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Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

blog.status.im

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Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

#61
post #10

I 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)…

Been using Riot for a couple months. The web app can be a bit sluggish, but I can't think of a single complaint about the mobile app.

My biggest concern at this point is that messages seem delayed sometimes by a few seconds. I don't know if this is an optimization issue, or some deeper problem with Matrix's protocol/distributed nature, but it can be annoying if I'm trying to carry on a real time conversation with someone.

It hasn't affected me too much overall, and I'm optimistic it will eventually be sorted out.

Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

#62
post #10

I 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)…

Been using Riot for a couple months. The web app can be a bit sluggish, but I can't think of a single complaint about the mobile app. My biggest concern at this point is that messages seem delayed sometimes by a few seconds. I don't know if this is an optimization issue, or some deeper problem with Matrix's protocol/distributed nature, but it can be annoying if I'm trying to carry on a real time conversation with som…

As far as I can tell (and from asking the developers), this is simply caused by the matrix.org servers being overloaded. Other homeservers don't seem to have this issue.

Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

#63
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been using Riot for a couple months. The web app can be a bit sluggish, but I can't think of a single complaint about the mobile app. My biggest concern at this point is that messages seem delayed sometimes by a few seconds. I don't know if this is an optimization issue, or some deeper problem with Matrix's protocol/distributed nature, but it can be annoying if I'm trying to carry on a real time conversation with som…

As far as I can tell (and from asking the developers), this is simply caused by the matrix.org servers being overloaded. Other homeservers don't seem to have this issue.

Good to hear. I was hoping that would be the case, and obviously it's not bothering me enough to do more than a cursory google search.

Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

#64
post #39
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

#65
Its good that Riot gets money, but its incredibly damning for Status, an ICO that was meant to produce its own chat platform. This shows status has no technical ability of their own, and has to ride on existing open source products.

The status investors paid to build a new platform, and the team is unable to deliver this.

By paying an existing open source project, yes we all win, but that is not what people (not myself, are you crazy... lol) paid for.

Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

#66
post #6

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 :(

We are not going to sell your data, nor can we (especially if it’s end-to-encrypted or sitting on someone else’s server)! The plan for making $ at New Vector is to provide paid hosted services of various kinds instead. (I work on Matrix).

Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

#67
post #16
post #3

Cool. 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…

> if not enough people are using them, they're useless

I feel like it only takes a handful of active users in your network to make the app worthwhile, though. I use a variety of messengers (including Riot) to talk with different people and don't find it burdensome, even if it is suboptimal.

Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

#69
post #10

I 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)…

>Matrix is an excellent, federated post-XMPP/IRC protocol

I have my doubts about this. So many IM systems have got this wrong before that there's no reason to give anyone the benefit of the doubt.

I, too, have looked at matrix at some point. I setup a server, created a user, joined a couple low traffic rooms in their main server, and found major practical issues on their protocol's behaviour.

It had problems with signatures when messages contained a certain field, so some messages appeared and others were missing. This seemed very unorthogonal (why is the payload not just a field of its own? Why do messages have so many fields? Why is the signature code different on both ends?) and left a bad impression. To top it off, the server was making me hit my ISPs (pretty bad ISP) connections per second limit. It was opening connections to hundreds of servers, constantly, which seems like seriously bad for scaling, considering I had only joined two low traffic rooms.

So, I fear this is going to be the same Jabber/XMPP bullshit all over again.

Apparently, development focus isn't on making the basic protocol perfect, but on UX nonsense and adding features (think "reaction animations" and other such crap) to try and attract the riffraff. No better than your average commercial IM "app".

I do strongly hope I'm wrong, but I'll stay in the sidelines for now; I did shut my server down because of the connections per second problem. I might give it another go in the future, once their golang server implementation gets there.

Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

#70
post #27

It's hard for me to really know what status.im is. It bills itself as an OS, but it's not because it runs on iOS and Android. Is it a separate app store and platform? Is it a collection of apps? Is it a library or a set of protocols? Is this a problem with the blockchain community? Repurposing long-established words for their own use ("crypto", "os")?

yeah, the naming.... it's basically a client app for the ethereum ecosystem, much like the role a web browser has
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