21 ms·

A Year Using Matrix and Riot

270 points by kasbah 8y ago

newscracker 8y ago
I would've liked a better segregation of how it was a year ago and how it is now, along with some kind of bullet list showing the salient points that the author wants to highlight. I've tried Riot briefly, and am very much interested to see such a decentralized solution becoming mature. I really can't wait for it to become something that can be "sold" to people who aren't into technology but care about the user experience and ease of use.
neilalexander 8y ago
> This has improved a lot since a year ago but there still needs to be a massive change in the UI design to make it comparable to the competition. I agree whole-heartedly with this. I am not entirely sure who decided on Riot's garish green UI filled with circles and non-standard UI controls and wildly variable padding/spacing and communities bar that takes up space even when not joined to any communities, but it looks a mess. If you look at Slack, Microsoft Teams etc, they are consistent, they are clean and they look like they have been designed by professionals. Riot doesn't - yet - and I can quite understand that putting people off, given that there aren't many other Matrix clients for the average user.
- Arathorn 8y ago
  You're always welcome to change the garish green in settings, and likewise hide the communities bar (although we expect communities to be used more and more in future, just as they are in Slack and Discord etc). Meanwhile, the upcoming redesign pretty much removes the green and the circles anyway :)
  - fredsir 8y ago
    Where can one sneak a peak of the redesign?
    - Arathorn 8y ago
      We'll do a blogpost shortly to show where it's at and gather feedback :)
  - neilalexander 8y ago
    Can't wait to see the new redesign. Hopefully it takes some hints from the host platform - it'd be great to have Riot feeling more at home on macOS!
    - Arathorn 8y ago
      We don't have any plans to make a separate desktop app from Riot beyond the Electron one. Instead we're hoping that someone will write a proper native MacOS matrix client, which will be a much closer fit. https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/matrixclient.html https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/matrixclient.html is the closest I know of there, but someone needs to pick it up and finish it off :)
      - acct1771 8y ago
        Is this the position for all platforms?
- mtgx 8y ago
  Probably a "quick and easy" way to fix this would be to just rely on Google's Material Design resources and tools, which I think are generally liked by most people. This may be an alternative: https://getmdl.io/index.html https://getmdl.io/index.html
  - rickycook 8y ago
    please not another MD app! the amount of wasted space is ridiculous!
    - kqr 8y ago
      I agree with you. But! If screen real estate is a priority to you, you may want to use something compact like weechat-matrix anyway, and let those with spare space have their mostly empty UI. It's really refreshing to finally have an open protocol with free client choice.
    - theelous3 8y ago
      Agreed. The negative space is nice looking, but efficient use of space wins in the long term.
Arathorn 8y ago
Project lead for Matrix here. This is a pretty accurate post, and in terms of the negative points we are painfully aware that UX on Riot (and performance on Synapse) still has a way to go. The current stuff we have in flight to fix this are: * Lazy-load all room members rather than push them proactively to clients. This should improve initial sync times and subsequent RAM usage by anywhere from 3x to 20x depending on how active your account is. * Cross-sign E2E devices when you log in so nobody ever has to verify them again. This should kill the constant device verification (and key sharing) warnings. * Refresh the whole UI/UX of Riot. We have an ex-Canonical/Ubuntu pro-designer working on a complete facelift of Riot/Web, coming in the next few months. * Perf improvements across the board on Riot/Web - particularly optimising React when switching rooms, and switching from Draft to Slate in order to speed up and stabilise the message composer. * Algorithmic improvements to Synapse to speed up the hottest paths (shifting from O(N) to roughly O(1) with the size of the room) - https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/jki.re/ubNfLtrmXZMmlGjJZYPnlHHy https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/jki.re/ubNfLtrm... * Algorithmic improvements to Synapse to avoid fragmentation of rooms by partitioning the DAG into 'chunks', avoiding stale/dead/orphaned chunks from contributing to the fragmentation of