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Automattic invests in Matrix

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Re: Automattic invests in Matrix

#31

Post by ijpsud »

jondubois wrote: post #19

This will not work. There are no incentives for different groups of people to collaborate on a single shared communication standard. The incentive is for entities to keep data to themselves. Also, this standard is too complex and unclear. Complex standards which try to bring together many different technologies under one abstraction never seem to work. Also, universal standards are not necessarily a good thing. Decen…

> This will not work.

They seem to be doing fine:

~10.0M global visible accounts

~2.5M messages per day

~4.5M unbridged accounts

~500K unbridged messages per day

~2.1M rooms that Matrix.org participates in

~20,000 federated servers

~3000 msgs/s out, ~30 msgs/s in on Matrix.org

~400 projects building on Matrix

~70 companies building on Matrix

https://matrix.org/faq/

They're up to 20k visible servers from about 5.5k servers in September 2018, and if you look here: https://youtu.be/1TPICntbC5w?t=1692 you can see the growth curve looks pretty good.

> Also, universal standards are not necessarily a good thing. Decentralization with multiple competing tools and standards is good

Matrix explicitly doesn't try to be "the one true standard". That's the whole idea of their bridging model: https://youtu.be/1TPICntbC5w?t=296

Re: Automattic invests in Matrix

#32

Post by oehtXRwMkIs »

bertman wrote: post #20
xondono wrote: post #17

Can someone give the “elevator pitch” of what sets Matrix apart?

Apart from what? Compared to xmpp: Marketing mostly.

XMPP vs Matrix is a really interesting discussion. I don't think marketing is the main difference though, I think most developers would prefer to work with Matrix and the user experience is much better. Here's a decent past discussion that also links to older discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12880860

Re: Automattic invests in Matrix

#33

Post by Arathorn »

rwmj wrote: post #9
Arathorn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried since we relaunched encryption and turned it on by default 2 weeks ago? The UX has completely been rewritten and it should now be transparent - see https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing... . edit: To be clear, we no longer nag whenever there's an unverified login present - and unverified logins should increasingly be a thing of the past anyway given we now have cross-signing and…

Can I bump two phones together to exchange keys (using NFC or similar)? That would be the killer feature for us when we do conferences - perhaps more relevant to the Before Covid times of course.

You could, but we chose to do QR codes first as it's a bit more intentional and slightly harder to MITM.

Re: Automattic invests in Matrix

#34

Post by Arathorn »

boudin wrote: post #30
tmikaeld wrote: post #2

Good news! Now if only they can figure out how to make Riot usable with Encryption enabled without pulling your hair out every time you enter a room or chat with non-matching keys. While Riot has a lot of features, it is also not easy for new users. I've tried to convert at least 10 persons and none of them use it any more, citing not being able to figure out how to use it or simply not having the time to waste figur…

For me the main issue is the battery usage of Riot fdroid which is way too high (i don't know if the google play version have the same issue). Last time i tried it was using more than 50% of my battery just by sitting in the background.

is this on Riot or RiotX on Android? All dev in the last year has been on RiotX, which should be an unrecognisably better app and will shortly replace Riot on Android (hopefully end of June).

Re: Automattic invests in Matrix

#35

Post by Arathorn »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #29
Ebenus wrote: post #18

With E2E encryption in place by default is there any real advantage in using Signal instead of Riot client for everyday communication with my friends? Riot desktop app is definitely more polished and customizable, video quality on all of my devices also seems to be a lot better. Surprisingly the only thing that I am really missing is the ability to use custom sticker packs which got added to Signal a few months ago.

A short while ago (maybe 2 months?) I tried an audio call from Android and while I don't remember the details, the experience was bad enough that we both agreed to not do that again and use Signal in the future. RiotX Android doesn't support calls at all according to the Play store page, while the old Riot Android client doesn't support cross-signing, search doesn't work, and it overall feels unpolished. It's still v…

VoIP has historically been a second class citizen in Riot, but we're trying to fix that right now. The implementation in RiotX is in mid flight up at https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/compare/feature/v... and Riot Android will be killed off shortly in favour of RiotX.

Re: Automattic invests in Matrix

#36

Post by xondono »

bertman wrote: post #20
xondono wrote: post #17

Can someone give the “elevator pitch” of what sets Matrix apart?

Apart from what? Compared to xmpp: Marketing mostly.

I’m just not “in the know” to see if this is the case, but I just found myself taking a look at the site and thinking “what’s new about this?”

Re: Automattic invests in Matrix

#38

Post by upofadown »

xondono wrote: post #17

Can someone give the “elevator pitch” of what sets Matrix apart?

Cross signing. If you already have a verified device you can use that device to verify new devices. That way you don't have to bother all your correspondents when you get a new phone.

Re: Automattic invests in Matrix

#39

Post by touisteur »

jondubois wrote: post #19

This will not work. There are no incentives for different groups of people to collaborate on a single shared communication standard. The incentive is for entities to keep data to themselves. Also, this standard is too complex and unclear. Complex standards which try to bring together many different technologies under one abstraction never seem to work. Also, universal standards are not necessarily a good thing. Decen…

I don't know about federation, but to me matrix hits the right spot for people that want modern chat (irc with full history & e2e encryption) in-house. I know my org is using it heavily on a custom install. I think the French government also announced some time ago some kind of adoption. I hope we can get away from whatsapp, telegram, slack and anything Google when we want.

Only things missing (to me) is a full Java API. I built one for bots and quick fleet-history-monitoring, but it's clunky...

Re: Automattic invests in Matrix

#40

Post by Arathorn »

brylie wrote: post #13
Arathorn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried since we relaunched encryption and turned it on by default 2 weeks ago? The UX has completely been rewritten and it should now be transparent - see https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing... . edit: To be clear, we no longer nag whenever there's an unverified login present - and unverified logins should increasingly be a thing of the past anyway given we now have cross-signing and…

I have logged in in the past couple of weeks. While setting up the encryption keys, the UI just hung there for a minute or two with almost no indication what was happening or how far things had progressed. I patiently waited through the process, but am not sure a casual user would know to wait for so long.

You must have hit us in the traffic spike on the matrix.org homeserver after we enabled e2ee by default - sorry. Keeping the matrix.org server scaling with the amount of traffic is a pain in the ass currently, but we're about to land horizontal scaling (at last) in the coming weeks which means others won't have to hang around. Thanks for being patient with it though. On the plus side, setup should be much lighter/faster for new users than existing ones.
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