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Matrix 1.0 – Are We Ready Yet?

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Re: Matrix 1.0 – Are We Ready Yet?

#121

Post by lallysingh »

MattJ100 wrote: post #112
jbverschoor wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weren't facebook messenger and google talk based on xmpp? I know that at least they were compatible, but in the end they removed that. Trying to force people on their own client

This is the problem - if you have a large user base there is simply no business incentive for federation. It is so much easier (and cheaper) to just build your own silo without worrying about interoperability. Plus you have the ability to monetize a closed system through ads, data mining, etc. There are so many advantages. And people don't complain (much) because, for chat especially, they have had years of condition…

And don't forget about spam. Spam becomes a problem when your system gets bigger.

Re: Matrix 1.0 – Are We Ready Yet?

#122

Post by [deleted] »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #55

I'm not very much into chat apps and protocols, but isn't it possible to just revive XMPP? Ten years ago we used Adium and Pidgin, and federated chat seemed like a solved problem. I understand XMPP with its extensions and use of XML fragments might be complex, but it sounds like matrix or another new protocol isn't easier. In a way, those willing to invest time into F/OSS chat apps have done the best they could with…

[deleted]

Re: Matrix 1.0 – Are We Ready Yet?

#123

Post by MattJ100 »

paulcarroty wrote: post #119
MattJ100 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of us are still working on XMPP, and there are thousands of XMPP servers and many more users on the network. It's true that since the original Jabber project began in 1999 there was a vision of giving users freedom of software and service, yet that vision is still nowhere near reality in 2019. But we are still an active community and still work towards that vision. XMPP is not dead. Unfortunately Pidgin and Ad…

> and there are thousands of XMPP servers proof please. Checked the top 3-4 xmpp servers last summer and they almost died. IRC looks 1000000x more active.

I'm not sure how you are judging "activity". I suspect you are talking about chatrooms. In this sense, yes, IRC probably would look pretty active - it is built around the concept of channels, the majority of which tend to be public. XMPP is far more diverse, rooms are spread across multiple servers with no central way to list them. A project that aims to spider the network and help find rooms is at: https://search.jabber.network/ (note that this doesn't currently index jabber.org, traditionally one of the larger hosts, due to a technical glitch I believe).

My mention of thousands of servers is not related to public chatrooms however. There are a bunch of public servers which you can register accounts on, but many more private ones (that federate) run by businesses and individuals and other organisations. A quick shodan search reports 55,760 unique IP addresses speaking XMPP publicly on port 5269 (the default federation port): https://www.shodan.io/search?query=port%3A5269+http%3A%2F%2F...

Re: Matrix 1.0 – Are We Ready Yet?

#124

Post by pbhjpbhj »

speedplane wrote: post #60
Animats wrote: post #31

The home page gives no clue as to what "Matrix" is. It seems to be yet another "federation" system. Is this worth any attention?

> It seems to be yet another "federation" system. Is this worth any attention? In the current internet environment of walled gardens and a siloed and decimated internet, any federation system is worthy of attention.

Given Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have shown they're against federated messaging the more pertinent question for me is "can it work?

Will anyone other than geeks switch from Facebook, et al..

You'd probably need some legislation to force those running large communication platforms to open their protocols and allow federation before there can be significant progress. I really can't see their being political will for that at present.

Re: Matrix 1.0 – Are We Ready Yet?

#125

Post by hawski »

Arathorn wrote: post #27
meruru wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I in fact just installed it. They changed the text in the "search bar" present in the homescreen, which is a great improvement (it now says "filter rooms"). However this feature is only useful for really heavy users with tons of rooms, yet it's displayed front and center while the global search option which is fundamental for onboarding is still hidden. The full redesign has been postponed because they are rewri…

the recent mobile update is just a cosmetic redesign (getting rid of all the green!) You're completely right that RiotX is where the overall usability fixes are happening, including ones which would solve your problem here. Good news is that RiotX is evolving fast though - we're putting all our resources into it rather than Riot/Android, and then the same UX will be ported over to Riot/iOS. We're aiming to get a dail…

Right now is it generally recommended to use Riot or is RiotX stable/good enough? Also is RiotX like a beta channel, so when it's considered complete/stable will an update effectively replace Riot with RiotX for all current users?

Re: Matrix 1.0 – Are We Ready Yet?