the overall room - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E0cmEeMDwcQarFYxpZ0b9aoQbf1ODxwRx7YWIo5nWt8 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E0cmEeMDwcQarFYxpZ0b9aoQ... On the minus side, we've been badly slowed down by constant firefighting keeping the Matrix.org homeserver operational despite massive growth, as well having to do a lot of preparation for GDPR compliance - see https://matrix.org/blog/2018/05/08/gdpr-compliance-in-matrix/ https://matrix.org/blog/2018/05/08/gdpr-compliance-in-matrix.... On the plus side, we have a lot of new people joining during May to work fulltime on Synapse, Dendrite and Riot/Web - which once we get past the mythical man month stage should make a huge huge difference. Fun times...
- robto 8y ago
  Thanks for the work you're doing here! I want to commend you on how well and consistently you communicate the priorities and progress of this project. Between the This Week in Matrix[0] blog posts, the Matrix Live chats for the Patreon patrons, and your presence here and on matrix/irc, I'm impressed at your organization and the results you've managed to produce! I'm happily using Riot with my wife and our 60+ year old parents, as well as with my peers, and we all really like it. This project is really shaping up to be a gem of the open-source community, and I'm excited to see it grow! [0]https://matrix.org/blog/2018/05/04/this-week-in-matrix-2018-05-04/ https://matrix.org/blog/2018/05/04/this-week-in-matrix-2018-...
codetrotter 8y ago
One thing I discovered when introducing other people to Riot.im and that even confused myself was the sign-up procedure. You think you are signing up but instead you are trying to sign in. Other than that I am happy with Riot.im.
sandov 8y ago
I Tried to use Riot.im with a friend of mine, who's also a hacker and we couldn't figure out how to create a room for us to chat. We're probably too dumb for this.
- potatopolis 8y ago
  Bottom left; click the little person icon. A modal pops up asking you to enter the user ID of the person you wish to chat with. There are valid complaints to be made about Riot's UI, but I really don't think that's one of them.
  - sandov 8y ago
    We did that many times, but nothing appeared on each other's screen, it seemed as if the IDs were being sent to /dev/null.
rterrero 8y ago
Hola
rcthompson 8y ago
After seeing a post on HN about Matrix a few weeks ago, I decided to see about setting up a home server on the headless Ubuntu box in my closet. All in all, it was pretty painless. The one thing I couldn't figure out was the built-in audio/video calling functionality, although the Jitsi videoconferencing widget did work (once my dad I managed to find all 20 of the volume knobs throughout the OS that need to be unmuted to have both the speakers and microphone working on both ends).
awesomepeter 8y ago
What confused me about Riot when I tried it was that when I picked a friend to chat, it created some kind of new room instead of.. not sure how to call it, a P2P chat? Like it's on slack or other services. For eg. I could remove messages but my friend couldn't which makes it weird (I'm an admin in a P2P conversation?)
- Stephen304 8y ago
  It seems Matrix really blurs the lines between a direct chat and group chat, it's one of the things I would like to be clearer. For example, when you start a direct chat, it's realy just a group chat with 2 people. If you invite another person (or even just an integration like giphy search!), the UI stops listing it under the other user as a direct chat and it seems indistinguishable from a chat room. Even removing the extra user seems to not get it classified again as a direct chat. If Matrix people are reading this - it would be great to have better distinction between direct and group. And it would be nice if integrations could somehow not break that illusion. And perhaps a warning if adding an integration / user will irreversibly make a chat a group chat.
  - dharma1 8y ago
    Yes! This is (one of the many things) addressed in the redesign. Also found it confusing, but don't worry, it will be fixed :) Can't wait to share some of the new designs with everyone! If anyone has other suggestions or frustrations, send them to me - contacts are in my description. I'm the guy working on a major UI/UX redesign for Matrix/Riot that Matthew mentioned above.
    - stevenicr 8y ago
      the closer we could get to the realchat interface from 2003 / 2007 - I'd love to see it. ( http://weblog.globaladvancedmedia.com/2018/realchat-backend-pages-one/ http://weblog.globaladvancedmedia.com/2018/realchat-backend-... ) rooms, pms, all kinds of options, modern design in a layout that worked even at 1/4 monitor screen fine. Of course it did not work on mobile - so it didn't have to think about how that would re-arrange and look. However it is clean and intuitive for many I think. The backend options for changing colors and making / trading entire themes was decent as well.
