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I support the whole idea, but I think it's premature. The Riot app in my experience has a pretty unwelcoming UI/UX experience and is still insanely buggy. Thin

I support the whole idea, but I think it's premature. The Riot app in my experience has a pretty unwelcoming UI/UX experience and is still insanely buggy. Things like Jitsi integration, widgets and a phone partnership should be after a solid, stable 1.0 MVP IMHO. Encryption is still opt-in and beta. So super supportive of the environment, the momentum and a native matrix phone partnership is the right move eventually, but please get it stable, fast and polished first before branching out too far.

Aaronn 9y ago
Matrix is really struggling on funding so they need these kinds of partnerships to allow them to continue making the software better. For those who are reading this and would like to help out please see the following blog post: https://matrix.org/blog/2017/07/19/status-update/ https://matrix.org/blog/2017/07/19/status-update/
Arathorn 9y ago
We're working as hard as we can on improving Riot's UI/UX and getting crypto out of beta. As others have said, partnerships like this help fund the team to get the core stuff in place. After all, this project (assuming the campaign is successful) is 2 months away anyway.
- carussell 9y ago
  What's the value proposition of building a whole new client? If your goal is to give people a client for your cool new protocol, why would you waste any development resources on squashing fiddly UI bugs of your own doing, rather than, say, providing a reference implementation by forking the Signal app and swapping out the pieces until it's talking Matrix instead of TextSecure? I see this mistake constantly. The ring.cx folks did the same thing. Inevitably, everyone ends up commenting how poor the app is—some of them even saying how much they'd like to be able to use it and would if it weren't for the UI. It wouldn't be so silly if there weren't plenty of essentially ready-made solutions for the problem.
  - Arathorn 9y ago
    1. Signal doesn't have a native Linux app (other than Electron) 2. The hope is to piggyback on one of the existing native Matrix SDKs or clients rather than write a whole new one. 3. One of the biggest complaints we hear about Matrix is that there is no native desktop app with parity to Riot yet. So this is our chance to fix that.
    - carussell 9y ago
      > Signal doesn't have a native Linux app (other than Electron) How is that an explanation for directing (apparently limited) resources into riot-android? > there is no native desktop app with parity to Riot yet Huh? The comparisons I made in my comment were to Signal and Ring, which are predominantly mobile messaging apps. The person you originally responded to was discussing Matrix on mobile. Why do you keep mentioning desktop? If there were any confusion, this is a thread about an announcement for a new smartphone.
      - Arathorn 9y ago
        Riot/Android doesn't run on Linux, so directing limited resources into it is fairly irrelevant. The point of this campaign is to fund us to work on a native app which can benefit desktop and handset users alike - whilst also supporting the core team so we can also work on the React, Android and iOS SDKs which power Riot. I keep mentioning desktop because this is a significant benefit of the campaign. The idea of somehow ripping out the core of the Signal or Ring apps and trying to bolt their UI onto Matrix SDKs is an interesting one, but in practice both protocols have significant differences to Matrix, and at best this would be a pretty big impedance mismatch. Of course, someone in the community is welcome to try to do it. Meanwhile, we'll keep plugging away at trying to make Riot kick ass (via the underlying Matrix SDKs), and add a native app to the pantheon too :)
      - confounded 9y ago
        > this is a thread about an announcement for a new smartphone The smartphone in question runs Debian.
    - 9y ago
tacoman 9y ago
>The Riot app in my experience has a pretty unwelcoming UI/UX experience and is still insanely buggy. I've setup my own Synapse server on a VPS and have my extended family of 12 people including an 85 year old grandmother using it on an iPad. It gets used daily for chat and picture sharing. I've come across a few minor problems on iOS, but overall I don't agree with that characterization.
orblivion 9y ago
> Encryption is still opt-in and beta This is the part that concerns me. https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ Moxie lays out a challenge to federation enthusiasts to prove him wrong that federated chat can be secure and have good usability. I would respectfully note that Matrix seems to be responding to the challenge with a chat client that is neither. Instead they seem to be doubling down on federation and integrations. Usability can be fixed, but the federation and multiple clients makes it a challenge. Security on the other hand is, again, concerning because it feels tacked on. It's not on by default because, again, it makes it complicated when you have multiple clients. Last time I tried, you could put in your password on the web client (browser encryption!) and join an existing conversation, and see all future posts by the people in the conversation, because suddenly they've accepted your new public key. I had to dig a little bit in the configs to find the current public keys for the clients in the conversation. Either they have to make a UX-friendly way of warning everybody that there's a new client, or accept that stealing an account password will let you snoop on conversations. I really appreciate their enthusiasm, and I hope someone gets federation right, but it just seemed like a mess. By contrast, I think that Signal recognized that you can work around the security vs usability tradeoff by trading off on a third vector: feature set. I think that we won't get a federated system until someone heeds Moxie's warnings and does some careful, creative thinking.
- Arathorn 9y ago
  > It's not on by default because, again, it makes it complicated when you have multiple clients This is simply not true. The reason it's not on by default is because we're still developing it and it's in beta. It's not tacked on; we've designed in E2E from the outset - but implementing it well in a decentralised manner is a huge amount of work; probably 5-6x more than in a centralised system like Signal. We're not going to enable it by default until we are 99.999% sure that it won't cause regressions over the non-e2e client. > Either they have to make a UX-friendly way of warning everybody that there's a new client I think you must have tried it a (very long) while ago - we've had the UnknownDeviceDialog since February. It looks like this (https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/matrix.org/mOOjVegIyiNaqJdLapRgfref https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/matrix.org/mOOj...), and warns you every time a new device is added to the room, and gives you the option of blacklisting it from receiving your messages if you don't trust it. Now, totally agreed that this UX is ugly and needs work, but this is NOTHING to do with the decentralised or federated nature of the protocol. It's simply that we currently are very resource constrained currently for working on web front-end issues. That said, if your ONLY priority is security, then Moxie's "the ecosystem is moving" probably has a point. After all, in an open ecosystem like Matrix, it's possible someone will fire up a buggy/malicious client and inadvertently compromise a room. However, if you value freedom as well as privacy, Matrix or OMEMO are basically your only choices.
drdaeman 9y ago
I think, homeserver software is also still somewhat immature. I'm waiting for Dendrite. I'm evaluating Synapse (as all the other servers say they're pre-alpha incomplete) for the last week or so, but one immediate issue I had is that when I had set it up, on my home low-power NAS it required more than 15 minutes (and 0.7GiB of memory out of 1GiB I've allocated to the container) at fully-saturated single CPU core to join #matrix:matrix.org. And it took no less than a minute to join a room with just 200 participants. Sure, that's just for the first time, but it still feels way too resource-heavy, compared to other chat systems. The machine has 10-year old Atom 330 CPU - which makes it an ancient relic, but hey, it has more than enough power to run XMPP (w/various transports), mail and web servers, and it just sits on a shelf in a kitchen, with a barely audible humming.
- Arathorn 9y ago
  Synapse's readme does try to spell out that it requires at least 2GB of RAM and a recent CPU. It is absolutely resource heavy, but not showstoppingly so in general. The comparison with XMPP is dubious as the protocols are completely different: it's like comparing a local filesystem with a distributed database and complaining that the DB is slower. That said, Dendrite should improve things a lot; we should have more stats in the near future but it seems to idle around 150MB of RAM and should run much better on ancient hardware. We are not bothering optimising synapse much further in favour of focusing on finishing Dendrite. Needless to say, we expect Dendrite to be finished well in time for the Librem 5 to go live, 18 months from now!

