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Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

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Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#101

Post by vitonsky »

Arathorn wrote: post #97
vitonsky wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix community scam everyone when claim a matrix is a privacy-focused. And you are part of this community who deceive people. The fact that anything is open source is not make it "privacy focused". Literally everything in Matrix is designed against privacy and security. Check issue I mention above. The product that is "privacy focused" would never have such type of problems that will force developers to say that la…

your issue is complaining that matrix-bot-sdk can’t exfiltrate encryption keys which predate it joining a room? this feels like a pretty reasonable limitation. if you really need this, use matrix-rust-sdk with MSC4268 enabled.

No, as i wrote in issue title and explained twice in this thread, the problem is bot SDK does not support encryption. It must work by default, for "privacy focused" application. Chat with no encryption must be an option, not default.

Matrix protocol is over-complicated, as consequence any SDK and even clients are over-complicated too, that eventually makes any interaction with Matrix is difficult, unpleasant, and error-prone.

Matrix design is error-prone by its nature:

Keys exchange confuses many users, I had many questions of people who are not programmer.

Matrix encourage login at random sites who up their web client, that is critical security problem.

But a Matrix fans are blind to a problems. This is why I don't believe Matrix will transform from marginal chat for freaks to a mainstream chat where people talk. So eventually, Matrix is a platform where Matrix fans talks about Matrix and send porn to each other.

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#102

Post by AAAAaccountAAAA »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #80
AAAAaccountAAAA wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix is not a some sort of volunteer project. It is used by NATO as their NI2CE, as well as by many other governmental entities. Matrix runs on European taxpayer's money.

You're thinking of Element: https://element.io/case-studies/nato Now do Nextcloud and many other projects. It's FOSS. There are volunteer contributors. https://matrix.org/blog/2025/06/dispelling-myths/ > Matrix is not just an open standard for secure communication, it’s an openly governed and collaboratively developed ecosystem of projects powered by a growing community of volunteers and vendors. In this way, Matrix…

Oh, it seems you are here to just troll and insult everyone. Matrix by calling it just a some sort of volunteer project run by nerds in basements, and those too, who are not pleased with it's problems.

What exactly does have a "call for volunteers" to haul around stuff in a some sort of conference has to do with anything? What has Nextcloud to do with this?

You'd have known that Matrix ecosystem has lots of paid professionals working on it, if you made even a cursory research on the subject before starting to write cheeky comments.

You claimed the problems with Matrix can be solved with a few pull requests. It's your duty to back it up.

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#103

Post by goku12 »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #69

"Pull requests welcome" is all I can say to anyone who puts energy into long rants about the "state" of a FOSS project. If you think volunteer dev is so easy then get stuck in and be the change you want to see.

Pull requests aren't going to solve the current issues with Matrix. I believe that the problem arises from the protocol design itself. And cutting back on the current specification is not viable for an already deployed project.

Here are some reasons why I think it's the protocol. Synapse is the only fully functional home server. Both dendrite and conduit are struggling to reach feature parity. This could be either due to the protocol being too complex or it being extended too fast. I have seen signs of both. Meanwhile, practically all web clients like element, cinny and schildi are all based on the same codebase. Native clients like Fractal and Nheko do exist. But it looks like they are also going to need the rust library behind elementx to attain full function. This lack of diversity among the clients are also indicative of the protocol complexity (similar to how nearly every web browser is based on Chrome's blink engine).

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#104

Post by AAAAaccountAAAA »

Arathorn wrote: post #85
AAAAaccountAAAA wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix is not a some sort of volunteer project. It is used by NATO as their NI2CE, as well as by many other governmental entities. Matrix runs on European taxpayer's money.

The Matrix Foundation is currently massively underfunded (contributing significantly to many of the complaints in this thread, especially around Trust & Safety) and even then losing money. It gets no money from folks like France or NATO despite their use of Matrix. You can see the list of financially contributing projects at https://matrix.org/support - there are only two governmental entities who support Matrix dire…

> The Matrix Foundation is currently massively underfunded (contributing significantly to many of the complaints in this thread, especially around Trust & Safety) and even then losing money. It gets no money from folks like France or NATO despite their use of Matrix. You can see the list of financially contributing projects at https://matrix.org/support - there are only two governmental entities who support Matrix directly today; Gematik in Germany and another unlisted European govt.

That some specific organization is underfunded does not mean that whole Matrix was built by a few volunteer developers here and there.

> Element on the other hand does have a bunch of customers like NATO, but is also losing money, thanks to governmental Matrix deals often going to system integrators who win contracts with Element's FOSS software and then don't contribute any $ back to Element. I explained the mess at FOSDEM: https://youtu.be/lkCKhP1jxdk?t=740 and there's a good article about a typical instance of this (in German) at https://www.heise.de/news/Wie-Behoerden-und-ihre-Auftragnehm...

That's kind of the point of FOSS. Everyone can crete their own forks, and do not have a duty to contribute money, especially not to an another for-profit company. That happens to all major Free Software projects. Many users of, say, Linux kernel, do not contribute any money at all. Some even refuse to abide by the GPL license (which is less okay), but Linux still not only survives, but thrives.

