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Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

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Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#101

Post by lifty »

jasonzemos wrote: post #70

This is really good news. I have only one question for Mozilla: why choose a solution whose hallmark is decentralization and the libre model- only to become a customer of a centralized host (modular.im). Why can't Mozilla actually federate? That's a step backward from your IRCd in my opinion. I hope Mozilla gets onboard with everyone else running their own Synapse, hacks on it, and pay their dues with patches, rather…

If Mozilla will use their own domain name they will be free to move their federated Matrix instance wherever they want. Modular.im will only provide the hosting expertise. I expect that in the future self-hosting your own Matrix server instance will become much easier.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#102

Post by PopeRigby »

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?

They just put up a blog post going over their progress https://www.ruma.io/news/these-weeks-in-ruma-2019-12-14/

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#103

Post by feanaro »

shantly wrote: post #93
jasonzemos wrote: post #70

This is really good news. I have only one question for Mozilla: why choose a solution whose hallmark is decentralization and the libre model- only to become a customer of a centralized host (modular.im). Why can't Mozilla actually federate? That's a step backward from your IRCd in my opinion. I hope Mozilla gets onboard with everyone else running their own Synapse, hacks on it, and pay their dues with patches, rather…

Matrix servers are kinda a pain in the ass to get up-and-running and to manage versus, say, XMPP or IRC. Especially if you can't get away with just running someone else's pre-built docker images for it, or whatever.

I've administered both XMPP and Matrix servers and I must say I don't see either as much of a hassle. Synapse had some growing pains but is pretty painless for me these days.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#105

Post by chrisseaton »

firethief wrote: post #73
chrisseaton wrote: post #61

Wow this already looks like a fractured mess! https://matrix.org/clients/ Why are there so many clients with different supported functionality?

"Already"? Is that something that usually happens as a project matures?

Yes? See the fracturing of what HTML browsers supported in the 90s, or what happened to XMPP, for example.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#106

Post by ATsch »

chrisseaton wrote: post #61

Wow this already looks like a fractured mess! https://matrix.org/clients/ Why are there so many clients with different supported functionality?

One big reason is that the core matrix protocol is incredibly simple to implement. With a good http library, it's a few lines of code to get a basic plaintext client going. However, there is a lot of surface area to cover. So that's how you end up with a lot of 1h/week projects that implement just what the single author cares most about.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#108

Post by kick »

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.

No longer true.

To quote the founder:

There are quite a lot of Synapses out there right now, and Synapse's featureset is pretty mature. Given we have pretty high profile people running Synapse (e.g. all of the French government) we have no choice but to invest the time to polish it and make it more efficient and stable. In an ideal world we'd have paused on Synapse ages ago and focused purely on a next-gen server, but we can't leave Synapse users in the lurch. Dendrite will be getting some attention in the coming months though, but not as a direct Synapse-replacement, but more of a playground for more experimental stuff.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21767057

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