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Just a user, but I think Matrix needs to - work on stability: the status quo is unreliable. Until this is solved it's hard to recommend Matrix to anybody who i

Just a user, but I think Matrix needs to - work on stability: the status quo is unreliable. Until this is solved it's hard to recommend Matrix to anybody who is looking to use it for serious work - disable signup on main server: this is a decentralized netword and the main server is overloaded already. It is overloaded so badly, that devs decided to turn off presence for as long as I can remember first seeing matrix. So even IRC is more usable in that regard because I know when I see a user they are online or they even have presence and an away message There's more but those are two issues I think should be dealt with urgently.

zaarn 8y ago
That and working on bridges. Some people suggest that bridges solve the problem of onboarding but the quality of the bridges has been abysmal last I checked, the only one that is somewhat maintained being the IRC bridge and even that having some problems (like showing users online even if they aren't)
- Arathorn 8y ago
  The main guy working on bridges left during the funding crisis we had last year, unfortunately. Luckily we have new people joining in May to work as their day-job on it. The IRC bridge should never show users in a room who aren't currently joined online on IRC (other than when it's recovering from a crash).
Arathorn 8y ago
Stability should be okay if you're not on a massively overloaded server, but it's very much something that we're working on alongside performance - in order to try to get out of beta as soon as possible (as well as support massive deployments for folks like the French Government). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17031626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17031626 is a list of stuff we're doing to address it atm.
thereandhere 8y ago
You bring up a good point about disabling signup on the main server. I've recently been wondering why the Matrix team wouldn't want to lose some of the control they have over the Matrix universe.. They could solve their scalability problem by bringing up other homeservers (why not a paid riot.im server even?) or promoting other open servers hosted by the community. Seems like Mastodon folks are favoring horizontal scalability by making people use various servers, but the Matrix team wants to keep mostly everyone on matrix.org. (I hope this doesn't sound too negative.. I know it's not like Matrix folks want to centralize things.. It's just, I wonder why they don't promote other homeservers more)
- Arathorn 8y ago
  The reason we haven't disabled signup is to try to provide a server which we can point people to over which we have some level of control and quality (even if that quality is pretty crap right now). Once we have account migration sorted out (hopefully coming sooner than expected thanks to work being done for GDPR), then the situation should be much better as folks can flee off the overloaded server onto one of their choice... but first-time newbies don't need to make the complicated and confusing call on picking an alt server.
  - ryukafalz 8y ago
    GP brings up an interesting point, though - couldn't you run multiple smaller homeservers rather than one huge one? I suppose it depends on how much of a challenge that is operationally, but Matrix federation as a whole seems to scale much better than individual homeservers do at this point. (Users who have already signed up on the matrix.org HS are stuck there until account migration is a thing, of course.)
    - Arathorn 8y ago
      Splitting matrix.org into smaller homeservers wouldn't necessarily help (even if we had account migration), as you'd just end up switching client<->server traffic for server<->server traffic. As New Vector (the startup we setup to support Matrix) we're also working on providing a homeservers-as-a-service though which should help.

zaarn 8y ago

That and working on bridges. Some people suggest that bridges solve the problem of onboarding but the quality of the bridges has been abysmal last I checked, the only one that is somewhat maintained being the IRC bridge and even that having some problems (like showing users online even if they aren't)

Arathorn 8y ago
The main guy working on bridges left during the funding crisis we had last year, unfortunately. Luckily we have new people joining in May to work as their day-job on it. The IRC bridge should never show users in a room who aren't currently joined online on IRC (other than when it's recovering from a crash).

Arathorn 8y ago

Stability should be okay if you're not on a massively overloaded server, but it's very much something that we're working on alongside performance - in order to try to get out of beta as soon as possible (as well as support massive deployments for folks like the French Government). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17031626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17031626 is a list of stuff we're doing to address it atm.

thereandhere 8y ago

You bring up a good point about disabling signup on the main server. I've recently been wondering why the Matrix team wouldn't want to lose some of the control they have over the Matrix universe.. They could solve their scalability problem by bringing up other homeservers (why not a paid riot.im server even?) or promoting other open servers hosted by the community. Seems like Mastodon folks are favoring horizontal scalability by making people use various servers, but the Matrix team wants to keep mostly everyone on matrix.org. (I hope this doesn't sound too negative.. I know it's not like Matrix folks want to centralize things.. It's just, I wonder why they don't promote other homeservers more)

Arathorn 8y ago
The reason we haven't disabled signup is to try to provide a server which we can point people to over which we have some level of control and quality (even if that quality is pretty crap right now). Once we have account migration sorted out (hopefully coming sooner than expected thanks to work being done for GDPR), then the situation should be much better as folks can flee off the overloaded server onto one of their choice... but first-time newbies don't need to make the complicated and confusing call on picking an alt server.
- ryukafalz 8y ago
  GP brings up an interesting point, though - couldn't you run multiple smaller homeservers rather than one huge one? I suppose it depends on how much of a challenge that is operationally, but Matrix federation as a whole seems to scale much better than individual homeservers do at this point. (Users who have already signed up on the matrix.org HS are stuck there until account migration is a thing, of course.)
  - Arathorn 8y ago
    Splitting matrix.org into smaller homeservers wouldn't necessarily help (even if we had account migration), as you'd just end up switching client<->server traffic for server<->server traffic. As New Vector (the startup we setup to support Matrix) we're also working on providing a homeservers-as-a-service though which should help.