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Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

matrix.org

61–70 of 204 posts

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#61
post #21

I tried matrix/riot out, looks perfect for me and app is slick. Sending messages though from a server to a room was more difficult than I expected. Java SDK didn't build and many of the other languages were alpha too. Go seemed favored but I dont really want to install. Is there a recommended simple command line app or script to send messages?

> Go seemed favored but I dont really want to install.

What do you mean? If you mean Go, the programming language, you don't need to install any of it to use a Go application since those are statically compiled.

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#62
post #57

I had to roll my own chat system recently because the open source solutions out there were surprisingly insufficient - nothing seems to support websockets. Looking forward to the French contributions to the ecosystem! For instance: at the moment Matrix server implementations expect clients like Riot to long-poll for JSON about each room/chat they're connected to. Alternatives like Prosody's XMPP server implementation…

[deleted]

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#63
post #52

I don't know much about licenses: is Matrix and/or the protocol safe from Facebook, Google and co to pull the same thing again? Feels like EEE is inevitable when these companies allocate resources to provide a better UI/UX and benefits in their own services.

I have no clue what you are trying to ask, sorry. Could you clarify? Do you mean IP lawsuit's against Matrix itself?

I guess grandparent means how Google (and later Slack) initially supported XMPP in their chat products, then disabled the XMPP gateway once their userbase was significantly large that most conversations were inside their own bubble.

There's not much that Matrix can do to defend against that, except for strategic marketing with the purpose of achieving a large distributed userbase. If Gmail had existed in 1990, we would not have a decentralized e-mail network today. If Gmail had got into a position where they served 99% of all e-mail users, they would've pulled the plug on mail delivery to third-party mail servers and e-mail as we know it would've been dead.

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#64
post #37

Never heard of Matrix... looked it up; gross... python2.7

Also take a look at the network "protocol": JSON over HTTP longpolling, requiring usually a separate socket for each batch of messages sent or received (unless HTTP/2 is available, then it’s a bit less expensive, still has a massive overhead). Matrix has so much potential – someday, when it’s built on technologically more ideal foundations. Python2.7 you’ll barely notice, but the network overhead of the Matrix protoc…

I think HTTP Keep Alive mechanism should help with sockets and it does not require HTTP/2.

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#65

Don’t suppose anyone knows why the Signal protocol wasn’t chosen?

Because when you build something like this, you shouldn't:

- requiere a phone

- build on s3 & a lot of other services without the option of a self hosted alternative.

Look up the signal server requirements.

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#66
post #57

I had to roll my own chat system recently because the open source solutions out there were surprisingly insufficient - nothing seems to support websockets. Looking forward to the French contributions to the ecosystem! For instance: at the moment Matrix server implementations expect clients like Riot to long-poll for JSON about each room/chat they're connected to. Alternatives like Prosody's XMPP server implementation…

Network overhead aside, long polling can be a pretty wonderful interface. “Give me what I don’t have yet, else let me know when there is something” makes for reliable transmission that is hard to screw up. Long polling requests can work idempotently and recover from network failures automatically. I think it’s an especially wise starting point.

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#67
post #57

I had to roll my own chat system recently because the open source solutions out there were surprisingly insufficient - nothing seems to support websockets. Looking forward to the French contributions to the ecosystem! For instance: at the moment Matrix server implementations expect clients like Riot to long-poll for JSON about each room/chat they're connected to. Alternatives like Prosody's XMPP server implementation…

> Prosody's XMPP server implementation dropped websocket support in favor of BOSH years ago.

You probably refer to the "old websocket" spec, new websockets are working well: https://prosody.im/doc/modules/mod_websocket

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#68
post #21

I tried matrix/riot out, looks perfect for me and app is slick. Sending messages though from a server to a room was more difficult than I expected. Java SDK didn't build and many of the other languages were alpha too. Go seemed favored but I dont really want to install. Is there a recommended simple command line app or script to send messages?

> Go seemed favored but I dont really want to install. What do you mean? If you mean Go, the programming language, you don't need to install any of it to use a Go application since those are statically compiled.

Yes sorry was a library on which to build your app.

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#70
It's sort of ironic considering France's history with Minitel[0] and encryption[1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1997/1201/6012058a.html#75b6a6...

Specifically from [1] is the line: "Its illegal in France to encrypt any communication in any way unless you have permission from the government. How is electronic commerce going to get off the ground in such a society? Good question, which appears not to have occurred to the authorities."

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