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Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

changelog.complete.org

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Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#51

Post by Phenix88be »

kiwidrew wrote: post #29

Yet another "Matrix isn't mature enough so just give up and use a centralized service" post that completely ignores the fact that XMPP is still alive and kicking. With multiple independent implementations (both client and server) that all work together pretty decently. We're never ever going to tear ourselves away from this death by centralization if we keep inventing excuses for why we don't use the federated/distri…

XMPP is nice, but I have never see regular folks use it. Only tech peoples. The fact that you can't "install and go" is killing decentralized solution because when you ask regular folks the "server url" (or even to choose on a server list), they give up because it's too complicated already.

It's already HARD enough to get them on Signal because they can't just click on the "Connect with Facebook" button. I got my mom on Signal and she actually converted other people to use it because it was not much harder than Whatsapp to set up.

XMPP nerver killed MSN back in the day's for the same reason...

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#52

Post by seusscat »

gorgonzolachz wrote: post #9

Can anyone chime in on their experiences hosting a synapse server? I have close to a dozen people on mine (although we don't federate much with the network as a whole, I set it up initially for a couple of groupchats/DMs with friends) and I'm not even close to hitting the limits of the $5/mo Digitalocean server I put it on. Does federating with the greater Matrix ecosystem cost that much extra processing power, that…

I have been running a Synapse instance for nearly 3 years now. My instance is not for open registration but just for family and friends, currently it has around 7 users on it and federates with the rest of the Matrix ecosystem. I also have some experience writing apps that use the Matrix APIs.

The federation API on matrix is a little too chatty for my taste. But that in itself causes no problems. The problems start when a user on your homeserver joins a massive room on any other homeserver. Most commonly these are the bug rooms on matrix.org. Once someone joins one such room, synapse will start slowing down and taking tons of RAM. This has significantly improved in the last year, by huge leaps and bounds. It however does remain a memory hungry process.

VoIP / video on the other hand has been a success story for me. 1:1 calls run smoothly after installing a TURN server. Me and my users use the calling functionality multiple tines a day and don't seem to have any problems with it.

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#53

Post by neiman »

> The advantages of P2P are undeniable and profound, but few are effectively addressing the privacy implications. The one I know of that is, Briar, routes all traffic over Tor; every node is reached by a Tor onion service.

Bisq (p2p exchange) does the same thing.

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#54

Post by sweden »

genewitch wrote: post #46
gorgonzolachz wrote: post #9

Can anyone chime in on their experiences hosting a synapse server? I have close to a dozen people on mine (although we don't federate much with the network as a whole, I set it up initially for a couple of groupchats/DMs with friends) and I'm not even close to hitting the limits of the $5/mo Digitalocean server I put it on. Does federating with the greater Matrix ecosystem cost that much extra processing power, that…

I just set up synapse last week. The config file has 93,000 characters in it, which i joked is worse than IRCd. I'm running it on gentoo, pretty bare system, probably equivalent to double an rpi4. I did notice that the database file grows quickly. Currently the entire machine is using 272MB RAM, 0.8% CPU peaks, 0.01 15 minute load average. Every part of setting up a server that will federate/host repeats again and ag…

Which file are you talking about? The homeserver.yaml?

Mine only has around 100 lines without comments.

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#55

Post by neiman »

A benevolent dictatorship would always be more effective than a democracy, but what happens once it stops being benevolent?

Same here. A centralized app (like Signal) is more effective than distributed/decentralized approach. But what would happen if Signal would ever stop being benevolent?

Remember the days Google were "do no evil"?

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#56

Post by runiq »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #7
rapsey wrote: post #5

A bit annoying how servers meant to be run by people themselves are written in awfully slow languages. Python for matrix server is a terrible choice. Even worse for home assistant. If it can't fit on raspberry pi it's useless.

They're working on a Go server impl, "Dendrite" which is supposed to be far faster and use less RAM. I was hoping for Rust, and I think there is a 3rd-party Rust server, but anything's better than Python. Node.js would probably be better than Python.

The 3rd party Rust server is Conduit: https://conduit.rs

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#57

Post by atoav »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #50
atoav wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who in principle would like decentralized/federated cryptomessengers to win what usually blocks me from using them (over Signal) is that most of the people I would contact via messenger are not tech-savy. To make them switch the messenger has to be easy to setup and feature wise it has to be so promising that they don't feel like I lured them into something half baked. While being federated is a huge plus…

People who make these sort of comments strike me as the same sort of people who box tick features in software development without ever giving consideration to UX. There’s always an open or decentralized alternative to whatever big bad closed/proprietary thing is being complained about. You can usually contrive together an argument for how it almost has feature parity. But only if stick your fingers in your ears and w…

Just as a side node: I use Element currently and have done so for a while. My comment was about me not recommending this thing to my non-techie friends, not about me inventing an excuse why I won't use it.

And I want to be able to recommend it. I just currently can't, this was the point of my comment.

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#58

Post by sweden »

gorgonzolachz wrote: post #9

Can anyone chime in on their experiences hosting a synapse server? I have close to a dozen people on mine (although we don't federate much with the network as a whole, I set it up initially for a couple of groupchats/DMs with friends) and I'm not even close to hitting the limits of the $5/mo Digitalocean server I put it on. Does federating with the greater Matrix ecosystem cost that much extra processing power, that…

I have been running my own Matrix instance with federation on my 20 dollar/month Linode VPS for 5 years already.

I use between some friends and family and I'm also connected to massive channels like the official "Element Android" and "Element Web/Desktop".

And it runs... just fine. The server can be a bit performance hungry but I also host plenty of other services on my VPS (email, HTTP server, Seafile, VPN, etc) and I never noticed any degradation in performance in any of them.

They have been making a lot of progress in improving the performance of the Synapse server and it is very usable now. And it is not difficult to configure at all, it's easier than configuring Prosody.

I would say that the bottleneck now is more about improving the UX and the Voip capabilities of the clients.

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#59

Post by m4lvin »

Phenix88be wrote: post #51
kiwidrew wrote: post #29

Yet another "Matrix isn't mature enough so just give up and use a centralized service" post that completely ignores the fact that XMPP is still alive and kicking. With multiple independent implementations (both client and server) that all work together pretty decently. We're never ever going to tear ourselves away from this death by centralization if we keep inventing excuses for why we don't use the federated/distri…

XMPP is nice, but I have never see regular folks use it. Only tech peoples. The fact that you can't "install and go" is killing decentralized solution because when you ask regular folks the "server url" (or even to choose on a server list), they give up because it's too complicated already. It's already HARD enough to get them on Signal because they can't just click on the "Connect with Facebook" button. I got my mom…

I use XMPP with "regular folks". At least on Android it works well to point someone to https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.quicksy.cli... and that's it.

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#60

Post by kitkat_new »

m4lvin wrote: post #59
Phenix88be wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XMPP is nice, but I have never see regular folks use it. Only tech peoples. The fact that you can't "install and go" is killing decentralized solution because when you ask regular folks the "server url" (or even to choose on a server list), they give up because it's too complicated already. It's already HARD enough to get them on Signal because they can't just click on the "Connect with Facebook" button. I got my mom…

I use XMPP with "regular folks". At least on Android it works well to point someone to https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.quicksy.cli... and that's it.

do you also use encryption with "regular folks" and verify each others devices?
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