Aaronn 9y ago

Matrix is really struggling on funding so they need these kinds of partnerships to allow them to continue making the software better. For those who are reading this and would like to help out please see the following blog post: https://matrix.org/blog/2017/07/19/status-update/ https://matrix.org/blog/2017/07/19/status-update/

Arathorn 9y ago

We're working as hard as we can on improving Riot's UI/UX and getting crypto out of beta. As others have said, partnerships like this help fund the team to get the core stuff in place. After all, this project (assuming the campaign is successful) is 2 months away anyway.

carussell 9y ago
What's the value proposition of building a whole new client? If your goal is to give people a client for your cool new protocol, why would you waste any development resources on squashing fiddly UI bugs of your own doing, rather than, say, providing a reference implementation by forking the Signal app and swapping out the pieces until it's talking Matrix instead of TextSecure? I see this mistake constantly. The ring.cx folks did the same thing. Inevitably, everyone ends up commenting how poor the app is—some of them even saying how much they'd like to be able to use it and would if it weren't for the UI. It wouldn't be so silly if there weren't plenty of essentially ready-made solutions for the problem.
- Arathorn 9y ago
  1. Signal doesn't have a native Linux app (other than Electron) 2. The hope is to piggyback on one of the existing native Matrix SDKs or clients rather than write a whole new one. 3. One of the biggest complaints we hear about Matrix is that there is no native desktop app with parity to Riot yet. So this is our chance to fix that.
  - carussell 9y ago
    > Signal doesn't have a native Linux app (other than Electron) How is that an explanation for directing (apparently limited) resources into riot-android? > there is no native desktop app with parity to Riot yet Huh? The comparisons I made in my comment were to Signal and Ring, which are predominantly mobile messaging apps. The person you originally responded to was discussing Matrix on mobile. Why do you keep mentioning desktop? If there were any confusion, this is a thread about an announcement for a new smartphone.
    - Arathorn 9y ago
      Riot/Android doesn't run on Linux, so directing limited resources into it is fairly irrelevant. The point of this campaign is to fund us to work on a native app which can benefit desktop and handset users alike - whilst also supporting the core team so we can also work on the React, Android and iOS SDKs which power Riot. I keep mentioning desktop because this is a significant benefit of the campaign. The idea of somehow ripping out the core of the Signal or Ring apps and trying to bolt their UI onto Matrix SDKs is an interesting one, but in practice both protocols have significant differences to Matrix, and at best this would be a pretty big impedance mismatch. Of course, someone in the community is welcome to try to do it. Meanwhile, we'll keep plugging away at trying to make Riot kick ass (via the underlying Matrix SDKs), and add a native app to the pantheon too :)
    - confounded 9y ago
      > this is a thread about an announcement for a new smartphone The smartphone in question runs Debian.
  - 9y ago

