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Shutting down the Matrix bridge to Libera chat

matrix.org

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Re: Shutting down the Matrix bridge to Libera chat

#131

Post by joshsimmons »

immibis wrote: post #113
k8svet wrote: post #103

I'm so incredibly conflicted about whether to keep investing time and energy and hope around Matrix. I normally have good tech intuition and matrix is in this weird spot. I think the vision and direction and attitudes are amazing but they keep fking up badly. I'm embarrassed at the thought that I would "soon" soft nudge my friends and family to matrix, years ago . With the state of synapse, matrix.org, and the projec…

Matrix, at this point, is effectively proprietary. It's fully controlled by one for-profit company (Element) and the blockchain protocol (yes, it uses a blockchain) is complicated enough to prevent independent reimplementations. And it doesn't even work that well.

As the Managing Director of the Matrix.org Foundation it is expected that I conduct myself with some level of decorum.

So, exercising all due restraint, I say this: your statement is unmoored from reality. I thank @camgunz for chiming in and citing sources.

Re: Shutting down the Matrix bridge to Libera chat

#132

Post by snvzz »

Arathorn wrote: post #126
snvzz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds serious, from an IRC perspective.

The issue in question here is https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/issues/1... (and https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/pull/133... ) which accidentally regressed due to other stability work done for Libera (specifically, keeping the IRC-side connections persistent, rather than reconnecting when the bridge starts). As a result there was an race condition edge case where users on the Mat…

Not too surprising.

IRC has some particular expectations of privacy, including that users that aren't in a room shouldn't be able to read what's going on in the room, and thus archived rooms are an exception rather than a rule.

Re: Shutting down the Matrix bridge to Libera chat

#133

Post by joshsimmons »

Zetobal wrote: post #117
k8svet wrote: post #103

I'm so incredibly conflicted about whether to keep investing time and energy and hope around Matrix. I normally have good tech intuition and matrix is in this weird spot. I think the vision and direction and attitudes are amazing but they keep fking up badly. I'm embarrassed at the thought that I would "soon" soft nudge my friends and family to matrix, years ago . With the state of synapse, matrix.org, and the projec…

Drop it. After all the shit they pulled last year (no oss server code anymore, killing bridges, bugged clients) and hiring a PR person you just know they are going for entshitification. I wonder if they will recognize that their commercial offerings are just not up to spec.

Check your facts. Matrix remains an open protocol, under open source license, with open governance, stewarded by a nonprofit. And there remain multiple open source server implementations and clients.

As useful as Cory Doctorow's concept of enshittification is, it has absolutely no utility in describing what is happening here.

Nobody is being locked in, the user experience is incrementally improving as the spec and the implementations evolve, and we're sure as hell not collecting ever more data and using recommendation algorithms to shove advertising down people's throats.

There are plenty of valid critiques. But what you're saying here is just patently absurd.

Re: Shutting down the Matrix bridge to Libera chat

#134

Post by RadiozRadioz »

immibis wrote: post #116
NewJazz wrote: post #4

Matrix has a long way to go to compete with IRC and XMPP... Godspeed.

Matrix has one big thing that is missing from IRC - disconnecting and reconnecting without losing chat messages. This is extremely important with mobile clients - so important that idling in IRC with a phone is barely possible.

XMPP supports this with XEP-0313

Re: Shutting down the Matrix bridge to Libera chat

#135

Post by _8j50 »

Syonyk wrote: post #122
_8j50 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am with you with IRC experience, but the definition of "works well" is dynamic. These days it means secure and easily accesible from a browser and no "trust me bro" irc server ops lol. I love IRC, the mess that exists today is a result of e2ee being implemented at the application layer instead of transport or session. But much like email, you have to let go of nostalgia. If the horse been dead for 20 years, dismoun…

> But much like email, you have to let go of nostalgia. If the horse been dead for 20 years, dismount! It's not nostalgia. It's quite literally the best way I've found to get deep, weird, technical details on the deep weeds I play in, because IRC has a lot of other people who are similarly skilled in the arts of wizarding at and below the kernel. I simply assume everything said on IRC is public, and act accordingly.…

By "dead" I meant the tech is outdated. You can run and enjoy IRC and email and plenty of people will join you but that does not mean it's a good solution. Even SSL was not a thing when those techs came out and security was an afterthought. It's not just transport security but also your machine/network getting compromised.

IRCv3 sounds promising since you can finally see historical chat (no need for a znc). But the question I ask is how does it compare with alternatives like discord or matrix?

