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Gitter now speaks Matrix

matrix.org

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Re: Gitter now speaks Matrix

#61

Post by dralley »

Arathorn wrote: post #30
haolez wrote: post #13

"In the medium/long term, it’s simply not going to be efficient for the combined Element/Gitter team to split our efforts maintaining two high-profile Matrix clients. Our plan is instead to merge Gitter’s features into Element (or next generations of Element) itself and then - if and only if Element has achieved parity with Gitter - we expect to upgrade the deployment on gitter.im to a Gitter-customised version of El…

To be 100% clear: we are not going to shelve the Gitter codebase until Element (or other Matrix clients) have total parity with it. And once we do, we'll replace the current Gitter codebase with a Gitter-branded version of Element, and make sure it's configured so all the Gittery stuff works as you'd expect... while also benefiting from all the work we're pouring into Matrix and Element. So, I'd see it more like Gitt…

Please consider more than just features when making this decision. Gitter has a very different user experience from Element at the moment.

Gitter's default layout is clean, information-dense and distraction-free. There is no "x has left/joined the room" spam, very little unnecessary whitespace, a bare minimum of icons (no "seen by", no miniature avatars in quotes and @callouts), and a more subdued color palette (emphasis is provided primarily by bold font rather than by different colors).

That's not to say that Element is bad, because it isn't. But for focused technical discussions, Gitter is much better in my opinion.

I've tried the "modern" compact and IRC layouts, but unfortunately they don't really solve these problems. Mostly they are the same amount of distraction packed into a more condensed form.

Re: Gitter now speaks Matrix

#62

Post by coolreader18 »

Arathorn wrote: post #39
JD557 wrote: post #33

Hi there. I'm completely new to Matrix, so sorry if this is a stupid question, but is there something like a gitter homeserver where I can login with my gitter credentials? If so, what homeserver URL should I use in element?

You can't use your Gitter creds to log into Matrix yet (although we're hoping to support Gitlab/Github/Twitter login for Matrix before Christmas). Instead, just sign up for a Matrix account via Element or another Matrix client, and then you can look at the Gitter server's room directory at Gitter.im and join its rooms from there. Because Matrix is one great big open network, you can pick any server for your account;…

That'll be a nice Hanukkah/early Christmas gift, depending on when it lands :)

Will there ever be a way to show on gitter that a gitter account and a matrix account are the same person? I'm pretty active on gitter right now, and I'd like to choose a homeserver to have an account on so that my messages from the gitter client (logged in with gh) and the messages from a matrix client are from the same user. Would github login allow that?

Edit: also, what's the plan for private/invite-only gitter rooms?

Re: Gitter now speaks Matrix

#63

Post by climb_stealth »

eXpl0it3r wrote: post #18
benatkin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people, including me, dislike threading in Slack. It breaks the algorithm for reading new messages. I use it when teammates do, and acknowledge it's useful sometimes, but I would prefer not to have that feature. Discord also does not have threads. I've heard some complaints about it, but not many. Threads in Zulip seem to change it into a different kind of app. I don't see how the Slack workspaces that I've…

I like threads a lot in the way we use it. With 60+ people in one channel, being able to ask a question and get answers in the thread, while not spamming the channel with replies and potentially interweaving multiple question & answer "threads" is really useful.

Threads in Slack are useful but the implementation is pretty bad. For example you don't see new responses in a visible thread until you click the button for more messages. It makes them really frustrating to use. Slack does a lot of things really well which makes the pain of using threads even worse.

Re: Gitter now speaks Matrix

#64

Post by SulfurHexaFluri »

Arathorn wrote: post #37
toomuchtodo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So...could I write a gateway that provides functionality for threads to be pulled in from HN/Reddit/NNTP/SMTP/Twitter (MSC2836)? Think Epiverse [1] within Matrix and its clients. [1] https://epiverse.co/

Yup. Can't wait for someone to implement a Matrix-powered Disqus clone!

I wonder how that would work performance wise since I assume comments sections on blogs are loaded many many more times than they are edited so you would want some super fast caching on it.

I guess anything is possible with custom code though.

Re: Gitter now speaks Matrix

#65

Post by [deleted] »

SulfurHexaFluri wrote: post #64
Arathorn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Can't wait for someone to implement a Matrix-powered Disqus clone!

I wonder how that would work performance wise since I assume comments sections on blogs are loaded many many more times than they are edited so you would want some super fast caching on it. I guess anything is possible with custom code though.

[deleted]

Re: Gitter now speaks Matrix

#66

Post by SulfurHexaFluri »

ducktective wrote: post #4
the_duke wrote: post #3

That was impressively quick. Looking forward to Github/Gitlab repository rooms and activity integration. In the acquisition announcement they also mentioned threading though, which is the most important feature Element is missing for me. Without it I'm very hesitant to use it in a professional setting. I do hope that threads will look much more like Zulip rather than Slack (which is a mess), or offer different view m…

Can you explain a bit more on "threading" and its relation to a chat service? And why Zulip's implementation is better?

Its when IM has a reply feature so you can "reply" to a message sent a little while ago and it quotes the message on the top of yours and usually you can click the message to scroll up to it.

Essential for group chats and still useful for DMs.

