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Gitter now speaks Matrix

matrix.org

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Re: Gitter now speaks Matrix

#71

Post by StavrosK »

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'll second Zulip, though I think the message view and "zooming in/out" they implemented is just as much of a game changer as the threading model.

Re: Gitter now speaks Matrix

#72

Post by SulfurHexaFluri »

IshKebab wrote: post #29
fractalf wrote: post #26

Very nice, GJ! Matrix is the FURURE. Now the work begins converting all slackers...

It might be the future, but it isn't the present while it doesn't have basic Slack features like threads.

Matrix has threading at least in the spec.

Re: Gitter now speaks Matrix

#73

Post by mbirth »

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.

XMPP is anything but dead yet. There were a lot of XEPs added and updated in recent years and it turned into a modern protocol being able to provide all features you could expect from a modern messaging service.

It's just that you need a client and server that supports those features. Daniel Gultsch has written an Android client[1], that's as good as it can be. He also offers a maintained XMPP server [2] providing the full-featured counterpart. But if you want to self-host, ejabberd supports all the features as does Prosody. For iOS users, there's Monal which is slowly getting there.

[1] https://conversations.im

[2] https://account.conversations.im

Re: Gitter now speaks Matrix

#74

Post by Stephen304 »

Arathorn wrote: post #55
Stephen304 wrote: post #42

This is amazing! Side note, there seems to be a typo "would be to have got Gitter". Also, I'm curious what the plan is to reconcile Gitter's one room per repo model with Matrix's anybody-can-create-any-room - in the long term, is the plan to keep gitter.im rooms restricted to matching repos? Or (post gitter-skinned-element) will people eventually be able to create arbitrary rooms on the gitter homeserver?

> An alternative architecture would be to have got Gitter directly federating This isn't exactly elegant English, but I think it's structurally correct. In US English you might say "gotten Gitter", i guess. > Also, I'm curious what the plan is to reconcile Gitter's one room per repo model with Matrix's anybody-can-create-any-room You can already create non-repo rooms in Gitter, so this one's already solved. For insta…

> In US English you might say "gotten Gitter", i guess.

I assumed "got" was extraneous due to editing, removing it sounds a lot better to my ear: "An alternative architecture would be to have Gitter directly federating with Matrix by..."

I assumed it was a mistake due to editing, since I would use "got" primarily in this way: "An alternative architecture would be if we got Gitter directly federating with Matrix by...", to my ear "got" normally follows a noun, but I think the alliteration makes it sound extra awkward.

At any rate, I'm no english major so it's not a big deal.

> You can already create non-repo rooms in Gitter

My question is less about non-repo rooms and more about rooms that look like repo-rooms. Is there any protection against a malicious user setting up "#google_chromium:gitter.im" and distributing malicious binaries?

Edit: Maybe I'm not really asking a clear question - overall I'm wondering what the long term plan is for the gitter room addresses, where you can be sure that matrix-org/matthew-test belongs to matrix-org. It seems to me that if the gitter room addresses are planned to be removed in the long term, the security implications of the room address will change, so I was looking for some mention of that in the post. Not that it's a huge deal if communicated properly, people would just have to be sure they found the room from an official repo and keep in mind that the restriction of creating rooms under the org is no longer present.

Re: Gitter now speaks Matrix

#75

Post by alexvoda »

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…

Does Matrix support linearly directed imageboards (e.g.:4chan) style threading?

In 4chan threading is done by linking the between posts using the post id permalink (1). This is aided by the UI which allows you to hover over the listed ID and see parents or children. This results in being able to respond to multiple posts in a single post. This means that instead of tree structured threading, DAG style threading is possible. The second consequence is that by default posts are displayed linearly, like an IRC discussion. This linear display results in unlimited nesting depth. Nesting is not dependent on indentation.

(1) https://www.4channel.org/faq#quote

Re: Gitter now speaks Matrix

#76

Post by throwaway894345 »

Is there a good reason why we have a distributed platform for IM and other distributed platforms for e.g. social media (think Mastodon) that appear to work the same way except that the data types are different? Could this “distributed server atop HTTP/whatever” be abstracted out into its own protocol such that anyone could more easily build distributed applications for their own domain? Maybe there is more variation between domains than I am aware of?

Re: Gitter now speaks Matrix

#78

Post by Kinrany »

yawgmoth wrote: post #20
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…

Discord has a feature (recently added?) in which you can reply to something -- it gets miniquoted above your reply. It does a good job of 'flattening out the tree'.

Telegram also shows all the replies to a given message as a separate chat, effectively turning messages into Reddit-like trees.

It's half-baked, but it seems like a great alternative to regular presentation: linear history, but filterable.

Re: Gitter now speaks Matrix

#79

Post by Arathorn »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #76

Is there a good reason why we have a distributed platform for IM and other distributed platforms for e.g. social media (think Mastodon) that appear to work the same way except that the data types are different? Could this “distributed server atop HTTP/whatever” be abstracted out into its own protocol such that anyone could more easily build distributed applications for their own domain? Maybe there is more variation…

ActivityPub, Matrix, XMPP and NNTP all do superficially similar things in very different ways. I personally think of ActivityPub as being a bit like multiplayer RSS; Matrix as being like a replicated pubsub open object database; XMPP like a overgenerously extensible messaging protocol; NNTP like a semi-closed federated BBS.

They all have different primitives and semantics - it’s not just data types. Matrix is the only one which actually implements a full data structure replication protocol between nodes, for instance.

Braid https://braid.news/ is one way you might be able to abstract thag operation on HTTP tho.

Re: Gitter now speaks Matrix

#80

Post by Arathorn »

dralley wrote: post #61
Arathorn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (emph…

Absolutely. the decision will be made on UX as well as features. agreed Gitter’s UX is great :)
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