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Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

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Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#171

Post by floatingatoll »

ori_b wrote: post #165
floatingatoll wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming the purpose of the messaging system selected is to help Mozilla's community work together on Mozilla projects, what benefit of 'decentralization' do you think would improve their ability to work together effectively?

Work together to what end? If the goal is a vibrant internet where large players are not in control, supporting decentralization is important.

I encourage reading the earlier posts on HN from exple.tive.org about this over the past year, as I think they may speak more to the reasoning you’re interested in discussing.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#172

Post by boring_twenties »

Arathorn wrote: post #161
lousken wrote: post #160

So after testing matrix and riot with friends for a couple of months, there're still a ton of work to be done. We all used the most common setup - matrix.org homeserver, riot and riotX as apps. (Also please don't point me to dev version, I am only considering what's in stable.) Random stuff not in particular order: 1a) e2e is a choice that affects experience in riot, a lot - you can't use search, you don't see recent…

1a/1b and 2 is where all our work is going currently. We're trying to get E2E on by default in Jan, and likewise exit beta for RiotX/Android around the same time. We're going as fast as we can. 3: Matrix.org homeserver performance should be absolutely fine now. Delays when doing things like joining big rooms are unrelated to the hardware, but perf optimisations we need to do to synapse in general. They're on the rada…

After spending several months convincing a few friends to use Riot, the ongoing fiasco with E2E has caused all of them to leave within a couple of days. Obviously they're unlikely to ever come back.

It's a real shame. These are technical people who don't particularly mind verifying a key by hand. In fact I personally even prefer it.

The problem is not only that certain things are not done automatically, but that the UI is designed to make it difficult to do them even manually!

E.g., I have one device 'foo' which you already trust. I add a new device 'bar'. Why on earth would you want to verify its key manually when I could just send you the new key from 'foo' which you already trust?

Even worse, the key for 'bar' is not straightforwardly available anywhere in the UI on device 'foo'. It should be easily viewable in the right hand pane where the list of devices is, but it's not. The only way to get the device ID and key is to send a message from 'bar' to 'foo' and view the details of the message. Why?

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#173

Post by stjohnswarts »

shmerl wrote: post #154
kibwen wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each individual Rust team (which govern individual aspects of Rust) got to choose where to jump to; I believe one did choose to use Matrix, but the others mostly chose Discord (because there was already a very large Rust user community there), a few chose Zulip, and one is still on IRC. If Matrix clients were more well-developed and widely-used, I believe there would be good incentive for them to transition--the Rust…

I still find it inappropriate for a FOSS project to promote closed non federated communication tools. Hopefully they won't be stuck with Discord because "we already switched to it".

I think they are just being pragmatic. No one, not even RMS, ever felt that open source needed to be open source from bottom to top, just the final product. You have to be pragmatic in this life. We can't wait for open source processors running on open source hardware on and open source OS compiled on an open source compiler before something gets released. I find it entirely appropriate for them to be pragmatic and use the tools to get done what they need to get done.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#174

Post by orthecreedence »

chrisseaton wrote: post #150
dvdgsng wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, are we complaining about one of the key advantages of open source now?

Is lots of half finished clients rather than one finished client an advantage?

Riot is pretty finished. So you have one fully-baked client, and a bunch of others to choose from if you don't like Riot.

Compare that to Slack, which only has one client, and it gets worse seemingly every day (somehow?).

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#175

Post by orthecreedence »

StavrosK wrote: post #33
dsypa wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were paying me to comment and you wanted me to stop commenting, yes definitely. I could go my own way and comment for free (as I already do) and then I would be able to do whatever I wanted. But as long as I am funded by you, yes I should do what you ask of me.

Wouldn't you have a choice between continuing to get paid or continuing to comment? And what if I already knew your decision would be to stop getting paid and quit HN but I still needed you to continue being on HN because your presence here was valuable to me? Would that not mean that I'm paying you, but I can't force you to do anything without harming myself much more than you?

Haven't you heard? Nuance isn't a thing anymore. All decisions are binary. Get with the times.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#176

Post by Arathorn »

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.

Riot should be way lighter these days, at least on web. We reduced RAM by 5x by lazyloading about a year ago.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#177

Post by bloopernova »

Has anyone had experience with both Matrix and Mattermost? What are the main differences between the two?

Apropos of nothing, currently I am running:

  * Signal
    * Wife
    * Family
  * Google Hangouts (web)
    * Friends and ex-coworkers
  * Slack
    * Vendor A
    * Vendor B
    * Team C
    * Team D
  * Keybase
    * Some friends
  * SMS
    * My Stepdaughter
  * Skype
    * Coworkers too stubborn to open Mattermost or change what they do
  * Mattermost
    * Coworkers
    * Various teams and groups
  * Remote Desktop
    * Microsoft Teams
      * My team
      * Client coworkers
      * Other teams at client
    * Microsoft Skype for Business
      * Chats from people who don't use MS Teams
      * Meetings
  * Gitter
    * Spacemacs chat
  * IRC (web)
    * Various random channels
Out of all of those, only SMS isn't on my macbook, and I'm sure I could put it on there if I wanted to.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#179

Post by steveklabnik »

jokoon wrote: post #145

I'm curious, what's wrong with IRC? Is it too old? Too difficult to monitor and moderate? Too easy to spam? I don't understand. I've never really understood why mozilla chose their own servers and not freenode. I've never really grasped the whole history of enet vs freenode either.

http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#180

Post by dashwav »

kick wrote: post #108
sreevisakh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, bu…

From two Matrix members, one who is the matrix.org team lead today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21836684

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