#126

Post by Arathorn »

Leace wrote: post #111
Arathorn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From memory, about 50% of the users visible in Matrix are on the matrix.org server, which is one of about 30K deployments total that we're aware of, directly or indirectly. This will likely change in the near future as the French deployment expands, which should dwarf the matrix.org server. In the medium/long term, we'd like to at least disable registration on the matrix.org server if not turn it off entirely (once d…

Thanks for your post. I've been wondering about federation distribution in various protocols since seeing similar stats for Mastodon [0]. Having federated protocol where vast majority of users still use one server is sub-optimal IMHO (this is not only for Matrix). [0]: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/the-federation-fallacy.html As for identity server, it was just surprising for me (from user's perspective) that when my fr…

the mobile clients lagged a bit on .well-known support, but it landed over the last few weeks: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk/pull/644 and https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-android-sdk/pull/436. Hopefully this should improve things a bunch.

For 'the federation fallacy' thing: our approach is to first decentralise accounts (so you can transparently move them between servers), at which we can turn off matrix.org (or at least disable signup) assuming there are enough other quality public servers available to incorporate the resulting diaspora. In the longer term, we want to enable P2P in Matrix so you don't even need a server at all if you don't want it, at which point the federation fallacy argument entirely falls apart :)

and thanks for the thanks! :)

Re: Matrix 1.0 – Are We Ready Yet?

#128

Post by Arathorn »

mindB wrote: post #105
Arathorn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, other clients with fully working E2E encryption include: Seaglass, Weechat, Pattle and nheko (although it needs to implement attachments, but they is easy). The weechat and nheko implementations are independent implementations (ie not the same as the Riot ones). We are starting work this week on closing the E2E gap for all the rest.

Oh neat. Is the plan to write a proxy sitting between client and server and decrypting/encrypting all events so any client can be used in e2ee rooms?

precisely. should have news about it later this week :)

Re: Matrix 1.0 – Are We Ready Yet?

#129

Post by notyourday »

TuringTest wrote: post #108
notyourday wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the standard problem of software designed by software engineers: they have a problem turning off their geek-brain to see how a potential user views it. Matrix folks: * if a teenager cannot understand what it is in 10 seconds of looking at it or if a teenager does not download the client after understanding what it is your product is hopelessly broken * if a 30 year old cannot understand what it is in 20 seconds…

That's why you point users to Riot.im instead... Seriously, you don't expose end users to platform-level infrastructure. Matrix audience is software engineers, so it's good that matrix.org is dedicated to explain itself to developers. The tools you build on top of it, those are the ones you show to end users.

Oh so the users also need to know that when they hear Matrix, it means people are talking about Riot!

Compare:

https://telegram.org/

with

https://matrix.org/blog/home/

Where is a link to the app store for Riot? Where is the link to the website? Why do I get a table of "yes/no/kinda" when I click on "Clients"?

This project will will become another IRC -- cute but irrelevant.

Re: Matrix 1.0 – Are We Ready Yet?

#130

Post by emias »

Arathorn wrote: post #80
hannob wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix is the perfect example of xkcd 927 - https://xkcd.com/927/ They built something like XMPP, just a bit different. What they got is more fragmentation in the space of free messaging. None of the justifications they have how their approach is different justifies the costs of additional fragmentation they create. This is super frustrating, people don't seem to have an understanding what the costs of incompatibilit…

I'd counter and suggest that the super frustrating thing is XMPP zealots saying "oh my god how dare you try to create a different protocol". With this mentality, nothing would evolve and we'd be stuck on svn rather than git... To reiterate once again, the things which Matrix tries to do differently to XMPP include: * Be a replicated conversation database for realtime conversations, more like usenet (NNTP) if anything…

> I'd counter and suggest that the super frustrating thing is XMPP zealots saying "oh my god how dare you try to create a different protocol".

I see no such consensus within the XMPP community, but yes personally I agree with those zealots. My interest in federation is making it possible to communicate with anyone just like I can call anyone by phone. Inventing an incompatible protocol obviously won't help with this goal, even if you ignore the issue of splitting up scarce manpower and assume bridges can act as a partial workaround (at least for geeks who can cope with their limitations).

> With this mentality, nothing would evolve and we'd be stuck on svn rather than git...

Comparing XMPP to SVN and Matrix to Git just reads like trolling to me. The obvious difference is that XMPP is highly extensible while SVN is not at all. So the discussion is not about whether or not to evolve, the question is whether evolving federated IM required starting from scratch, i.e. whether the advantages are worth the resulting fragmentation. And I just fail to see the problem in using/extending the XMPP spec to replicate your DAG.

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