Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im • Hacker News Board

Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

#21

Post by edaemon » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 6:20 PM UTC

lima wrote: post #6

How are they supposed to make money? I distrust for-profit messenger apps, no matter how good their intentions are. Sooner or later, they'll sell my data :(

I share your distrust, which is one of the reasons I'm not a big fan of Discord. I don't know where Riot's revenue will come from, but Matrix [1] (and Riot by extension [2]) support end-to-end encryption. As others have said you can also set up your own server.

[1] https://matrix.org/blog/2016/11/21/matrixs-olm-end-to-end-en...

[2] https://medium.com/@RiotChat/exciting-new-riot-release-get-r...

Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

#22

Post by floatboth » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

nirv wrote: post #10

I have never heard of Status.im[0], but I'm glad that the Matrix protocol[1] and it's major[2] client implementation Riot.im[3]—received significant financial resources. We, a small group of tech-savvy people, tried to use Riot client in the early summer of 2017, but it was far from being convenient for work needs. Poor UI/UX, overcomplicated E2E-keys sharing, sluggish interface (Electron, as you might have guessed)…

You don't need Electron. It's just a web app. I just run Riot as a pinned tab in Firefox.

Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

#23

Post by floatboth » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 6:24 PM UTC

tachion wrote: post #16

Unklejoe wrote: post #3

Cool. I just set up my own Matrix server (Synapse) the other day and have been using Riot.im on my iPhone. To be honest, everything works much better than I expected. Right now, my only complaints are that there are some notification settings that you can't change from the app, and that the user interface is a little redundant. I'm highly optimistic though.

And who are you talking to? The problem with Matrix (or other messenger technologies) is not that they're not good enough (in most cases nowdays) but that if not enough people are using them, they're useless, even if technically superior. I have pretty great working Jabber server but the issue is I have literally 2 people left I can talk to using it nowdays and both hardware and maintenance costs when compared to ben…

I use Matrix as a glorified IRC bouncer, since matrix.org has bridges to freenode and mozilla IRC networks :)

There are some rooms that bridge IRC, Gitter and Telegram using Matrix, of course providing native Matrix access too.

Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

#24

Post by duozerk » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 6:28 PM UTC

nirv wrote: post #10

I have never heard of Status.im[0], but I'm glad that the Matrix protocol[1] and it's major[2] client implementation Riot.im[3]—received significant financial resources. We, a small group of tech-savvy people, tried to use Riot client in the early summer of 2017, but it was far from being convenient for work needs. Poor UI/UX, overcomplicated E2E-keys sharing, sluggish interface (Electron, as you might have guessed)…

Yes, riot sucks both in its current "desktop" implem (electron indeed) and the web version - tried it about two months back. You can tell there's possibly something worthwhile there though; eventually it may become usable for work.

I found the way the software tries systematically to push the user towards the "official", centralized matrix server distasteful though.

Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

#25

Post by shmerl » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 6:28 PM UTC

Good. Seeing how XMPP basically came to a complete stall, may be Matrix can progress further.

Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

#26

Post by shmerl » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 6:29 PM UTC

rrggrr wrote: post #12

Great, another messaging app. My phone and desktop are overrun by them.

Blame those who don't support the idea of IM federation.

Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

#27

Post by camgunz » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 6:32 PM UTC

It's hard for me to really know what status.im is. It bills itself as an OS, but it's not because it runs on iOS and Android. Is it a separate app store and platform? Is it a collection of apps? Is it a library or a set of protocols?

Is this a problem with the blockchain community? Repurposing long-established words for their own use ("crypto", "os")?

Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

#28

Post by Shoothe » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 6:33 PM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #25

Good. Seeing how XMPP basically came to a complete stall, may be Matrix can progress further.

I wonder why did you get that impression about XMPP, for me it's quite the opposite. Have you seen https://conversations.im/ ?

Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

#29

Post by andrewflnr » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 6:41 PM UTC

tachion wrote: post #20

vurpo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix has a big community of people with a lot of active rooms to chat in, and beyond that it has bridges to other networks like IRC, Gitter, and Slack. See voyager.t2bot.io for a graph of a whole lot of public Matrix rooms (created by a crawler bot).

This doesn't change a lot. This makes it at best Slack competitor (and I am aware of the gateways plugins being worked on) and not WhatsApp/Skype/iMessages competitor.

What's wrong with being a Slack competitor? Your perspective here seems to be "it's useless if it can't take on WhatsApp", which I think is overly pessimistic.

Re: Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

#30

Post by thomastjeffery » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 6:49 PM UTC

floatboth wrote: post #22

nirv wrote: post #10

I have never heard of Status.im[0], but I'm glad that the Matrix protocol[1] and it's major[2] client implementation Riot.im[3]—received significant financial resources. We, a small group of tech-savvy people, tried to use Riot client in the early summer of 2017, but it was far from being convenient for work needs. Poor UI/UX, overcomplicated E2E-keys sharing, sluggish interface (Electron, as you might have guessed)…

You don't need Electron. It's just a web app. I just run Riot as a pinned tab in Firefox.

That doesn't make it any less clunky or sluggish.