> (by the way, you seem to spend a a lot of time telling everyone how shit Matrix is; don't you have anything better to do? :)

What is a "lot of time"? A few short messages online?

I think I have explained a realistic user perspective on Matrix. It works, but it has some problems. I have even told that the abuse spam problem has been gotten under control, in the recent threads concerning that.

You have gotten to the point where people care about Matrix. That's a big deal. Matrix is quite possibly a bigger thing now than IRC was at its very peak. That is a big achievement. Unless there is something big I don't know about, your situation is far from hopeless. There is no need to play a victim, give up or to start insulting your users.

The idea that citizens should just shut up about a software project partially built on public money is completely ludicrous.

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#105

Post by dzaima »

udev4096 wrote: post #99
dzaima wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that messages not getting through federation in some cases is just a thing that can happen. How that's compatible with calling matrix as having good federation, I don't know.

No, you are making things up. That cannot happen unless the homeservers are not configured properly. If you don't have anything to back that story up, I suggest you slow down on making matrix look bad

Unfortunately I cannot find where I had read that, might've just misinterpreted discussion about delays as about dropping messages / interpreting messages as answers to questions I didn't actually post... Sorry for the unnecessary negativity!

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#106

Post by johnisgood »

Arathorn wrote: post #93
johnisgood wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a graph for post-2022 data? I wonder if it kept its trajectory.

sure, i just genned a new one for you: https://matrix.org/~matthew/mscs.png The trajectory is the same, although obviously it's not ideal that the backlog grows at roughly the same rate as we merge/close them. Perhaps some day the Foundation will have enough $ to actually fund the spec core team to work on MSC review as their dayjob; meanwhile it's done in spare time or smuggled in as part of their dayjob. Meanwhile,…

Thank you! :)

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#107

Post by Arathorn »

dzaima wrote: post #105
udev4096 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you are making things up. That cannot happen unless the homeservers are not configured properly. If you don't have anything to back that story up, I suggest you slow down on making matrix look bad

Unfortunately I cannot find where I had read that, might've just misinterpreted discussion about delays as about dropping messages / interpreting messages as answers to questions I didn't actually post... Sorry for the unnecessary negativity!

in dzaima’s defence they did hit an instance here where messages were effectively dropped - but only because the matrix.org db was so corrupted it incorrectly quarantined them (and even then, they can be flushed through). corruot db is effectively an extreme form of misconfiguration, i guess.

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#108

Post by Arathorn »

vitonsky wrote: post #101
Arathorn wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your issue is complaining that matrix-bot-sdk can’t exfiltrate encryption keys which predate it joining a room? this feels like a pretty reasonable limitation. if you really need this, use matrix-rust-sdk with MSC4268 enabled.

No, as i wrote in issue title and explained twice in this thread, the problem is bot SDK does not support encryption. It must work by default, for "privacy focused" application. Chat with no encryption must be an option, not default. Matrix protocol is over-complicated, as consequence any SDK and even clients are over-complicated too, that eventually makes any interaction with Matrix is difficult, unpleasant, and err…

matrix-bot-sdk does support encryption: https://turt2live.github.io/matrix-bot-sdk/tutorial-encrypti...

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#109

Post by Arathorn »

goku12 wrote: post #103
hammyhavoc wrote: post #69

"Pull requests welcome" is all I can say to anyone who puts energy into long rants about the "state" of a FOSS project. If you think volunteer dev is so easy then get stuck in and be the change you want to see.

Pull requests aren't going to solve the current issues with Matrix. I believe that the problem arises from the protocol design itself. And cutting back on the current specification is not viable for an already deployed project. Here are some reasons why I think it's the protocol. Synapse is the only fully functional home server. Both dendrite and conduit are struggling to reach feature parity. This could be either du…

This is not correct.

Matrix is deliberately asymmetrical - it’s easier to write clients than servers (although that balances has shifted somewhat with E2EE).

The reason Dendrite has fallen behind is simply because we couldn’t afford to split focus between it and Synapse. Meanwhile the various Conduit projects seem to be keeping up quite well despite being entirely hobby projects.

Clientside, there are entirely separate production grade stacks with full featuresets in at least typescript (eg Element Web), rust (EX, Fractal), Dart (FluffyChat), KMP (Trixnity), C++ (Nheko), Go (Beeper) and more. I can guarantee their authors would very heavily push back on the “you need rust-sdk to attain full function”, not least as many of those have more features than rust-sdk.

This is not a WebKit situation.

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#110

Post by Arathorn »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #98
Arathorn wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Matrix Foundation is currently massively underfunded (contributing significantly to many of the complaints in this thread, especially around Trust & Safety) and even then losing money. It gets no money from folks like France or NATO despite their use of Matrix. You can see the list of financially contributing projects at https://matrix.org/support - there are only two governmental entities who support Matrix dire…

> thanks to governmental Matrix deals often going to system integrators who win contracts with Element's FOSS software and then don't contribute any $ back to Element Are they contributing code? Money (explicitly to a single specific entity, especially) is hardly the only way to support something.

France has contributed back some code in lieu of money, but it’s a very mixed blessing given we then have to maintain that code, which costs way more in the long term than writing it in the first place. It also actively damages the braintrust of the team if Element has to let staff go because we can’t pay them, and get code instead (as happened with France).
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