tacoman 9y ago

>The Riot app in my experience has a pretty unwelcoming UI/UX experience and is still insanely buggy. I've setup my own Synapse server on a VPS and have my extended family of 12 people including an 85 year old grandmother using it on an iPad. It gets used daily for chat and picture sharing. I've come across a few minor problems on iOS, but overall I don't agree with that characterization.

orblivion 9y ago

> Encryption is still opt-in and beta This is the part that concerns me. https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ Moxie lays out a challenge to federation enthusiasts to prove him wrong that federated chat can be secure and have good usability. I would respectfully note that Matrix seems to be responding to the challenge with a chat client that is neither. Instead they seem to be doubling down on federation and integrations. Usability can be fixed, but the federation and multiple clients makes it a challenge. Security on the other hand is, again, concerning because it feels tacked on. It's not on by default because, again, it makes it complicated when you have multiple clients. Last time I tried, you could put in your password on the web client (browser encryption!) and join an existing conversation, and see all future posts by the people in the conversation, because suddenly they've accepted your new public key. I had to dig a little bit in the configs to find the current public keys for the clients in the conversation. Either they have to make a UX-friendly way of warning everybody that there's a new client, or accept that stealing an account password will let you snoop on conversations. I really appreciate their enthusiasm, and I hope someone gets federation right, but it just seemed like a mess. By contrast, I think that Signal recognized that you can work around the security vs usability tradeoff by trading off on a third vector: feature set. I think that we won't get a federated system until someone heeds Moxie's warnings and does some careful, creative thinking.

Arathorn 9y ago
> It's not on by default because, again, it makes it complicated when you have multiple clients This is simply not true. The reason it's not on by default is because we're still developing it and it's in beta. It's not tacked on; we've designed in E2E from the outset - but implementing it well in a decentralised manner is a huge amount of work; probably 5-6x more than in a centralised system like Signal. We're not going to enable it by default until we are 99.999% sure that it won't cause regressions over the non-e2e client. > Either they have to make a UX-friendly way of warning everybody that there's a new client I think you must have tried it a (very long) while ago - we've had the UnknownDeviceDialog since February. It looks like this (https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/matrix.org/mOOjVegIyiNaqJdLapRgfref https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/matrix.org/mOOj...), and warns you every time a new device is added to the room, and gives you the option of blacklisting it from receiving your messages if you don't trust it. Now, totally agreed that this UX is ugly and needs work, but this is NOTHING to do with the decentralised or federated nature of the protocol. It's simply that we currently are very resource constrained currently for working on web front-end issues. That said, if your ONLY priority is security, then Moxie's "the ecosystem is moving" probably has a point. After all, in an open ecosystem like Matrix, it's possible someone will fire up a buggy/malicious client and inadvertently compromise a room. However, if you value freedom as well as privacy, Matrix or OMEMO are basically your only choices.

drdaeman 9y ago

I think, homeserver software is also still somewhat immature. I'm waiting for Dendrite. I'm evaluating Synapse (as all the other servers say they're pre-alpha incomplete) for the last week or so, but one immediate issue I had is that when I had set it up, on my home low-power NAS it required more than 15 minutes (and 0.7GiB of memory out of 1GiB I've allocated to the container) at fully-saturated single CPU core to join #matrix:matrix.org. And it took no less than a minute to join a room with just 200 participants. Sure, that's just for the first time, but it still feels way too resource-heavy, compared to other chat systems. The machine has 10-year old Atom 330 CPU - which makes it an ancient relic, but hey, it has more than enough power to run XMPP (w/various transports), mail and web servers, and it just sits on a shelf in a kitchen, with a barely audible humming.

Arathorn 9y ago
Synapse's readme does try to spell out that it requires at least 2GB of RAM and a recent CPU. It is absolutely resource heavy, but not showstoppingly so in general. The comparison with XMPP is dubious as the protocols are completely different: it's like comparing a local filesystem with a distributed database and complaining that the DB is slower. That said, Dendrite should improve things a lot; we should have more stats in the near future but it seems to idle around 150MB of RAM and should run much better on ancient hardware. We are not bothering optimising synapse much further in favour of focusing on finishing Dendrite. Needless to say, we expect Dendrite to be finished well in time for the Librem 5 to go live, 18 months from now!