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Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

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Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#111

Post by majewsky »

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.

Not true in my experience. Synapse is just as easy to stand up as Prosody, and in fact requires making less choices since you don't have to pick which modules to enable and stuff.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#112

Post by Arathorn »

est31 wrote: post #100
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…

Can you tell me more about the modular.im behaviour/policy towards federation? Is it explicitly turned off? Also, IRC has federation too by having multiple servers in a network. IIRC Mozilla hadn't allowed you to do this for moznet did they? So how is this different?

To be clear: the server will be publicly federated. All modular.im servers federate by default unless you explicitly turn it off.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#113

Post by [deleted] »

swiley wrote: post #19
rtpg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, I feel like it’s such an indictment on native app tool development that we have a bazillion new electron apps written by ppl all the time for weekend projects yet almost no one spitting out native apps to interface with services. It’s clearly in demand (if a bit of a niche kind of demand)

Native development on OSX and iOS both kind of suck unless you completely embrace objective C and coaca. I think that’s what’s turned so many people off to it. It’s comparatively easy to write complex portable applications with tk (or even just strait win32 and whichever X11 widget toolkit is your favorite.)

[deleted]

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#114

Post by Arathorn »

johnchristopher wrote: post #27

This screenshot https://discourse-prod-uploads-81679984178418.s3.dualstack.u... shows a UI that seems way wore easier to grip than the riot UI. I remember screenshots https://img.bfmtv.com/c/840/625/06e8/68cd7316f6a279a3899fcf8... http://www.tchap.fr/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/interface-tch... of the client used set up by the France efforts. Are those clients ever going to be released to the general public ?

the first image is Riot circa 2015 (back when it was called Vector). You can run it if you really want from https://riots.im.

Tchap meanwhile is opensource at https://github.com/dinsic-pim and there are unofficial builds which let you use it as a general purpose Matrix client.

However, we're busy improving Riot's UX in general to make it easier to grip - on Mobile that ends up being a rewrite (RiotX), on Web we're iterating incrementally.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#116

Post by jethro_tell »

lifty wrote: post #101
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.

It can be a bit onerous, half the convo in our matrix room is about updating matrix.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#117

Post by Arathorn »

Aardwolf wrote: post #104

How does one visit the Mozilla channel on it? No links anywhere in there or in Mozilla's post. Is the discussion channel publicly visible? (excuse me if channel is not the correct terminology)

It's not live yet :) (and we called channels 'rooms' in Matrix).

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#118

Post by shd4 »

swiley wrote: post #19
rtpg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, I feel like it’s such an indictment on native app tool development that we have a bazillion new electron apps written by ppl all the time for weekend projects yet almost no one spitting out native apps to interface with services. It’s clearly in demand (if a bit of a niche kind of demand)

Native development on OSX and iOS both kind of suck unless you completely embrace objective C and coaca. I think that’s what’s turned so many people off to it. It’s comparatively easy to write complex portable applications with tk (or even just strait win32 and whichever X11 widget toolkit is your favorite.)

https://github.com/neilalexander/seaglass looks promising.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#119

Post by gdxhyrd »

w354kjhllkj wrote: post #63
rtpg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, I feel like it’s such an indictment on native app tool development that we have a bazillion new electron apps written by ppl all the time for weekend projects yet almost no one spitting out native apps to interface with services. It’s clearly in demand (if a bit of a niche kind of demand)

You answered your own question. You can write a pretty and functional Electron app in a weekend. To implement the same level of functionality and prettiness in a native app toolkit like Qt is at least a month of work. It's the same story as Python versus C, or C versus Assembly. When C was introduced, the old-timers had the same complains like we do today: why would you program in such a slow and inefficient language…

> You can write a pretty and functional Electron app in a weekend.

You can also do so in Qt and other frameworks.

The fact that you are proficient in web frameworks does not mean other tools are less productive.

In fact, being proficient in modern web dev, including HTML, CSS, JS, TS, React, etc. takes way longer than learning something like Qt. And if you go to easier frameworks like Delphi or VB6, you would be amazed at the productivity speed.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#120

Post by johnchristopher »

Arathorn wrote: post #114
johnchristopher wrote: post #27

This screenshot https://discourse-prod-uploads-81679984178418.s3.dualstack.u... shows a UI that seems way wore easier to grip than the riot UI. I remember screenshots https://img.bfmtv.com/c/840/625/06e8/68cd7316f6a279a3899fcf8... http://www.tchap.fr/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/interface-tch... of the client used set up by the France efforts. Are those clients ever going to be released to the general public ?

the first image is Riot circa 2015 (back when it was called Vector). You can run it if you really want from https://riots.im . Tchap meanwhile is opensource at https://github.com/dinsic-pim and there are unofficial builds which let you use it as a general purpose Matrix client. However, we're busy improving Riot's UX in general to make it easier to grip - on Mobile that ends up being a rewrite (RiotX), on Web we're i…

Ah, cool ! I am off to installing tchap then.

Really glad to hear you are upgrading the game on the front-end/UX/UI !

edit: well, I give up :D. Been playing for 40 minutes with yarn build/dist and config.json and missing olm and async_hooks dependencies.

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