Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision • Hacker News Board

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#51

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

est31 wrote: post #28

kibwen wrote: post #5

I'm pleasantly surprised! They took the route of "promising but underdeveloped technology" rather than settling for a well-developed solution that compromises their principles (which, frankly, I wouldn't have faulted them for; at the end of the day you still have to get work done). With luck maybe we'll see Mozilla contribute to Matrix? There is, after all, an implementation written in Rust: https://github.com/ruma

The last ruma commit was in August, which was after a long period where nothing happened at all. Is the project dead?

[deleted]

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#52

Post by est31 » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #32

dzypa wrote: post #8

Daily reminder that Rust uses Discord, a closed source piece of software with draconian privacy and data retention terms. Steve Klabnik will predictably reply to me saying that it was the decision of the community and blah blah, but the Mozilla Corporation should not have allowed it.

AFAICT they moved off IRC in response to Mozilla's announcement that it was being deprecated and also because IRC was terrible. They tried Zulip but concluded it wouldn't work well. There was already a community Discord server doing well so they set up an official one. I suspect they might move back to Mozilla's Riot/Matrix instance once it's set up in production, but that hasn't happened yet.

Zulip is still being used for official discussion though. Discord isn't the only chat platform Rust uses.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#53

Post by steveklabnik » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 4:58 PM UTC

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #32

dzypa wrote: post #8

Daily reminder that Rust uses Discord, a closed source piece of software with draconian privacy and data retention terms. Steve Klabnik will predictably reply to me saying that it was the decision of the community and blah blah, but the Mozilla Corporation should not have allowed it.

AFAICT they moved off IRC in response to Mozilla's announcement that it was being deprecated and also because IRC was terrible. They tried Zulip but concluded it wouldn't work well. There was already a community Discord server doing well so they set up an official one. I suspect they might move back to Mozilla's Riot/Matrix instance once it's set up in production, but that hasn't happened yet.

This is sort of correct but also not, exactly. Most of the teams are on Discord, but a few are on Zulip. The Embedded Working Group is on Matrix.

In general, the teams are allowed to organize themselves as they wish.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#54

Post by anoa_ » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 4:58 PM UTC

wildduck wrote: post #42

Any one knows the progress of dendrite? Have not used matrix/riot for a while. It was too heavy to run awhile back. Hopefully they make the client and server more light weight.

We've just hired a new full-time employee to work on Dendrite and p2p matrix. Expect rapid progress on Dendrite as of a few days ago.

https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#55

Post by uhoreg » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

nickstinemates wrote: post #11

Are there any other projects using this setup? Also, any write up on the compelling reasons to switch? Are they hoping this move will attract more contributors? Article is unclear.

> Are there any other projects using this setup?

GNOME and KDE are also using Matrix.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#56

Post by kibwen » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

sreevisakh wrote: post #36

sandGorgon wrote: post #3

Congrats to Riot/Matrix. I'm hoping with Mozilla's backing the product, there's a lot of features that get built out. There's no reason this cant be a Slack-beating product now. I'm betting a Rust based homeserver replacing Synapse.

The official successor to Synapse homeserver is Dendrite written in Go ( https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite ). There is homeserver project in Rust called Ruma ( https://github.com/ruma/ruma ). Ruma was waiting for async/await to stabilize. But it doesn't seem to have much activity even after that.

It looks like Ruma was waiting for an async web framework to emerge, and the web frameworks were waiting on hyper to upgrade, and hyper was waiting on h2 to upgrade, and h2 was waiting on http to upgrade, and http was waiting on bytes to upgrade, and everyone was waiting on tokio to upgrade. In the six weeks since async await has stabilized, the web framework that my company uses has only just managed to upgrade to stable async/await last week. I wouldn't fault Ruma for waiting for other frameworks to upgrade before making a choice.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#57

Post by iudqnolq » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 5:04 PM UTC

jordigh wrote: post #41

jeltz wrote: post #7

Nice, given how the discussions were going some months ago I was worried that they would pick some closed source solution like Discord or Slack. I have not used Matrix so I do not know how good it is, but I do not like the lock-in of Discord and Slack.

Agreed, this is a huge relief. I was getting quite worried that Mozilla would go to Discord, like Rust and other projects have done. I don't know anything about Matrix, but I know it's free, and if it has Mozilla's endorsement, now I'm actually curious to try it... maybe even via an IRC bridge!

FYI #rust-beginners is on discord, but many of the teams have transitioned to Zulip because it has threads. I'd love if Zulip was OSS, but at least it's a highly innovative company that's improved a lot on the UX of IRC (far beyond not needing to setup a bouncer).

The mismatch between Discord's targeted audience of gamers can get funny at times. One rust dev has had their status we to "playing systemd" for days.

Edit: How did I miss that Zulip is open source??? Thank you to the commentators who pointed this out, you made my day :)

Edit2: Just learned what I said about rust decision-making was totally wrong. Thanks to Rob Pike in the other thread for his detailed comments.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#58

Post by feanaro » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 5:15 PM UTC

pteraspidomorph wrote: post #47

feanaro wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compelling reasons to switch: it's an open standard, it's federated (so you can own your own server and avoid vendor lock-in), it has end-to-end encryption, it supports bridging with many other protocols, there's quite a growing ecosystem of tools and libraries around it, etc. The protocol itself is designed to be really flexible in the kind of data you can send through it (and therefore automatically propagated to a…

I try matrix on occasion (as in, I set up my own server from scratch). The last time I tried it, support for multi-participant audio and video calls (and screensharing) was still between terrible and nonexistant. Definitely much worse than Discord. Has it improved?

There were some bug fixes in the last year (IIRC) though nothing very substantial, I think. Then again, it's always worked reasonably well for me and I'm using it regularly. I heard it was going to get worked on soon, though.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#59

Post by jpeeler » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 5:15 PM UTC

iudqnolq wrote: post #57

jordigh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, this is a huge relief. I was getting quite worried that Mozilla would go to Discord, like Rust and other projects have done. I don't know anything about Matrix, but I know it's free, and if it has Mozilla's endorsement, now I'm actually curious to try it... maybe even via an IRC bridge!

FYI #rust-beginners is on discord, but many of the teams have transitioned to Zulip because it has threads. I'd love if Zulip was OSS, but at least it's a highly innovative company that's improved a lot on the UX of IRC (far beyond not needing to setup a bouncer). The mismatch between Discord's targeted audience of gamers can get funny at times. One rust dev has had their status we to "playing systemd" for days. Edit…

You're talking about https://github.com/zulip/zulip, right? It was open sourced in 2015.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#60

Post by dstaley » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

billCarsonFr wrote: post #43

dstaley wrote: post #39

I really hope this means more development and focus on building great mobile apps for Matrix. For the past four months the Riot Android app has had this bug where login state expires after a day and the app gets stuck in an infinite loop trying to refresh the token. Supposedly a fix was merged [1], but after four months of not being able to use Riot (and thus Matrix) my friend group has fallen back to Discord. [1] ht…

Have you tried RiotX https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.riot... Most efforts are going to this new android client. The issue you refer to has been properly handled on RiotX (soft logout)

I don't think this issue is related to soft logout, which is what happens when the user logs out of a device remotely. The issue I was running into was that the app, after 24 hours of being logged in, would get stuck in an initialization loop.