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Come to the Matrix! [1] - Open! Free on both the beer|culture axis! - Modern! (There's actually control structures in the protocol. Imagine: a chat protoco

Come to the Matrix! [1] - Open! Free on both the beer|culture axis! - Modern! (There's actually control structures in the protocol. Imagine: a chat protocol that's actually ascii safe! (Yes, yes, unicode too: the joke is, IRC isn't even ascii safe.)) - Many platforms! (The matrix.org site has a full client list; I'm personally using it via a linux desktop client (that also works on windows and mac), the web, my ipad, and my android phone.) - IRC bridged. (I use it constantly in this mode. It's a better IRC experience than any other IRC client I've used, honestly. Even in rooms with 100s/1000s of people. Consistent logs, instantly accessible from multiple computers/clients, no need to set up bouncers, and so on.) - File uploads, images, videos. All of it. A friend streamed me a video from his halloween party last night via the Matrix client on his iPhone. It worked. - Did I mention it even supports webRTC? That's right: it's also a completely functional skype replacement. (Yes, pending your browser's support and all that jazz: that said, it's a more complete product than most of the other webRTC demos floating out there.) The entire protocol is just... good. On the nerdier deep end of things: It's the first federated chat standard I've seen proposed that actually has reasonable message IDs baked in and loose timing systems that's both available during a partition and can reach consistency afterward (messages list their last-seen messages, and so act like vector clocks, an accepted good solution to problems in CAP territory). You could actually take two systems with clock skew and have them reach a single, reconciled view of the world, even after netsplits. Compared to IRC (or XMPP) this is either magical or a deep relief, or both. I discovered Matrix while I was in the process of writing a chat client of my own for XMPP. I abandoned the project (and XMPP, as well, though that's a subject all its own [2]). Matrix already did everything I ever wanted. Really, really well. Not affiliated; just a happy user who's never found any better platform for communicating openly. --- [1] https://matrix.org https://matrix.org | https://vector.im https://vector.im [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772968

sandGorgon 11y ago
I'm curious if you ever evaluated something like Pubnub or Pusher and how matrix stacks up versus them (as a self hosted chat API for mobile platforms)
rrix 11y ago
+1 matrix solves a lot of problems that IRC has and even lets you solve those problems on IRC through the Matrix<->IRC bridge :) I've been using it as a replacement for my IRC bouncer for a while, barring a bug that prevents support of SSL-only rooms, and it's been wonderful. Great web client on vector.im, pretty decent mobile clients given they are "reference implementations", support for VoIP voice and video chat, coming support for e2e encryption (the DAG just stores encrypted blobs now) I've long felt that a big piece of my love of IRC was the spontaneous intersections of my communities. I got involved in FOSS and open source because one time a person mentioned there was a LUG chat for the city I was in; that led me in to a long chain of events that ended with me getting involved in the Fedora Project and other FOSS communities. Slack is creating a world where that is simply not possible. One of the big things that this discussion misses is that tribal-intersections that IRC allows opens up a huge door for abuse. Slack "solves" that by siloing you away from the world, but that has always been a lazy and error prone solution. I feel like Matrix is in a position to move the needle on that. It's got a huge distributed DAG specifically designed for human-metadata like chat and presence and, well, why not put Karma or Reputation on that DAG as well? People have talked of dogecoin and similar as a Whuffie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie) and in my mind Matrix is an interesting platform to build something like that on. I could create a room that requires a certain reputation level to post in, and you'd have to gain reputation in other communities to be allowed to post in to mine. When you realize that Matrix.org 1:1 chats are just "rooms with only two people in them" that becomes a really nice way to solve the spam/abuse issue. Prove to my friends in the public chat that you aren't a shitbag and you can talk to me.

sandGorgon 11y ago

I'm curious if you ever evaluated something like Pubnub or Pusher and how matrix stacks up versus them (as a self hosted chat API for mobile platforms)

rrix 11y ago

+1 matrix solves a lot of problems that IRC has and even lets you solve those problems on IRC through the Matrix<->IRC bridge :) I've been using it as a replacement for my IRC bouncer for a while, barring a bug that prevents support of SSL-only rooms, and it's been wonderful. Great web client on vector.im, pretty decent mobile clients given they are "reference implementations", support for VoIP voice and video chat, coming support for e2e encryption (the DAG just stores encrypted blobs now) I've long felt that a big piece of my love of IRC was the spontaneous intersections of my communities. I got involved in FOSS and open source because one time a person mentioned there was a LUG chat for the city I was in; that led me in to a long chain of events that ended with me getting involved in the Fedora Project and other FOSS communities. Slack is creating a world where that is simply not possible. One of the big things that this discussion misses is that tribal-intersections that IRC allows opens up a huge door for abuse. Slack "solves" that by siloing you away from the world, but that has always been a lazy and error prone solution. I feel like Matrix is in a position to move the needle on that. It's got a huge distributed DAG specifically designed for human-metadata like chat and presence and, well, why not put Karma or Reputation on that DAG as well? People have talked of dogecoin and similar as a Whuffie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie) and in my mind Matrix is an interesting platform to build something like that on. I could create a room that requires a certain reputation level to post in, and you'd have to gain reputation in other communities to be allowed to post in to mine. When you realize that Matrix.org 1:1 chats are just "rooms with only two people in them" that becomes a really nice way to solve the spam/abuse issue. Prove to my friends in the public chat that you aren't a shitbag and you can talk to me.