Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

This Year in Matrix

matrix.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 109 posts

Re: This Year in Matrix

#21

Post by beepbooptheory »

Really get good vibes from the company, can't quite put my finger on it... Never hearing back from them about a job was a bigger disappointment than usual.

Problems with synapse are true, but it was a good compromise to push out an early implementation so things could get rolling quicker with getting people to actually use the clients.

Just when I get used to some issue/missing feature in the clients, they seem to fix it.

And in general I trust and know that decisions with the spec are being made carefully.

I use it for an intimate chat server with never more than 8 users, so I can't speak to some of the problems. I can just say the trajectory itself for Matrix is strong. A good effort to fight slack and discord. Wish all the discord servers people use were matrix instead.

Re: This Year in Matrix

#22

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

MayeulC wrote: post #3

> 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 white…

That sounds terrifying from a security perspective. I know wasm is sandboxed, but it's in a sandbox with all the user's data and parts of the user interface, which is quite enough to do damage.

Re: This Year in Matrix

#23

Post by kevincox »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #21

Really get good vibes from the company, can't quite put my finger on it... Never hearing back from them about a job was a bigger disappointment than usual. Problems with synapse are true, but it was a good compromise to push out an early implementation so things could get rolling quicker with getting people to actually use the clients. Just when I get used to some issue/missing feature in the clients, they seem to fi…

> And in general I trust and know that decisions with the spec are being made carefully.

This is one place where I strongly disagree.

Almost all features have "We will add encryption later" which is not a way to build a secure messenger. Stickers, polls, profiles, spaces, relations, reactions... they all start with and unencrypted version with the promise that "encryption will come in a later MSC". They should really take "secure" out of the tagline until they actually add E2EE for all of these features. Basically all clients allow users to use these insecure features in encrypted rooms with no warning at all.

And I constantly see hacky quick fixes get accepted because "we need to do something", "no clear use case for $X" (even when there is) and "N other MSCs depend on this so we'll merge it in and deal with a proper solution later". For example the relations MSC just got merged with support for only 1 relation per message even though it is clear that editing replies would be a problem with this system.

I love Matrix and hope it does in fact unify messaging but I think "carefully" is not the way to describe how the spec is progressing. More like "shoved in whatever direction is needed to implement the newest Element feature". Maybe that is for the better, we do need a featureful protocol to get users after all, but personally it irks me the wrong way. Especially when security and privacy are ignored "for later".

Re: This Year in Matrix

#24

Post by IceWreck »

kuon wrote: post #10

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…

Your problems are with synapse. I had a similar experience with it in 2019. Dropped matrix for a while and started using Dendrite in 2020.

It still lacks features compared to synapse but I'm happy with the performance. Notifications are sorely missing but I think the PR to add them is finally ready to merge.

Give it a year or two and you'll have a full featured matrix home server that can run on a raspberry pi.

Re: This Year in Matrix

#25

Post by kevincox »

mroche wrote: post #17
trumpablehump wrote: post #11

Can I use separate identities in the same Element instance yet? Especially with Spaces I feel like this is an obvious feature where it should be easy for people to protect their privacy by using different accounts for different hobbies or peer groups. I would love to finally be able to use my employer's chatrooms with my real name, the animal rights group with my one pseudonym and the techie chat with the other one.

It sounds like you're asking for a Slack style configuration, e.g. where each workspace (in Slack terminology) needs to be authed into and can use different accounts within one app instance?

Slack is a bad example here because you can't really use different accounts at a time (at least on web). It just provides a relatively easy link to switch between them. Maybe app/mobile are better?

But yes, I think OP is asking to be logged into two accounts and see the rooms/contacts/notification from both in the same application. This is not currently supported in Element and I don't think it is on the near roadmap. But some other clients do have multi-account support.

Re: This Year in Matrix

#26

Post by Arathorn »

trumpablehump wrote: post #11

Can I use separate identities in the same Element instance yet? Especially with Spaces I feel like this is an obvious feature where it should be easy for people to protect their privacy by using different accounts for different hobbies or peer groups. I would love to finally be able to use my employer's chatrooms with my real name, the animal rights group with my one pseudonym and the techie chat with the other one.

Not yet. Hopefully one for 2022!

Re: This Year in Matrix

#27

Post by blitzar »

IceWreck wrote: post #24
kuon wrote: post #10

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…

Your problems are with synapse. I had a similar experience with it in 2019. Dropped matrix for a while and started using Dendrite in 2020. It still lacks features compared to synapse but I'm happy with the performance. Notifications are sorely missing but I think the PR to add them is finally ready to merge. Give it a year or two and you'll have a full featured matrix home server that can run on a raspberry pi.

I believe that is when the Year of the Linux Desktop is scheduled as well.

Re: This Year in Matrix

#28

Post by italwayslags »

IceWreck wrote: post #24
kuon wrote: post #10

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…

Your problems are with synapse. I had a similar experience with it in 2019. Dropped matrix for a while and started using Dendrite in 2020. It still lacks features compared to synapse but I'm happy with the performance. Notifications are sorely missing but I think the PR to add them is finally ready to merge. Give it a year or two and you'll have a full featured matrix home server that can run on a raspberry pi.

No post body was provided.

Re: This Year in Matrix

#29

Post by MayeulC »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #22
MayeulC wrote: post #3

> 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 white…

That sounds terrifying from a security perspective. I know wasm is sandboxed, but it's in a sandbox with all the user's data and parts of the user interface, which is quite enough to do damage.

I agree that the attack surface needs to be carefuly thought about. It shoudln't be much harder than current "widgets", though.

I was thinking of something that only does I/O with data contained in the room it's in. I think the UI would be the hard part, but it could be doable with a few HTML tags and an extensible UI.

For instance: add an "insert poll" button, or an "add voice message" button. Or an "add sticker"/emoji/gif, etc. Currently every client needs to build this individually. Users could pick the features they want in their clients.

Moreover, not every plugin needs to be third-party. A "trusted store" could very well be maintained.

Re: This Year in Matrix

#30

Post by Arathorn »

kevincox wrote: post #23
beepbooptheory wrote: post #21

Really get good vibes from the company, can't quite put my finger on it... Never hearing back from them about a job was a bigger disappointment than usual. Problems with synapse are true, but it was a good compromise to push out an early implementation so things could get rolling quicker with getting people to actually use the clients. Just when I get used to some issue/missing feature in the clients, they seem to fi…

> And in general I trust and know that decisions with the spec are being made carefully. This is one place where I strongly disagree. Almost all features have "We will add encryption later" which is not a way to build a secure messenger. Stickers, polls, profiles, spaces, relations, reactions... they all start with and unencrypted version with the promise that "encryption will come in a later MSC". They should really…

This is a really interesting point. We deliberately built Element to help prove the spec and define its direction (including ensuring it has decent privacy properties), to avoid all the failure modes where folks build a protocol without a real app or product in mind and end up with something which tried to be all things to all people and useful to none.

While I’d have loved us to have infite manpower getting all the security features in from day 1, we had to bootstrap and we prioritised usable apps over optimising for a perfect spec. And judging by some of the rest of the thread, we didn’t so well even then; it would have been even worse otherwise.

Post reply on HN