orthecreedence 8y ago
> Another huge issue is how painfully slow the client is. Simple tasks like switching between groups takes up to a second Guess the author hasn't used Slack lately... I run both Slack (for work) and Riot (for personal, on the matrix.org server) and while I don't use Riot as much as Slack, I really love it. I think the UI is great. I am fairly used to IRC though, and I think that's where Riot gets a lot of its DNA from, so maybe I'm just used to that setup. For the project being open source, and for the short time it has been alive, it has come so incredibly far. I can't wait to see what else they do.
seba_dos1 8y ago
For 1-to-1 chat, XMPP seems way better suited. However, Matrix feels like a really nice IRC successor. I hope both can live in a somewhat symbiotic relationship.
- stev0lution 8y ago
  Yeah, that's their plan, I think. Bridges to other services instead of 'walled gardens' https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/matrix/ https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/matrix/
- majewsky 8y ago
  What makes XMPP "better suited" for 1-on-1 chats? I use both XMPP and Matrix for both 1-on-1 and group chats and found neither lacking in any case.
  - seba_dos1 8y ago
    What I meant is rather "chatting with friends and family, Facebook style", as opposed to "chatting in organized teams and groups, Slack style".
arthurcolle 8y ago
Is there interop with existing chat server protocols? I would think this is hard to achieve but I figured it would be worth the question
- eat_veggies 8y ago
  Yep, you can bridge Matrix with a lot of stuff.
jtl999 8y ago
Is multi-account support being actively worked on for Riot? So (as a use case) I can be signed in to my personal matrix.org account and my (work) private HS account at the same time? If not I was planning on taking a look at it myself despite my JS being rusty and have never done anything with Electron before but I haven't had time to go through the code and see how much of it is designed being built around just a single user account. I remember the old Matrix Console app for Android had multiple account support.
- confounded 8y ago
  What’s wrong with multiple tabs in a browser?
  - theelous3 8y ago
    Being in a browser.
  - Qwertie 8y ago
    Even more resource usage and doesn't work on mobile.
- Arathorn 8y ago
  It's not actively happening right now but it's on the roadmap.
fegul 8y ago
One thing I noticed when I tried it out a year or so ago was the high data usage on mobile devices even when messages weren't being sent or received. I had set up our own Synapse server but the high data usage, quirky 1-1 vs rooms chats, etc. made it tough for me to adopt fully. I do hope to use it in the future though as I really like the concept but it wasn't quite there for me yet.
stevenicr 8y ago
really excited about this. Just need a way to give some users moderator powers to click to see ip addys of other users when issues arise - and the power to ban them by ip, subnet, as, cidr, hostname. (and any other options) One troll with a couple of VPNs and wow, the damage that can be done is something else. Would hooking https://access.watch/ https://access.watch/ into a home server or something like it make any sense / make it easier / faster to roll something like this out? Can't wait to get into this more, so many possibilities. I am right in thinking that having a home server that does not connect to the main rooms on the main matrix server would save 80% of the ram and much of the lag?
josefresco 8y ago
Off topic, but I love the simple & clean design of this site/blog. I think I'll borrow it for my personal blog. Did some homework, looks like it was built using Hugo: https://gohugo.io https://gohugo.io
fb03 8y ago
What Matrix offers differently from Jabber? - Jabber has definable custom xml schemas where you can also define your own protocol on top of it for media exchange, voip and etc. - Also, it is pretty decentralized. In the current incantation jabber also has performance advantages, having a server implemented in low level language and all the existing jabber clients around. EDIT: Keep in mind I am not criticizing Matrix, I just found it to have a staggering amount of features similar to Jabber, which is "kinda" used but sadly didn't quite fly like other not-foss alternatives like Telegram/Whatsapp. We all really need a good decentralized and open IM protocol.

