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The Matrix Trashfire

blog.koehntopp.info

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Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#61

Post by gtirloni »

onli wrote: post #46
gtirloni wrote: post #21

These user reports are invaluable. They contain so much information that us devs miss because we're so used to working with our software.

Note though that this is not a regular user, but an old school blogger with deep database experience and afaik programming skills, at the very least someone highly technical (and known in Germany). He is just able to put his user hat on -> regular devs can do that too.

Yeah, that's a good point. When I put my user hat on, I try to force myself to not know things (conciously ignore them if I can), but I think it's not a "natural" experience like an end user report. Still, better than automatically doing what will work.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#62

Post by skywhopper »

crimsoneer wrote: post #6
IanCal wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you expect to just use the thing, you should be going to Element. Element sent them to matrix.org

I'll happily admit the Element/Element X migration they're currently on is silly and unhelpful, but the point being if they'd just gone to the Element home page, or download the actual Element app instead of the X one, it would have perfectly happily registered them to Matrix.org by default and everything would have been just fine.

You’re missing the point. He’s following a reasonable user flow. If he went to the wrong place in the beginning, that confusion itself is a problem that the Matrix community needs to address.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#63

Post by LorenDB »

danpalmer wrote: post #14

I've never used Matrix, directly. However I use Beeper all day every day, via their iOS, Android, and macOS clients. Beeper (not the iMessage app, but their previous and continuing multi-network app) is pretty great. I get one consistent UX across all chat networks I use. Sometimes the networks drop out, but rarely due to Beeper issues. Beeper is essentially a Matrix homeserver, plus a bunch of hosted Matrix bridges,…

This. I use Matrix daily using nheko for my client. It's a rock solid experience (except for a bit of trouble with voice calling one of my friends). I've never been randomly told I have to reverify. If you are being asked to relogin and reverify every time you restart your client, you're doing something wrong.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#64

Post by jesprenj »

I really don't like the forced end to end encryption of chats. I do not care that much about the security of my chats to justify the complications of end to end encryption -- verifying devices, constant "reset" prompts that I don't even know what they do, but they seem like they are very destructive.

I trust my homeserver, since I host it myself. I do not need end to end encryption. I understand this is an issue of the client, not the protocol. But there aren't many clients. Prebuilt element for android from fDroid will connect to matrix.org, vector.im and other network hosts and I don't want that at all, although this tracking can't easily be disabled. It feels very centralised.

I run my own homeserver and want to chat with my friend that runs his own server. It is unacceptable to me that clients connect to anything other than those two homeservers (apart from CRL and OCSP, which should also be disabled by default, as I consider those protocols great spyware). Not to mention the fact that homeserver software itself is known to make connections to the servers of the developers by default, without ever talking to someone on matrix.org. This is also unacceptable. My homeserver should only connect to other homeservers.

3PID is a failed attempt, as it centralises identities and works by utilising a single point that gathers a lot of personat information at one place. I don't want it.

XMPP does not have those issues. Set up prosody and use dino or Conversations and they won't make any connections to non-essential servers. Furthermore, the end to end encryption is way easier to use in XMPP (OMEMO), and it's easy to turn it off if you don't need it.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#65

Post by influencer3000 »

solarkraft wrote: post #55
influencer3000 wrote: post #29

While it's never fun to receive negative feedback, it'll only help to improve the product. Still, I run Matrix servers since inception of the project (10 years now \o/), and for an experienced system administrator this is not something difficult to do. If you think running a Matrix server is difficult, you are probably not the intended audience: running an IRC server, an email server, or some other server, is mostly…

> Lastly I think comparing an open source project like Matrix/Element to Publicly traded corporations like Slack or Meta, is not fair. If we want to "win" (reach similar/higher adoption), we need to at least come close. It's not easy work, but not doing it and leaving the product that so much good work has ready gone into unusable for a vast number of people would be a bummer.

Not sure we want to "win". If endusers want apps "to just work" without "paying up", then I would recommend them to stay with Whatsapp.

That kind of users aren't worth the hassle if they have no money.

I personally have better relationships with people that enjoy learning something new, and coming up with solutions for issues themselves, eventually contributing to the ecosystem.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#66

Post by skywhopper »

Fantastic writeup. I’m a little confused by the screenshot with the caption “Servers marked as vulnerable, unavailable and with profanity in their name.” In the screenshot, three things are highlighted: labels for “Vulnerable”, “Unavailable”, and the server name “cyberfurz.chat”. Is “cyberfurz” supposed to be profanity?

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#67

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

vallode wrote: post #58
IanCal wrote: post #18

This kind of process is extremely valuable and should be done by devs more often. Start from the start and follow whatever your application tells you to do . Note down when it doesn't tell you where to go or what to do. You'd be surprised by just how many things you do automatically while working because you know the little tricks and things to get by, and that wording doesn't necessarily match what the app requires…

QA is a massively underappreciated position. A QA person that knows when to automate, when to manually test, and how to report and file issues relevant to the project can save a significant proportion of hours on a project overall. I wish many more companies included budget for QA, it saves developers a lot of time. A bit of a side-note: this sort of analysis is a great answer to "I want to contribute to open source,…

The old wisdom in the US, is that if you have "Quality" in your job title, your career is over.

At the Japanese company that I used to work for, it meant that you were one of the most powerful people in the corporation, and was a sought-after adornment.

Different strokes, and all that...

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#69

Post by ivan_gammel »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #67
vallode wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QA is a massively underappreciated position. A QA person that knows when to automate, when to manually test, and how to report and file issues relevant to the project can save a significant proportion of hours on a project overall. I wish many more companies included budget for QA, it saves developers a lot of time. A bit of a side-note: this sort of analysis is a great answer to "I want to contribute to open source,…

The old wisdom in the US, is that if you have "Quality" in your job title, your career is over. At the Japanese company that I used to work for, it meant that you were one of the most powerful people in the corporation, and was a sought-after adornment. Different strokes, and all that...

I always give the power to my QA team to block any release no matter what and to give higher priority to tickets than product manager. If CEO wants to override, I cover them and take the blame. This is not a guarantee that there will be no bugs in production, but it saved us a few times.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#70

Post by the_third_wave »

rglullis wrote: post #17

Ok, now do XMPP. Or Signal, but with the added requirement that you want to run your own server.

Running an XMPP server is dead simple, just install Prosody and make few simple edits to the configuration and you're set. It hardly takes any resources (32 MB resident on my server) so it can happily live on whatever server you're already using. You will want to add some records to your domain to make it all run smoothly but this is well-documented and even works fine on free DNS providers like Namecheap and Cloudflare. Once you've done that you just install Conversations (from F-Droid, of course) and something like Gajim or Dino-im on your laptops and you'll bask in the glory of evading the surveillance dragnet because you're using OMEMO encryption which works end-to-end.

If you happen to have Jitsi Meet installed you'll already have an XMPP server up and running to which you can add some configuration to make it useable for this purpose.

Source: this is what I've been doing for many years

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