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P2P Matrix

matrix.org

91–100 of 178 posts

Re: P2P Matrix

#91

This is exciting - I'm looking forward to it. I've been nerding out a bit playing with Matrix/Riot and Urbit - there's a lot of exciting stuff happening in this space. If you like what Matrix is doing consider paying $10/month for your own server via Modular.im ( https://modular.im/ ). It supports the Matrix devs and you get your own high performance federated server to use on the network. Their automation makes it e…

Re your question -- it depends: if the network ends up being based on Yggdrasil, as the blog post suggests it could, "IP addresses" are public keys, and packets are encrypted to that destination (which could be a NATing router, though).

So, it gives you some guarantees about encryption, that might or might not be redundant (and for some use-cases, better safe than sorry).

Re: P2P Matrix

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> at that point IPFS is just an overweight tooling... Only if you assume that your only use case is to have private communications. There are a lot of use cases and jurisdictions where sharing files do not have to be private and would benefit a lot from having redundant nodes doing the distribution. The tooling is already there, why not benefit from it?

There are no jurisdictions where all possible information can be shared safely without hiding it. And IMO, software should maintain privacy by default - doing something less private should involve actively opting into that. Matrix, for example, creates e2e encrypted rooms by default, and even for non-e2e rooms, it doesn't announce the contents of the rooms to unrelated servers. If you want to publish the fact that yo…

> There are no jurisdictions where all possible information can be shared safely without hiding it.

This is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that there are plenty of people in countries doing illegal-on-paper things but are largely ignored by their Governments. No one in Brazil is worried about torrenting, even though it is not legal. No one connecting to a Swedish VPN provider worries much about getting copyright infringement letters, and so on. No one in Russia is worried about downloading music via VK, a social network with more ties to its Government than Facebook with the CIA.

> software should maintain privacy by default (...) you should treat this like reporting your downloads to your Government voluntarily.

I don't see any contradiction between what you are saying and what I am saying.

Yes, it should be secure by default. Yes, people should be aware that anything that is not sent encrypted and securely should be considered public knowledge.

So what?

Nothing of what you said negates the fact that there is a huge number of use cases where people want things to be public (Youtube? Instagram? Basically every social network?) and that they will benefit from having it that way.

You might not care about these use cases because you are too risk-averse to use them. Fine. There are plenty of other people who are totally okay with these risks. As long as they aware of the risks, why stop them?

Worse still, between a system that does only one thing "super-privately" vs something that gives them privacy when they want it and also gives them "things where I don't care if is public or not", which one do you think people will use? Look at another post on the same thread, you have people sharing multi-GB Anime over IRC, ffs.

Re: P2P Matrix

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you still don't think what Signal is doing is enough, you can run your own signal (or matrix) server, but then you are running a very, very valuable server from a graph analysis perspective. ...which is precisely why we’re working on P2P matrix. No servers; nowhere for metadata to accumulate (other than the clients, of course).

I understand the goal. I don't understand how a peer P2P system is going to route large groups at scale. I don't think phones are powerful enough to deal with the kinds of routing you need for large scale comms services. In general, as the number of nodes in a comms graph increases, the overhead of synchronizing the comms between those nodes increases to the point that noise dominates signal, which is why most comms…

So it's true that P2P Matrix is currently full mesh (which is why it's staggering a bit as everyone trying it from HN piles on). However, you can absolutely do better than full mesh without going straight back to hub-and-spoke: you can use spanning trees (like Yggdrasil), or gossiped segmentation as libp2p's Gossipsub does (https://blog.ipfs.io/2020-05-20-gossipsub-v1.1).

Also, you don't need to scale larger than the number of nodes in a single room (or worst case, the number of nodes visible to your account). For context, the largest rooms in today's non-P2P Matrix have about 100K users in them, and a typical poweruser account sees about 400K other users at any given point. Obviously as Matrix grows this will increase, but I strongly suspect rooms will then move into "celebrity" or "auditorium" modes - much as Facebook & Twitter etc have a separate class of routing algorithms for handling traffic for accounts with millions of followers.

Re: P2P Matrix

#94
How does Matrix achieve linearizability in group chat / federation?

I'm curious about what eng tradeoffs and so on have been made and so on. Imo zookeeper type system with an eventual transition to async bft consensus is the best practical approach today. Node join / leave etc is too hard a problem right now in non centrally managed p2p topologies.

Re: P2P Matrix

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may. Riot can be a bit of a pain to get the initial handshake going. If all else fails just keep blowing up the room and retrying until it sticks. I've had to do that before with members of my team.

I see, thanks. I tried with another friend, I keep trying to verify him but I keep seeing a spinner "waiting for him" and he sees nothing. I'm going to give Matrix a few more years to mature and try again then, I think.

We're not aware of any performance problems on the matrix.org server right now (we had a breakthrough in performance last week), so I think something else is going wrong. What clients were you using?

Re: P2P Matrix

#96

How does Matrix achieve linearizability in group chat / federation? I'm curious about what eng tradeoffs and so on have been made and so on. Imo zookeeper type system with an eventual transition to async bft consensus is the best practical approach today. Node join / leave etc is too hard a problem right now in non centrally managed p2p topologies.

Don't know but it seems to be centralisation

Re: P2P Matrix

#97
post #78

A big question that I don't see addressed in the text or asked here yet: why does this require the user to not be in private browsing mode? Some necessary API that's not available in incognito mode? Is the restriction temporary?

Empirically service workers don't seem to work in private browsing mode, and the demo relies on running Dendrite as a service worker.

> In Firefox, Service Worker APIs are also hidden and cannot be used when the user is in private browsing mode.

Says https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Wor...

Re: P2P Matrix

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see, thanks. I tried with another friend, I keep trying to verify him but I keep seeing a spinner "waiting for him" and he sees nothing. I'm going to give Matrix a few more years to mature and try again then, I think.

We're not aware of any performance problems on the matrix.org server right now (we had a breakthrough in performance last week), so I think something else is going wrong. What clients were you using?

I was using web and he was using the android client. Things started working when he switched to web too.

Re: P2P Matrix

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may. Riot can be a bit of a pain to get the initial handshake going. If all else fails just keep blowing up the room and retrying until it sticks. I've had to do that before with members of my team.

I see, thanks. I tried with another friend, I keep trying to verify him but I keep seeing a spinner "waiting for him" and he sees nothing. I'm going to give Matrix a few more years to mature and try again then, I think.

It's really not that bad or I certainly wouldn't be using it.

The matrix home server has horrible lag spikes at some times of the day.

The e2e implementation was pretty miserable until a few weeks ago but is now pretty smooth sailing.

Been using it for 3-4 years and quite happy.

Re: P2P Matrix

#100
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on how 'casual', it's definitely usable and works - but there's still some effort required to figure things out. I've found the docs are generally pretty good and the community is helpful so if you're interested in playing with it it's worth it.

What is Urbit for? I mean i never understood whats it's real use. From what i've read i imagine it as some new stack that replaces networking and servers but then i found out that you have to buy namespaces that are finite? Why?

So when you blacklist a troll, they can't just create a new account for free.
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