270 points by kasbah 8y ago

I would've liked a better segregation of how it was a year ago and how it is now, along with some kind of bullet list showing the salient points that the author wants to highlight. I've tried Riot briefly, and am very much interested to see such a decentralized solution becoming mature. I really can't wait for it to become something that can be "sold" to people who aren't into technology but care about the user experience and ease of use.

neilalexander 8y ago

> This has improved a lot since a year ago but there still needs to be a massive change in the UI design to make it comparable to the competition. I agree whole-heartedly with this. I am not entirely sure who decided on Riot's garish green UI filled with circles and non-standard UI controls and wildly variable padding/spacing and communities bar that takes up space even when not joined to any communities, but it looks a mess. If you look at Slack, Microsoft Teams etc, they are consistent, they are clean and they look like they have been designed by professionals. Riot doesn't - yet - and I can quite understand that putting people off, given that there aren't many other Matrix clients for the average user.

Arathorn 8y ago
You're always welcome to change the garish green in settings, and likewise hide the communities bar (although we expect communities to be used more and more in future, just as they are in Slack and Discord etc). Meanwhile, the upcoming redesign pretty much removes the green and the circles anyway :)
- fredsir 8y ago
  Where can one sneak a peak of the redesign?
  - Arathorn 8y ago
    We'll do a blogpost shortly to show where it's at and gather feedback :)
- neilalexander 8y ago
  Can't wait to see the new redesign. Hopefully it takes some hints from the host platform - it'd be great to have Riot feeling more at home on macOS!
  - Arathorn 8y ago
    We don't have any plans to make a separate desktop app from Riot beyond the Electron one. Instead we're hoping that someone will write a proper native MacOS matrix client, which will be a much closer fit. https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/matrixclient.html https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/matrixclient.html is the closest I know of there, but someone needs to pick it up and finish it off :)
    - acct1771 8y ago
      Is this the position for all platforms?
mtgx 8y ago
Probably a "quick and easy" way to fix this would be to just rely on Google's Material Design resources and tools, which I think are generally liked by most people. This may be an alternative: https://getmdl.io/index.html https://getmdl.io/index.html
- rickycook 8y ago
  please not another MD app! the amount of wasted space is ridiculous!
  - kqr 8y ago
    I agree with you. But! If screen real estate is a priority to you, you may want to use something compact like weechat-matrix anyway, and let those with spare space have their mostly empty UI. It's really refreshing to finally have an open protocol with free client choice.
  - theelous3 8y ago
    Agreed. The negative space is nice looking, but efficient use of space wins in the long term.

Arathorn 8y ago

Project lead for Matrix here. This is a pretty accurate post, and in terms of the negative points we are painfully aware that UX on Riot (and performance on Synapse) still has a way to go. The current stuff we have in flight to fix this are: * Lazy-load all room members rather than push them proactively to clients. This should improve initial sync times and subsequent RAM usage by anywhere from 3x to 20x depending on how active your account is. * Cross-sign E2E devices when you log in so nobody ever has to verify them again. This should kill the constant device verification (and key sharing) warnings. * Refresh the whole UI/UX of Riot. We have an ex-Canonical/Ubuntu pro-designer working on a complete facelift of Riot/Web, coming in the next few months. * Perf improvements across the board on Riot/Web - particularly optimising React when switching rooms, and switching from Draft to Slate in order to speed up and stabilise the message composer. * Algorithmic improvements to Synapse to speed up the hottest paths (shifting from O(N) to roughly O(1) with the size of the room) - https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/jki.re/ubNfLtrmXZMmlGjJZYPnlHHy https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/jki.re/ubNfLtrm... * Algorithmic improvements to Synapse to avoid fragmentation of rooms by partitioning the DAG into 'chunks', avoiding stale/dead/orphaned chunks from contributing to the fragmentation of the overall room - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E0cmEeMDwcQarFYxpZ0b9aoQbf1ODxwRx7YWIo5nWt8 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E0cmEeMDwcQarFYxpZ0b9aoQ... On the minus side, we've been badly slowed down by constant firefighting keeping the Matrix.org homeserver operational despite massive growth, as well having to do a lot of preparation for GDPR compliance - see https://matrix.org/blog/2018/05/08/gdpr-compliance-in-matrix/ https://matrix.org/blog/2018/05/08/gdpr-compliance-in-matrix.... On the plus side, we have a lot of new people joining during May to work fulltime on Synapse, Dendrite and Riot/Web - which once we get past the mythical man month stage should make a huge huge difference. Fun times...

