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Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

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Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#81

We had a variation on this discussion a few days ago here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44591820 I discussed that their primary server had a child porn/child sex assault imagery problem. Others who had similar concerns were completely dismissed and attacked by the Element/Matrix admins. I have to agree with this article. Matrix is basically dead, and not worth keeping around. And it starves the open source eco…

> Others who had similar concerns were completely dismissed and attacked by the Element/Matrix admins.

This is completely untrue, as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44599457.

We are VERY aware of the CSAM spammer problem, and have been working solidly on it, and apologising whereever we can - e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44599382.

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#82
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The corrupt room bug which pushed the OP over the edge was due to a corrupted DB index on matrix.org which caused millions of rows to be incorrectly deleted and was an absolute nightmare to debug and mitigate. You can see some of the story at https://marc.info/?t=175161814600006&r=1&w=2 . We need to write up the incident report; it’s not clear whether the root cause was a bug in postgres (potentially years ago, and o…

Thanks for the link to the postgres discussion! An incident report would definitely be interesting. I haven't reported the missing messages thing anywhere as I assumed that was just expected (IIRC (and this is a big IIRC) it was mentioned a long time ago (i.e. entirely unrelated to this) by TravisR on Discord bridge problems as a possible cause for missing messages). Here is one event in an affected room, made by a t…

Huge thanks for giving details we can investigate; i've taken a look:

* That event is in the matrix.org DB...

* ...but it failed authentication checks and got rejected from being added to matrix.org's copy of the room, presumably because matrix.org didn't think the sender was in the room at the point that the message was sent

* This was almost certainly because the state groups that tracked that the sender was in the room had been deleted due to the where clause on DELETEs matching unrelated rows thanks to the corrupted index

So the sending server probably thought it had successfully sent the message, but matrix.org quarantined it due to the db corruption. Therefore we need to manually flush the rejected messages to get them re-authorised in the impacted rooms; we hadn't spotted the problem so forgot to do so. I've nudged the folks who run the server to take a look on Monday.

Sorry you got hit by this, and thanks again for the actionable report.

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#83

This link has 71 comments and 84 points and is from 4 hours ago yet it shows for me on place 197 (page 7) of HN. Is Ycombinator (or one of the intermediary investment funds) invested in New Vector?

neither YC nor any YC-intermediary is an investor in NV. Instead, you're likely seeing that HN has circuit-breakers against high-temperature threads which turn into pile-ons (whether they're justified or not).

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#84
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link to the postgres discussion! An incident report would definitely be interesting. I haven't reported the missing messages thing anywhere as I assumed that was just expected (IIRC (and this is a big IIRC) it was mentioned a long time ago (i.e. entirely unrelated to this) by TravisR on Discord bridge problems as a possible cause for missing messages). Here is one event in an affected room, made by a t…

Huge thanks for giving details we can investigate; i've taken a look: * That event is in the matrix.org DB... * ...but it failed authentication checks and got rejected from being added to matrix.org's copy of the room, presumably because matrix.org didn't think the sender was in the room at the point that the message was sent * This was almost certainly because the state groups that tracked that the sender was in the…

FWIW, my specific room didn't lose much due to the missed syncing, I manually copied over the lost messages (..and we're used to doing so due to the flaky discord bridge). I just noted it as it seemed like a generally relevant thing (and of course perhaps more important for other affected rooms). Thanks for looking into it though, good to know that's at least not how it's supposed to function!

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#85

"Pull requests welcome" is all I can say to anyone who puts energy into long rants about the "state" of a FOSS project. If you think volunteer dev is so easy then get stuck in and be the change you want to see.

Matrix is not a some sort of volunteer project. It is used by NATO as their NI2CE, as well as by many other governmental entities. Matrix runs on European taxpayer's money.

The Matrix Foundation is currently massively underfunded (contributing significantly to many of the complaints in this thread, especially around Trust & Safety) and even then losing money. It gets no money from folks like France or NATO despite their use of Matrix. You can see the list of financially contributing projects at https://matrix.org/support - there are only two governmental entities who support Matrix directly today; Gematik in Germany and another unlisted European govt.

