This Year in Matrix

#1

Post by Arathorn » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 5:12 PM UTC

Re: This Year in Matrix

#2

Post by Arathorn » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

Fun fact: this blog post comes out at 26 pages of A4. If anyone wants assistance digesting it, I can try to help answer stuff here :)

Re: This Year in Matrix

#3

Post by MayeulC » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 6:00 PM UTC

> nightmarish pain point that is the amount of time we spend implementing the same features across the three different platforms

I've been toying with the idea of providing dynamic extensions to Matrix rooms by sending a WASM payload as an event.

That WASM could then provide new UI elements, interactions, interpret events, etc. This could be used to implement polls (I know it's coming, but that's an example) or whiteboards inside existing clients.

It's just an idea, not sure how it would work in practice... But if anyone wants to have a go at it, be my guest!

Re: This Year in Matrix

#4

Post by lsowen » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 6:06 PM UTC

A big thank you to the entire matrix team. You've tackled a big problem space and made great progress. Here's to a great 2021 and and even better 2022!

Re: This Year in Matrix

#5

Post by marginalia_nu » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 6:08 PM UTC

Arathorn wrote: post #2

Fun fact: this blog post comes out at 26 pages of A4. If anyone wants assistance digesting it, I can try to help answer stuff here :)

It's more like 18 if you remove all the videos and images and various other cruft.

Re: This Year in Matrix

#6

Post by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 6:09 PM UTC

I have been using matrix for quite a while now, and managed to get the people I write the most with on it too!

Back then I rented matrix hosting with modular.im (now called ems) once I noticed that I did use Riot/Element on a daily basis, and the latency of matrix.org servers was too big for my taste, combined with the lack of online status display.

Now that dendrite is starting to finally mature, I will probably switch to hosting it myself to save some costs.

Main things stopping me are the possible headaches around domain names and federations: How hard is it to move to a different hoster once I have an instance running?

I read in the documentation that things can become problematic if I don't carefully backup parts of my dendrite matrix instance. What would happen if I (or rather my hosting provider) lose my files and have to setup my matrix instance from scratch, will my domain then remain blocked on the federation, even when I still have control over the domain?

It's not that I don't do backups, but I'm curious what would happen in a worst case scenario.

Re: This Year in Matrix

#7

Post by MayeulC » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 6:09 PM UTC

Arathorn wrote: post #2

Fun fact: this blog post comes out at 26 pages of A4. If anyone wants assistance digesting it, I can try to help answer stuff here :)

typo: minimising battery life on mobile

Re: This Year in Matrix

#8

Post by onefootincode » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

This was truly a great year for matrix. Thanks to the whole team for making a dream about decentralized www come true!

But I have a great pain with that bug: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/469

Everytime I’m fighting with myself to not be sarcastic when speaking about this issue, but I want to say I have hard time believing that Element could we a main communication platform for anyone without this being fixed. It drives me mad, and I have just two people to communicate with!

Re: This Year in Matrix

#9

Post by 2Gkashmiri » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

Arathorn wrote: post #2

Fun fact: this blog post comes out at 26 pages of A4. If anyone wants assistance digesting it, I can try to help answer stuff here :)

android element. why can't we forward a text or a photo or anything? i have to "share" and then select a chat or a room to forward to. any reason for this issue to exist? i personally never joined whatsapp and quit telegram during the last mass exodus to telegram.

Re: This Year in Matrix

#10

Post by kuon » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 6:16 PM UTC

I tried to adopt matrix for our small business and here is summary of my experience.

- Synapse is very resource hungry even for a small server

- Synapse creates a gazillion of TCP connection and keep them open, it was a real problem for my ISP router (SOHO router for 1gbit/s) and it took a very long time to debug, be sure to limit the number of TCP connection on the server

- Synapse is hard to get a good idea of the health of the server, the federation can break without warning

- If the federation broke for some reason, when submitting messages, they will show as delivered, this was one of the major problem for us

- Encryption is very cumbersome to get right for non technical users, there should be a server wide option to make it "easier but less secure". Even for me, it was hard to get rid of a warning popup about some device error.

- Group VOIP is hard to setup, it should be as easy as discord to be viable.

- Webhook is really hard to setup too, I want to be able to right click a channel and "copy webhook URL" to be able to post to it with CURL (discord has that)

- Globally it is very slow when joining federated rooms, it can take days to sync 500+ people room

In the end we just use discord, it's free and do the job. Of course they can read our messages and this is a problem for me as I am for privacy and encryption, but it works for everybody, it is friendly and easy to use.

I will keep a close eye on matrix and try to adopt it again, but right now it is not usable for us.