocol, which is also open. There is a reference Matrix server called "Synapse", which I actually just started running the other day. With these components, you can host your own messaging platform.
Who will I message?
Check voyager.t2bot.io for a big list of different public Matrix rooms. There are lots of active rooms, as well as bridges to the biggest IRC networks, Slack, Gitter, Discord, and more.
Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
And who are you talking to? The problem with Matrix (or other messenger technologies) is not that they're not good enough (in most cases nowdays) but that if not enough people are using them, they're useless, even if technically superior. I have pretty great working Jabber server but the issue is I have literally 2 people left I can talk to using it nowdays and both hardware and maintenance costs when compared to ben…
Matrix has a big community of people with a lot of active rooms to chat in, and beyond that it has bridges to other networks like IRC, Gitter, and Slack. See voyager.t2bot.io for a graph of a whole lot of public Matrix rooms (created by a crawler bot).
This doesn't change a lot. This makes it at best Slack competitor (and I am aware of the gateways plugins being worked on) and not WhatsApp/Skype/iMessages competitor.