4 ms·

EDIT: this isn't a response to most of the article, but specifically to the "Moving Forward" section, asking about alternative tools. Come to the matrix! http

EDIT: this isn't a response to most of the article, but specifically to the "Moving Forward" section, asking about alternative tools. Come to the matrix! https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/ It's free -- all FOSS, including the entirety of the server -- and yes, all of it: proof by existence: several of my friends run their own. It federates. I regularly join channels hosted on several different servers, and exchange messages without issue. It's on every platform. I use it on the desktop, my android (cyanogen, without gapps, none the less!), and my ipad, every day. It even has voice and video calling built in, using webRTC. This feature has been a little rough while it was in development, but I used it last week in a 1-on-1 call and had an effortless experience. The audio and video quality was on par with Google Hangouts. Crypto is hard, but it's coming. The Matrix developers have huge respect for the axolotl ratchet design used in Signal. They've worked on making another implementation (in C, for easier linking in various languages, ostensibly) here: https://matrix.org/git/olm/ https://matrix.org/git/olm/ The deployment of that code to give full End-to-End encryption is a work in progress, but the beta is roughly functional. It includes everything you'd expect: communication works by default, but in an encrypted room, messages are flagged yellow if you haven't explicitly verified the sender's key. There's a key per device; it doesn't leave the device; and as soon as you verify that device/key, messages from it are green, and you're E2E secure. Disclaimer: I have no direct association -- I became a Matrix convert after trying to write some XMPP client code about a year ago. I'm just really enthusiastic about recommending it because the tech is solid, the sync is good, it solves a problem, and the team hasn't stopped either: they been firing on all cylinders constantly since I started using Matrix. I love Signal for their dedication to getting encryption right and the security of their users. But yes, I also share a lot of the concerns listed in this article. Most of all, I honestly believe federation is an imperative. So, while acknowledging Signal's history of outstanding security work... Hey, let's celebrate there's more than one game in town working on alternatives.

Veratyr 10y ago
I'm also a Matrix convert. Tried getting Conversations + Prosody running for me and my wife but just couldn't get it to work properly. XMPP has so many XEPs (like MAM - XEP-0313) that you need to get things working nicely and there are very few clients (Conversations only afaik) that actually support them. We also found that Conversations just wouldn't send/receive messages sometimes and that when there was no connection, it'd pretend everything was fine and dandy but not actually send. Switched to Matrix and setting up my own homeserver took about half an hour, comes with everything I need (history, "Carbons", notifications, attachments, voice/video) built in. Plus it's federated and has support for bridges so I can interact with pretty much anything else through it if I like.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
I heard from another thread that Matrix is bad a realtime messaging, and quite slow at it. Is this true?
- heavenlyhash 10y ago
  Not even remotely. It's quite good at realtime, and especially reliable realtime. Compared with protocols like XMPP, Matrix scores way higher on reliability because it has message IDs and message ordering baked into the protocol, so it can actually converge on a correct state after network flakes. (I consider this a pretty big deal because silent message drops were a pretty regular issue for me in XMPP, and we all know about netsplits in IRC. I've simply never had silent message loss in Matrix because the protocol is simply better.)
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Ah. It was claimed by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12880856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12880856, but that was an XMPP developer, so there's a bias.
    - heavenlyhash 10y ago
      It's true that it's a big hunk of JSON. And I'll readily concede that when efficiency matters, I'm more partial to binary formats like CBOR. But XMPP is XML, which... isn't exactly lighter. There's another HN thread where I've talked more about XMPP vs Matrix here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772968 -- long story short, I tried to write an XMPP client, and I got grey hairs, fast. The story for consistent delivery is pretty much bananas. (And huh, based on that date, I guess I've been a Matrix convert for almost TWO years now! Time flies.) I'm not entirely sure what the comment about battery is about either. If anyone has a networking technology that can work without turning on the phone radio, I'm sure we'd all love to hear it...? Practically speaking, I leave the Matrix Vector app open on my phone constantly. As of this morning, I have half a charge, and three more days of charge to go. I don't have any other apps to provide a good comparison here, but I'll leave this screenshot here for what it's worth: https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/matrix.org/IgkUoQxhTNUvErfkrcKBSfrP https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/matrix.org/IgkU... Looks like my phone has spent about the same order of magnitude of battery on just plain paging the cell towers as I moved around the city. As other comments on this thread cover, if you use proprietary Google stuff, you can wake the phone up slightly more efficiently. But whatever this app is doing works pretty fine for me.

Veratyr 10y ago

I'm also a Matrix convert. Tried getting Conversations + Prosody running for me and my wife but just couldn't get it to work properly. XMPP has so many XEPs (like MAM - XEP-0313) that you need to get things working nicely and there are very few clients (Conversations only afaik) that actually support them. We also found that Conversations just wouldn't send/receive messages sometimes and that when there was no connection, it'd pretend everything was fine and dandy but not actually send. Switched to Matrix and setting up my own homeserver took about half an hour, comes with everything I need (history, "Carbons", notifications, attachments, voice/video) built in. Plus it's federated and has support for bridges so I can interact with pretty much anything else through it if I like.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

I heard from another thread that Matrix is bad a realtime messaging, and quite slow at it. Is this true?

heavenlyhash 10y ago
Not even remotely. It's quite good at realtime, and especially reliable realtime. Compared with protocols like XMPP, Matrix scores way higher on reliability because it has message IDs and message ordering baked into the protocol, so it can actually converge on a correct state after network flakes. (I consider this a pretty big deal because silent message drops were a pretty regular issue for me in XMPP, and we all know about netsplits in IRC. I've simply never had silent message loss in Matrix because the protocol is simply better.)
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Ah. It was claimed by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12880856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12880856, but that was an XMPP developer, so there's a bias.
  - heavenlyhash 10y ago
    It's true that it's a big hunk of JSON. And I'll readily concede that when efficiency matters, I'm more partial to binary formats like CBOR. But XMPP is XML, which... isn't exactly lighter. There's another HN thread where I've talked more about XMPP vs Matrix here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772968 -- long story short, I tried to write an XMPP client, and I got grey hairs, fast. The story for consistent delivery is pretty much bananas. (And huh, based on that date, I guess I've been a Matrix convert for almost TWO years now! Time flies.) I'm not entirely sure what the comment about battery is about either. If anyone has a networking technology that can work without turning on the phone radio, I'm sure we'd all love to hear it...? Practically speaking, I leave the Matrix Vector app open on my phone constantly. As of this morning, I have half a charge, and three more days of charge to go. I don't have any other apps to provide a good comparison here, but I'll leave this screenshot here for what it's worth: https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/matrix.org/IgkUoQxhTNUvErfkrcKBSfrP https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/matrix.org/IgkU... Looks like my phone has spent about the same order of magnitude of battery on just plain paging the cell towers as I moved around the city. As other comments on this thread cover, if you use proprietary Google stuff, you can wake the phone up slightly more efficiently. But whatever this app is doing works pretty fine for me.