How 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 :(
The reason we can trust Matrix is that it's free software, and it's decentralized.
Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im
31–40 of 90 posts
Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im
#32While 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 test…
But has riot.im really been bought? Isn't this just providing the riot.im developers with more time and developmental resources to push forward with?
Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im
#33Cool. 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…
In my case, I became "that guy" and aggressively pressured people I know to switch to it, even if it's just to communicate with me. The way to get people to switch is one person at a time.
I know it's annoying, and I do avoid doing such things in general. I'd have never done it to get people to switch from proprietary centralized service X to proprietary centralized service Y.
But Matrix/Riot is special and worthy of such evangelism. It's the first federated secure IM system with a good user experience and instant messaging desperately needs to move away from today's proprietary walled garden hellscape.
I had hoped XMPP would pull it off, but it didn't. For a time it seemed Google Talk would make that happen, but Google bait and switched us.
I'm hoping that Matrix/Riot can pull off what XMPP failed to do (and Google arguably actively sabotaged), and I'm willing to strain friendships with social pressure to convert people one person at a time.
Because that's how you build movements. One person at a time.
Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need Electron. It's just a web app. I just run Riot as a pinned tab in Firefox.
That doesn't make it any less clunky or sluggish.
Eh, it reduces the memory overhead to run it in your existing browser rather than run a separate browser runtime just for Riot.
Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im
#35I have never heard of Status.im[0], but I'm glad that the Matrix protocol[1] and it's major[2] client implementation Riot.im[3]—received significant financial resources. We, a small group of tech-savvy people, tried to use Riot client in the early summer of 2017, but it was far from being convenient for work needs. Poor UI/UX, overcomplicated E2E-keys sharing, sluggish interface (Electron, as you might have guessed)…
Hey there! Sounds awesome, I'm with Status and would love for you to check out more about what we're all about. https://wiki.status.im/The_Status_Network_Whitepaper
We're super supportive of matrix and their protocol, Riot will be getting a huge overhaul from how I understand
https://matrix.org/blog/2018/01/29/status-partners-up-with-n...
their latest blog post on this investment goes over the details of what all they are hiring for.
Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im
#36Cool. 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…
I use it primarily as a Slack alternative, for coordinating with people on Free Software projects.
Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im
#37While 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 test…
But has riot.im really been bought? Isn't this just providing the riot.im developers with more time and developmental resources to push forward with?
It hasn't been bought, Status had contractually selected some features/bugs that they wanted fixed but apart from that they do not control riot.im's roadmap.
- Contracted Matrix Dev
Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im
#38I have never heard of Status.im[0], but I'm glad that the Matrix protocol[1] and it's major[2] client implementation Riot.im[3]—received significant financial resources. We, a small group of tech-savvy people, tried to use Riot client in the early summer of 2017, but it was far from being convenient for work needs. Poor UI/UX, overcomplicated E2E-keys sharing, sluggish interface (Electron, as you might have guessed)…
There's a Weechat plugin [1], however I remember it having problems with UI lags. In addition, the official Freenode bridge on matrix.org often has problems as well, but that's what I get for not bothering to run my own bridge. At least it seems like the Weechat plugin is under active development. [2] I should give it another try.
[1] https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/weechat.html
[2] https://github.com/torhve/weechat-matrix-protocol-script
Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
web and desktop are opt-out, but it all is very minimal and redacts anything personal
- Dev who wrote Riot's Analytics
Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im
#40While 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 test…
Hey there! Status is acctually making this investment not in the traditional capacity, but rather allowing New Vector (matrix, riot) to continue their development on their own terms.
Status has a very close to working MVP; developing an application completely based off of new protocols and a decentralized environment is no easy task and much R&D still has to be done with Ethereum and the whole ecosystem in general before any of these new systems are production ready; and Status aims to stay true to the ethos of keeping a completely decentralized interface and system while supporting others in the ecosystem that share that same vision.
If you sign up for our alpha on status.im you can test out our (already functional) product. The majority of work left to be done is in performance and security audits.