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Status.im Invests $5M in Riot.im

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

#71
Any investment in open source makes me happy, especially if there are 5 zeros or more, that means things can get done for a while, which makes things better, longer.

The Riot IM site confuses me a bit, I had thought it was an open source client you could run on own server - but I don't see anything about that there. Did some digging on matrix and found one mention of vector code on github - not many details...

Is there someone I can send $100 that can spend some time explaining to me how to set this up on my own server, and how to mod it a bit so that for example, most logged info is destroyed after 24 hours and things like that?

After spending time and money on rocket chat I've come to find the value in hiring an expert / professional in the sphere to consult with before drinking the koolaid and going all in on the flashy promises on home pages.

added contact info to my profile thing here, I hope it works.

Now if someone would put $2 million into buddypress, and mastadon (I think that's what its called) I would think we have a future that is possible without the F and G overlords.

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

#72
post #47
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No progress on Muji XEP for years or stagnation of clients like KDE Telepathy and etc. all gives the impression that things aren't moving anywhere. Also, servers closing down (DDG one), Google letting federation rot by not enabling server to server encryption and etc. and etc. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of XMPP, but the lack of progress is quite upsetting.

It's true that not every XEP moved out of draft status and that big players closed federation but there are new XEPs that are being worked on (OMEMO, HTTP Upload).

Google and DDG do not provide Matrix servers and probably will never do (big players are not interested in federation in general, not just XMPP), but isn't the entire point of federation that you host your own?

Check out conversations.im and dino.im for modern clients.

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

#74

Any investment in open source makes me happy, especially if there are 5 zeros or more, that means things can get done for a while, which makes things better, longer. The Riot IM site confuses me a bit, I had thought it was an open source client you could run on own server - but I don't see anything about that there. Did some digging on matrix and found one mention of vector code on github - not many details... Is the…

The RIOT (used to be known as Vector) is just main client. There are many more clients. All listed here https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html

Matrix is the protocol - it is a standard. So there are many servers being implemented. But most of them are Alpha/Beta software. The server from matrix org everyone uses now is called Matrix Synapse. It is written in python. If you don't need extreme performance (thousands+ clients) then go with that. On debian/ubuntu it is simple as apt get matrix-synapse but it can be installed as any other python app. Then it is basically about setting one config yaml file (homeserver.yml) and you are done. Lots of guides here https://matrix.org/docs/projects/server/synapse.html

I run matrix synapse for smallish org and we also tried rocket chat and mattermost. Riot was by far most stable and fastest. Rocket chat was very sluggish and mattermost had problems with mobile notifications (i think you have to pay them for notifications or something like that).

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

#75

Any investment in open source makes me happy, especially if there are 5 zeros or more, that means things can get done for a while, which makes things better, longer. The Riot IM site confuses me a bit, I had thought it was an open source client you could run on own server - but I don't see anything about that there. Did some digging on matrix and found one mention of vector code on github - not many details... Is the…

Oh sorry you want to hire someone. I did not understand.

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

#76
post #69
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)…

>Matrix is an excellent, federated post-XMPP/IRC protocol I have my doubts about this. So many IM systems have got this wrong before that there's no reason to give anyone the benefit of the doubt. I, too, have looked at matrix at some point. I setup a server, created a user, joined a couple low traffic rooms in their main server, and found major practical issues on their protocol's behaviour. It had problems with sig…

> It had problems with signatures when messages contained a certain field, so some messages appeared and others were missing.

Did you file a bug on this? We're not aware of any signature problems whatsoever in Synapse (or Matrix).

> Why do messages have so many fields?

So looking at a message like this:

  {
    "origin_server_ts": 1517313544657,
    "sender": "@kitsune:matrix.org",
    "event_id": "$15173135441073284GrtsX:matrix.org",
    "unsigned": {
      "age": 277
    },
    "content": {
      "body": "Yep, almost a year ago.",
      "msgtype": "m.text"
    },
    "type": "m.room.message",
    "room_id": "!eUGMvloIjhBoAwlyRh:matrix.org"
  }
You get:

* `origin_server_ts`: the absolute TS the sending server claims * `sender`: the matrix ID of the sender * `event_it`: the UID of the event * `unsigned.age`: a relative TS for receipt on your local server (added by your local server, hence being unsigned) * `type`: the namespaced type of the event. In this instance, `m.room.message` is the general purpose Instant Message event type. * `content`: arbitrary JSON to describe the contents of this type of event. In this instance, it's a plain text message with a given body. * `room_id`: the room the event's been sent in.

This doesn't seem unreasonable? (but I may be biased thanks to working on it).

> To top it off, the server was making me hit my ISPs (pretty bad ISP) connections per second limit.

Oops. This might have been a while ago before we improved the connection pooling for federation traffic? What's the limit?

> Apparently, development focus isn't on making the basic protocol perfect, but on UX nonsense and adding features

We're trying to do both. A perfect protocol is useless if it doesn't have flagship apps which make it usable by normal people. Right now the protocol is relatively good; the Python/Twisted impl is very heavyweight (but getting better); Riot (as a flagship app) also has perf problems but it hopefully headed in the right direction.

Dendrite should be an enormous improvement on the serverside when it gets there however!

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

#77
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Matrix is an excellent, federated post-XMPP/IRC protocol I have my doubts about this. So many IM systems have got this wrong before that there's no reason to give anyone the benefit of the doubt. I, too, have looked at matrix at some point. I setup a server, created a user, joined a couple low traffic rooms in their main server, and found major practical issues on their protocol's behaviour. It had problems with sig…

> It had problems with signatures when messages contained a certain field, so some messages appeared and others were missing. Did you file a bug on this? We're not aware of any signature problems whatsoever in Synapse (or Matrix). > Why do messages have so many fields? So looking at a message like this: { "origin_server_ts": 1517313544657, "sender": "@kitsune:matrix.org", "event_id": "$15173135441073284GrtsX:matrix.o…

> issue

To be clear, it got solved, and it happened several months ago.

> the Python/Twisted impl is very heavyweight (but getting better)

Constantly near-saturating rpi2 cpu while doing effectively nothing last time I turned it on. (70%+ cpu time). This is why I'm thinking I'll wait for golang until I try again.

>Right now the protocol is relatively good

Couple questions:

- If I delete my server database, start anew, and join a room I used to be in, will I end up in a bad state, or are things more robust these days? I remember reading about it somewhere.

- Does the server _still_ solve a bunch of names and open hundreds of connections / server event interval or whatever it was called?

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

#78
One of my biggest concerns with Matrix was the amount of device data that it exposes.

It's extremely easy to fingerprint the devices that someone is using (it literally tells you right within Riot) and by design could make it easy for someone to track you or target your device if there are any known exploits for it.

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

#79
post #38
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)…

There's a Weechat plugin [1], however I remember it having problems with UI lags. In addition, the official Freenode bridge on matrix.org often has problems as well, but that's what I get for not bothering to run my own bridge. At least it seems like the Weechat plugin is under active development. [2] I should give it another try. [1] https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/weechat.html [2] https://github.com/torhve/…

I think they fixed the Freenode bridge recently.

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

#80

Its good that Riot gets money, but its incredibly damning for Status, an ICO that was meant to produce its own chat platform. This shows status has no technical ability of their own, and has to ride on existing open source products. The status investors paid to build a new platform, and the team is unable to deliver this. By paying an existing open source project, yes we all win, but that is not what people (not myse…

Why reinvent the wheel when a superior open source solution is in development?
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