robto 8y ago
Thanks for the work you're doing here! I want to commend you on how well and consistently you communicate the priorities and progress of this project. Between the This Week in Matrix[0] blog posts, the Matrix Live chats for the Patreon patrons, and your presence here and on matrix/irc, I'm impressed at your organization and the results you've managed to produce! I'm happily using Riot with my wife and our 60+ year old parents, as well as with my peers, and we all really like it. This project is really shaping up to be a gem of the open-source community, and I'm excited to see it grow! [0]https://matrix.org/blog/2018/05/04/this-week-in-matrix-2018-05-04/ https://matrix.org/blog/2018/05/04/this-week-in-matrix-2018-...

codetrotter 8y ago

One thing I discovered when introducing other people to Riot.im and that even confused myself was the sign-up procedure. You think you are signing up but instead you are trying to sign in. Other than that I am happy with Riot.im.

sandov 8y ago

I Tried to use Riot.im with a friend of mine, who's also a hacker and we couldn't figure out how to create a room for us to chat. We're probably too dumb for this.

potatopolis 8y ago
Bottom left; click the little person icon. A modal pops up asking you to enter the user ID of the person you wish to chat with. There are valid complaints to be made about Riot's UI, but I really don't think that's one of them.
- sandov 8y ago
  We did that many times, but nothing appeared on each other's screen, it seemed as if the IDs were being sent to /dev/null.

rterrero 8y ago

Hola

rcthompson 8y ago

After seeing a post on HN about Matrix a few weeks ago, I decided to see about setting up a home server on the headless Ubuntu box in my closet. All in all, it was pretty painless. The one thing I couldn't figure out was the built-in audio/video calling functionality, although the Jitsi videoconferencing widget did work (once my dad I managed to find all 20 of the volume knobs throughout the OS that need to be unmuted to have both the speakers and microphone working on both ends).

awesomepeter 8y ago

What confused me about Riot when I tried it was that when I picked a friend to chat, it created some kind of new room instead of.. not sure how to call it, a P2P chat? Like it's on slack or other services. For eg. I could remove messages but my friend couldn't which makes it weird (I'm an admin in a P2P conversation?)

Stephen304 8y ago
It seems Matrix really blurs the lines between a direct chat and group chat, it's one of the things I would like to be clearer. For example, when you start a direct chat, it's realy just a group chat with 2 people. If you invite another person (or even just an integration like giphy search!), the UI stops listing it under the other user as a direct chat and it seems indistinguishable from a chat room. Even removing the extra user seems to not get it classified again as a direct chat. If Matrix people are reading this - it would be great to have better distinction between direct and group. And it would be nice if integrations could somehow not break that illusion. And perhaps a warning if adding an integration / user will irreversibly make a chat a group chat.
- dharma1 8y ago
  Yes! This is (one of the many things) addressed in the redesign. Also found it confusing, but don't worry, it will be fixed :) Can't wait to share some of the new designs with everyone! If anyone has other suggestions or frustrations, send them to me - contacts are in my description. I'm the guy working on a major UI/UX redesign for Matrix/Riot that Matthew mentioned above.
  - stevenicr 8y ago
    the closer we could get to the realchat interface from 2003 / 2007 - I'd love to see it. ( http://weblog.globaladvancedmedia.com/2018/realchat-backend-pages-one/ http://weblog.globaladvancedmedia.com/2018/realchat-backend-... ) rooms, pms, all kinds of options, modern design in a layout that worked even at 1/4 monitor screen fine. Of course it did not work on mobile - so it didn't have to think about how that would re-arrange and look. However it is clean and intuitive for many I think. The backend options for changing colors and making / trading entire themes was decent as well.