Element on the other hand does have a bunch of customers like NATO, but is also losing money, thanks to governmental Matrix deals often going to system integrators who win contracts with Element's FOSS software and then don't contribute any $ back to Element. I explained the mess at FOSDEM: https://youtu.be/lkCKhP1jxdk?t=740 and there's a good article about a typical instance of this (in German) at https://www.heise.de/news/Wie-Behoerden-und-ihre-Auftragnehm...

(by the way, you seem to spend a a lot of time telling everyone how shit Matrix is; don't you have anything better to do? :)

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#87
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Architecture Astronauts, and Cowboy Coding are all problematic. This is more of a question of enough clarity, direction and alignment. Either both groups have it, or they don't.

Tech people don't like to hear this, but you also need product people. And I don't necessarily mean those with a business background, but those who can see the larger picture from the user/customer perspective and who can ensure that all of the technology is packaged into one coherent and actually useful thing. If the project is run by those who are all deep in the weeds of low level technological details, odds are t…

I'm a tech creator who's a product person for a long time, as well as on the business side. Hyper-problem and user focused. Having put in the time for all 3, I agree with you fully on needing product, tech, and user experience awareness.

I can say that tech creators tend to be able to learn product and business easier than the other way around.

One reality is too many product folks don't always know what tech is capable and possible of, which can undermine the asks and the solves. So innovation can become best practices (existing) and increments from there, instead of seeing new ways digital can be delivered.

I'm all for making fun of premature optimization and abstraction into wavy concepts. That can happen as much in product practice as it does development. Maybe the sticky consumption ratio could be part of a KPI.

When building technology solutions to solve people's problems, clever architecture will always beat clever coding and clever product people. Because you make both product and code and architecture evaporate for something simple and flexible that can actually learn and have more than few chances to become what the problem needs.

Another reality is tech folks don't need interpreters like they are sub-human or something either. It all depends how the organization and it's culture is put together to value everyone.

Where tech folks are relegated to be "engineering" it's at the peril of the organization. The more layers between the customers, their problems and those who create the solution (together), the greater the disconnect that can form as the org grows.

The solution is about a table.

A round table.

Where everyone has an equal seat and can understand it together.

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#88
post #7

I'm of the same stance. I've been using Matrix for 3 years now, primarily to communicate with family located where there is high censorship and most messengers are blocked. Probably due to the complexity of the system and inherent design, performance is horrible. Good enough for usage but just unpleasant. Their new Element X client is meant to solve a lot of problems but they're starting to deviate from common standa…

It’s depressing to hear that you’ve given up on Element X, given that’s where all the work has been going, including ensuring the encryption is rock solid. Element Call is still webrtc; the fact it’s direct calling to a SFU rather than needing TURN for firewall traversal should be a good thing. How did you try to set it up? I did a basic walk through at https://github.com/element-hq/element-docker-demo in case that h…

Element X is (e)xcellent. Just wanted to share that.

Been using Matrix via Synapse since ~2019 and all the Matrix odds and ends require the least maintenance out of anything in the stack. Any uptime issues I've experienced have been my own silly fault with incorrect configurations.

Even Element as it stands without the X builds is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else I've tried (and I have and continue to try a lot of FOSS, but nothing does what Element does as a client, nor what Matrix does as a protocol).

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got a link? What forks of element or synapse have they publicly endorsed?

https://matrix.org/ecosystem/ Lists of competing clients, servers, hosts, and more.

Not to mention the great "This Week in Matrix" RSS feed they do that I've been enjoying for years.

https://matrix.org/category/this-week-in-matrix/

Incredibly supportive of anything within the Matrix ecosystem.

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#90
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you do understand that schildichat is a relatively light fork of element…?

Ok fair. Did not know that. Just in my personal experience it is better. However like conduite for server , a lightweight http API client can be made. And communicate over https is great for crappy internet over proxy.

Can you quantify this "better"?
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