This Year in Matrix

> I think the initial sync issue is one of the worst problems, because someone joining in to leave a quick comment will be waiting for the system to synchronize

The initial sync issue is only a problem for large accounts which have joined many rooms. Cactus comments creates a guest user for non-logged-in commenters, and an empty guest account is pretty much instant to load in my experience.

You can go to my cactus comments instance (running on aforementioned 1gb machine) to test out the speed https://karmanyaah.malhotra.cc/tech/2021/06/website-things/

I'm running a small (at the beginning it was completely public, now I'm keeping an eye on registrations) homeserver with synapse for a few years - I really like Matrix on a conceptual level and I'm happy that it exists even through it's not perfect it works pretty well mostly. I don't want to be too harsh because it's the best decentralized alternative for chat at the moment and it's open-source and there is a lot of progress but damn' it was a pain in the ass to run that server... we solved our problems mostly with throwing resources and memory on the problem... it's a nice tour de force if you want to learn about debugging distributed systems but it's nothing to install somewhere and just keep running.

synapse is quite a mess and there are a lot of hidden footguns if you just run a server - this is just the tip of iceberg to keep the postgres database somewhat sane: https://levans.fr/shrink-synapse-database.html - lot's of other issues in the issue-tracker where you can just scratch your head.

bridges are all subtly broken - the xmpp bridge is horrible and broke in so much interesting ways that I'm not going to touch it ever again - telegram works okay most of the time, irc-bridge also have some warts - but it's easy to criticize from my chair and probably unfair to talk so negative about it here but it's often buggy and broken for edge-cases - it works most of the time pretty okay but it's quite a mess to get a mental model for the code and so it's difficult to debug things.

moderation/spam/etc.pp is all hackable but not there out of the box - it looks and feels like mostly quickly hacked up nodejs code that at least for us exploded in all kinds of interesting ways. https://github.com/matrix-org/mjolnir writing 3tb of logs in a few day and eating memory like crazy for instance. You have to babysit it and there is no simple ui for anything.

So it's powerful but requires quite a bit of dedication and patience to get right. It's a full blown distributed system and often state is all over the place and once you make a mistake it's difficult to impossible to get that thing do work correct again without starting over.

But there are so much promising projects that I'm confident that these issues will be resolved and it will only get better but in my experience it will break badly on all kinds of edge-cases - the mentioned xmpp-bridge created usernames that can't be deleted via the http api for instance. someone bridged 1000 channels via our telegram-bridge and there is no code to remove those channels - you have to code something up in python for yourself. irc bridge kicks you after 30 days idle because they can't handle the connections - freenode (before the takeover) said it's not them - maybe single threaded nodejs is not such a good idea for that.

Could I do it any better and delivering? Probably not. But except some adventure and if you want to deploy it for an org carefully test any assumptions you take for granted. It's cool but it's also kind of quick'n'dirty in a lot of ways. Still better than anything else I'd use it over any megacorp messenger anytime but maybe don't switch your family yet.

But for using it you don't have to care - and there are great projects like https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy that solve most of the problems out of the box and mobile clients and web clients and E2E crypto also works really well.

I want to voice strong agreement with kevincox. I use an encrypted Matrix room daily and had no idea that reactions, relations (does that mean that edits are in cleartext??), etc are completely unencrypted. I've read a little bit of the spec (though clearly not very much), I've written a bot, I've patched the Element desktop client, I've even been working with a JSON export of my message history and didn't notice—perhaps I should have, but my point is that it's not obvious at all, and users SHOULD be proactively made aware of what's encrypted and what's not.

Sending things unencrypted that users have every reason to think are encrypted is extremely irresponsible. And I assumed, as I think is perfectly reasonable, that everything in an E2EE room is in fact end-to-end encrypted. I'm very disappointed to find out this way that it's not (and won't be for the foreseeable future), and I don't see any justification for failing to making users aware of that.

All that said, I love Matrix, will continue to use it every day, and am hugely rooting for the success of the project. Thanks for all your hard work on it!

I will give conduit another look if I ever try to setup a server again. I am quite active in the rust community and maybe I could also participate.

fixed, thanks