orthecreedence 8y ago

> Another huge issue is how painfully slow the client is. Simple tasks like switching between groups takes up to a second Guess the author hasn't used Slack lately... I run both Slack (for work) and Riot (for personal, on the matrix.org server) and while I don't use Riot as much as Slack, I really love it. I think the UI is great. I am fairly used to IRC though, and I think that's where Riot gets a lot of its DNA from, so maybe I'm just used to that setup. For the project being open source, and for the short time it has been alive, it has come so incredibly far. I can't wait to see what else they do.

seba_dos1 8y ago

For 1-to-1 chat, XMPP seems way better suited. However, Matrix feels like a really nice IRC successor. I hope both can live in a somewhat symbiotic relationship.

stev0lution 8y ago
Yeah, that's their plan, I think. Bridges to other services instead of 'walled gardens' https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/matrix/ https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/matrix/
majewsky 8y ago
What makes XMPP "better suited" for 1-on-1 chats? I use both XMPP and Matrix for both 1-on-1 and group chats and found neither lacking in any case.
- seba_dos1 8y ago
  What I meant is rather "chatting with friends and family, Facebook style", as opposed to "chatting in organized teams and groups, Slack style".

arthurcolle 8y ago

Is there interop with existing chat server protocols? I would think this is hard to achieve but I figured it would be worth the question

eat_veggies 8y ago
Yep, you can bridge Matrix with a lot of stuff.

jtl999 8y ago

Is multi-account support being actively worked on for Riot? So (as a use case) I can be signed in to my personal matrix.org account and my (work) private HS account at the same time? If not I was planning on taking a look at it myself despite my JS being rusty and have never done anything with Electron before but I haven't had time to go through the code and see how much of it is designed being built around just a single user account. I remember the old Matrix Console app for Android had multiple account support.

confounded 8y ago
What’s wrong with multiple tabs in a browser?
- theelous3 8y ago
  Being in a browser.
- Qwertie 8y ago
  Even more resource usage and doesn't work on mobile.
Arathorn 8y ago
It's not actively happening right now but it's on the roadmap.

fegul 8y ago

One thing I noticed when I tried it out a year or so ago was the high data usage on mobile devices even when messages weren't being sent or received. I had set up our own Synapse server but the high data usage, quirky 1-1 vs rooms chats, etc. made it tough for me to adopt fully. I do hope to use it in the future though as I really like the concept but it wasn't quite there for me yet.

stevenicr 8y ago

really excited about this. Just need a way to give some users moderator powers to click to see ip addys of other users when issues arise - and the power to ban them by ip, subnet, as, cidr, hostname. (and any other options) One troll with a couple of VPNs and wow, the damage that can be done is something else. Would hooking https://access.watch/ https://access.watch/ into a home server or something like it make any sense / make it easier / faster to roll something like this out? Can't wait to get into this more, so many possibilities. I am right in thinking that having a home server that does not connect to the main rooms on the main matrix server would save 80% of the ram and much of the lag?

josefresco 8y ago

Off topic, but I love the simple & clean design of this site/blog. I think I'll borrow it for my personal blog. Did some homework, looks like it was built using Hugo: https://gohugo.io https://gohugo.io

fb03 8y ago

What Matrix offers differently from Jabber? - Jabber has definable custom xml schemas where you can also define your own protocol on top of it for media exchange, voip and etc. - Also, it is pretty decentralized. In the current incantation jabber also has performance advantages, having a server implemented in low level language and all the existing jabber clients around. EDIT: Keep in mind I am not criticizing Matrix, I just found it to have a staggering amount of features similar to Jabber, which is "kinda" used but sadly didn't quite fly like other not-foss alternatives like Telegram/Whatsapp. We all really need a good decentralized and open IM protocol.