Re: Gitter now speaks Matrix

#67

Post by jancsika »

Arathorn wrote: post #35
random9763 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's totally different because it is a message syncing http+json API and totally not a messaging and presence protocol based on XML. /joke It is interesting because Matrix has money thus full-time developers, marketing, exposure, and time to defend their work to the depth of the deepest reddit thread. (The Element page on F-Droid reads "Element is able to do all this because it operates on Matrix - the standard for o…

I love that all 3 of the snarky points here are illfounded :D Yes, Matrix is a conversation history syncing protocol, and XMPP is a message-passing protocol. They genuinely are fundamentally different. It's a bit like the difference between SVG and Canvas. Sure, you can use both to draw pretty vector artwork. But one's an object graph, and the other's immediate mode. In terms of Matrix having money: yup, it's true th…

Yes, how dare you sift through Reddit threads relevant to matrix and devote your time to give responses there!

It's like self-loathing teens reflexively making fun of an enthusiastic teacher. Except we're presumably all adults here.

Re: Gitter now speaks Matrix

#68

Post by SulfurHexaFluri »

zanny wrote: post #12
sktrdie wrote: post #5

Can anyone explain what Matrix is and why is this interesting? Feels like we’re reinventing Jabber?

Jabber needed reinventing. XMPP grew and thrived in the early 2000s and died as every participant fragmented off to spin up a proprietary walled garden replacement. You then need something better than XMPP to fight back against that partitioning of the messaging space because XMPP implementations became too fragmented in feature compatibility to reliably compete.

Part of me wonders if this is a fatal flaw in the very concept of distributed systems. It seems to me that as soon as a protocol or technology loses its single authority (multiple companies write implementations) it becomes feature frozen since it would be impossible for multiple companies to come to an agreement on what the new features should be or getting them all to implement them.

If matrix actually does succeed and continue to change I think it will result in having only 1-2 server implementations and 1 client per platform. A hobby dev can't possibly keep up with all the features being implemented by a whole team working on the main client.

Re: Gitter now speaks Matrix

#69

Post by rkangel »

the_duke wrote: post #3

That was impressively quick. Looking forward to Github/Gitlab repository rooms and activity integration. In the acquisition announcement they also mentioned threading though, which is the most important feature Element is missing for me. Without it I'm very hesitant to use it in a professional setting. I do hope that threads will look much more like Zulip rather than Slack (which is a mess), or offer different view m…

I actually think that the MS Teams implementation of threads is the best.

The problem with the Slack implementation is that it's not the default. You have to understand it to use it, and you have to have an organisational culture that pushes people to use it. Otherwise you end up only occasional threads, and mostly you're back in in the classic Slack '200 messages since you last visited, only 10 of them are of interest, but you have to read everything to find them' situation.

I like the Zulip version, it is automatically threaded but personally I had a slightly silly problem - you had to think of a topic name. It's a bit like the subject line of an email, except that you don't want it to be as long. This increases the friction slightly and you inevitably end up with a lot of messages going in one topic called something like 'general' when people can't think of a suitable topic name. I haven't used Zulip as intensively as the other two though, so maybe that problem goes away (or maybe it gets worse).

Teams is a lot like Zulip. Everything is in a thread automatically, but you don't have to name it, you just start a new 'conversation'. It works pretty organically, and it works by default without any 'culture' needed. You can give a thread a title if you want, but you don't have to. A bonus of the structure of Teams is that private messages (as supposed to Team channels) are just are a normal sequence of messages like Slack or anything else, because that's what you want. Teams is a memory hog and sluggish to use, but I do think they got that bit of the user experience right. Like many companies we had enforced, hurried massive increase in usage of Teams in March, and it has worked pretty seamlessly.

Re: Gitter now speaks Matrix

#70

Post by mainstreem »

Arathorn wrote: post #25
the_duke wrote: post #3

That was impressively quick. Looking forward to Github/Gitlab repository rooms and activity integration. In the acquisition announcement they also mentioned threading though, which is the most important feature Element is missing for me. Without it I'm very hesitant to use it in a professional setting. I do hope that threads will look much more like Zulip rather than Slack (which is a mess), or offer different view m…

Matrix now has two flavours of threading defined and implemented as we experiment with the different approaches: label-based threading in MSC2326[1] (i.e. "filter this room to only show msgs tagged #foo"), and full-blown free-form HN/Reddit/NNTP/SMTP/Twitter style threading in MSC2836[2]. The former is closer to Zulip, and is implemented in Synapse. The latter is closer to HN, and is implemented in Dendrite[3][4]. Cl…

LOL let me get this straight, you implemented 1 type of threading in your old "reference" homeserver, and a second type in the new one that's been incomplete for years?

How is this supposed to be supported by all clients, and how is Matrix supposed to be an open protocol, if you can't even maintain feature parity among the first party homeservers? Neither is supported by Element, as you point out, so which one is the "correct" model that a second implementation of the homeserver protocol should follow? Which one should new clients follow?

Also, when is Dendrite actually going to be a usable replacement for Synapse?

Also, when will you hire an actual professional to represent your company on HN instead of sticking your head into every thread on your product? It makes it seem like you don't have better things to do than be on HN all day.

Matrix is an amateur-hour project. I don't understand why it is so popular on HN. I'd rather use Jabber, full stop.

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