Also, you are right about finding a lot of smart people on IRC, I had the same experience but I can't even find many of the people I use to chat with in there anymore. Slack, discord, social media have taken over. The nice thing about matrix was you can bridge all these places, but as you can with this post, IRC folks cause drama over matrix all the time because they can't adapt to new stuff. I would have expected the opposite where libera would run a matrix home server!

These are just tools and tech, don't we all care more about the people and conversations we can have more than all this? I wouldn't even touch discord had so many not migrated to it already. And many of these communities had other spaces like on twitter and reddit and now they are fragmented all over the internet. I have no problem rallying around whatever the masses pick so long is it is actually good enough.

Re: Shutting down the Matrix bridge to Libera chat

#136

Post by dang »

immibis wrote: post #127
doublerabbit wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord is as if IRC and MSN/Y!M/AIM had an orgy and gave birth to an illegitimate child. Discord got it right but wrong. Channels are correct. Image / File sharing is correct Closed gardens and gimmicks with paid subscriptions is where it falls.

[flagged]

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing a ton of this. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Re: Shutting down the Matrix bridge to Libera chat

#137

Post by Karrot_Kream »

_8j50 wrote: post #120
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking about this in a nuanced way on HN these days is useless. Threads about IRC, Mastodon, Lemmy, etc don't attract pragmatists. They attract zealots that really want to pretend like their chosen ethical technology is the best and won all the wars and changed everything, and shhh you sheeple for suggesting otherwise let me downvote you. I will say while Element (the flagship Matrix client) isn't as polished as I'd…

Except element does choke my browser/system (32g ram, many cores) even with rooms that aren't all that big. Slack does the same, discord doesn't even with large rooms and 100+ rooms open.

Hm I haven't had any issues like that. I do have room sync issues where it takes forever to join a large room, but nothing wrong with the app itself. I'm also using the Electron app across platforms and maybe it handles differently across browsers, but I use the Discord Electron app also.

Re: Shutting down the Matrix bridge to Libera chat

#138

Post by wkat4242 »

INTPenis wrote: post #19

Some channels on libera have been awful, a ton of [m] names, and long repetitive messages converted from matrix. I know I might be using a dying medium but I enjoy IRC the way it is.

The repetitive messages happen when you edit a message in matrix. It resends the whole thing because irc doesn't support that feature.

Re: Shutting down the Matrix bridge to Libera chat

#139

Post by vilunov »

camgunz wrote: post #118
immibis wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix, at this point, is effectively proprietary. It's fully controlled by one for-profit company (Element) and the blockchain protocol (yes, it uses a blockchain) is complicated enough to prevent independent reimplementations. And it doesn't even work that well.

Sorry I don't think anything you've written here is true: > Matrix, at this point, is effectively proprietary. Matrix is fully open [0] and fully spec'd by the MSCs [1], and stewarded by the Matrix Foundation [2]. > It's fully controlled by one for-profit company (Element). 2/5 people on the board work for Element [2]. > and the blockchain protocol (yes, it uses a blockchain) It does not use a blockchain (there is no…

> Matrix is fully open [0] and fully spec'd by the MSCs [1], and stewarded by the Matrix Foundation [2].

Technically correct, but in practice the spec is complex enough that there are only 2 more or less working server implementations, both of them developed by the same org. I tried to implement it myself, but in comparison to IRC and XMPP it's just too complex. That's what "effectively" means.

> There are several independent client [3] and server [4] implementations.

Only one non-Element server is there is "Production ready", and it's dead. The website is down and the last commit is from 2021. There were many spec changes since then, including the infamous "sliding window sync", which is necessary for the next gen clients.

> It does not use a blockchain (there is no proof-of-anything). You might be confusing blockchains with Merkle Trees, but in that case you'd also have to think git is a blockchain.

They probably mean the DAG-like structure of rooms, which is a horror to implement, and even more horrifying to implement efficiently. It's a blockchain of sorts, with room events being linked to parent events.

> there is no proof-of-anything

It does not need to be "proof-of-anything" to be a blockchain, that's not why there are words "block" and "chain" are there. There is a consensus protocol between home servers, and it fails terribly, leading to room resets.

Re: Shutting down the Matrix bridge to Libera chat

#140

Post by wkat4242 »

thedaly wrote: post #74
carterschonwald wrote: post #68

One thing that Libera and its predecessors have that is impossible with element and discord and slack is: multiple overlapping communities on the same platform. Maybe matrix/element has that, but I’m not very adept at finding it I guess. Old time original freenode had so many communities.

Isn’t that how it works with discord? I don’t understand what you mean by overlapping communities.

Discord is a datamining tracking commercial service. It's just not fair to ask FOSS users to join it IMO.
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