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> With XMPP and Matrix.org -based services you would still need to convince everyone to join your new network. Easy in theory, very complex in practice! I thin

> With XMPP and Matrix.org -based services you would still need to convince everyone to join your new network. Easy in theory, very complex in practice! I think they missed the the bit where Matrix is called Matrix because it bridges (matrixes) the existing networks (Slack, IRC, Telegram, Discord, XMPP, etc) in, rather than needing to convince everyone to join. But no matter, we'll just provide a COI bridge if this takes off :)

lima 8y ago
In reality, those bridges work badly and hardly anyone uses them. I had to give up on my attempt at using Matrix as IRC client - it had questionable uptime and some channels even banned Matrix users due to frequent reconnects (on Freenode). Hackint recently shut down their Matrix bridge due to how maintenance-intensive it was (and the fact that it logged all messages in its own database). It's great in theory but impractical to use.
- rschulman 8y ago
  This is completely the opposite of my experience. I'm in probably a dozen Freenode channels via bridge and another 5-6 Mozilla IRC channels, and haven't had a problem in as long as I can remember.
  - jlkuester7 8y ago
    Same. It was a little 'interesting' to get setup (because IRC) but all-in-all it works great!
- Arathorn 8y ago
  This info is a bit stale - it's true we had stability problems in Freenode until July 2018 (exasperated by their spam issues), but since then it's been pretty stable and the reconnects are considerably rarer than freenode netsplits. It's not perfect, but many people use it fine as a casual IRC client. There are over 24,000 active users using the Freenode bridge in the last month, for instance, so I'm unsure that 'hardly anyone uses them'... The Hackint story is a different one; the bridge itself is not maintenance intensive at all. But it is true that the default Matrix server implementation is resource & relatively admin heavy; we're working on that currently. Meanwhile we're also fixing the data retention behaviour - https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc1763/proposals/1763-configurable-retention-periods.md https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc176... etc.
  - alrs 8y ago
    I tried Matrix last month. It's neat, but slow and a little buggy. Recommending it to anyone other than a Matrix developer right now seems a bit of a stretch.
    - SamWhited 8y ago
      Not to mention that it's just re-solving all the same problems other messaging protocols (XMPP, IRC, etc.) spent time solving 10+ years ago. I always feel that the Matrix organization is a bit disingenuous. Not only are they not developed by any recognized standards body (meaning they have no long-term sustainable funding model), but if they really just wanted to connect all the other chat protocols and make sure everything was interoperable they could have built bridges for existing protocols instead of reinventing the wheel yet again and making the chat scene even more fragmented. Not invented here syndrome is not okay when there are plenty of good (or at least "good enough" even if they're not my favorite) alternatives on the market already.
      - jancsika 8y ago
        > Not only are they not developed by any recognized standards body (meaning they have no long-term sustainable funding model), I don't see a clear relationship between the sentence and its parenthetical. I don't know about Matrix' funding model. But I do know Signal, for example, isn't developed by a recognized standards body. What can I infer from that about the sustainability of its long-term funding?
        SamWhited 8y ago
        That's fair; these should have been two separate points.
      - Arathorn 8y ago
        i'd argue that the Matrix.org Foundation is just as 'recognized' as the XMPP Standards Foundation :) In terms of disingenuousness - i'd argue that the definition of disingenuous is accusing us of reinventing the wheel rather than acknowledging that Matrix is an entirely different type of technology to IRC or XMPP. It's more similar to NNTP or Git than either IRC or XMPP. For better or worse, trying to solve existing problems using new approaches is how things evolve. On which note, it's cool to see delta.chat and COI trying a totally different approach too.
- gsich 8y ago
  Bridges usually suck, even for IRC. Split brain, someone needs to monitor it constantly, you are not sure if Matrix clients have received it and vice versa.
- mst 8y ago
  Speaking in my personal capacity but as somebody's who's a freenode oper: The ridiculous crashing every few minutes thing of the IRC bridge has been fixed enough I haven't noticed a problem for quite a while. I have a looooot of disagreements with matrix, which I have discussed and will discuss with them, but honestly they're not doing it completely wrong anymore.
  - Arathorn 8y ago
    > I have a looooot of disagreements with matrix, which I have discussed and will discuss with them, but honestly they're not doing it completely wrong anymore. \o/ :) The other stuff is very much on our radar, fwiw (and in an ideal world i hope we'll finally be able to implement a services or TS6-based bridge). We've been a bit distracted over the last few months with an XMPP bridge (matrix-bifrost) but will be back on IRC bridging shortly.
- Proven 8y ago
  I was going to comment how this French idea with hundreds of non-expert users maintaining and operating Matrix servers seems unrealistic. The software itself may be secure and configurable but instances of such service, especially if operated by government hacks, may not be. 100s of ObamaCare portals with 0.01% of the budget. Yeah that will go well.
enough 8y ago
Very true, but have you tried just reaching out to someone via email on Matrix in practice? I tried with Riot and am not able to do that. Maybe just a bug, but if you want the real Matrix experience, you need a Matrix account. Don't get me wrong, I do love Matrix, but I also love XMPP - both not spectacular successes so far. AFAIK, the French Matrix version is even locked down and does not federate across the network.
- Arathorn 8y ago
  You can reach out to folks by email in Riot by hitting "start chat" and entering an email address. I'm not sure how much easier we can make that ;) We should run a general purpose email bridge though, and in fact there's a massive public sector outfit asking for such a thing currently so it'll probably happen sooner than later. In terms of Matrix not being a spectacular success - well, that's a matter of perspective. The intention for France is absolutely for it to federate with the public network (once there's are sufficient border gateways in place). And France is far from the only high profile Matrix deployment out there, it's just one that we can speak about. But eitherway, COI looks cool, and I hope it helps OX sell more mail servers :)
zaarn 8y ago
>Discord Yet, there is no option to bridge without involving the administrator of all servers you want to talk to. That and I had a very bad experience with the other bridges. Outside of IRC it's basically unusable.
Zash 8y ago
The XMPP-IRC bridge Biboumi is great tho, https://biboumi.louiz.org/ https://biboumi.louiz.org/ But any bridge will be restricted to the lowest common denominator, often you get into weird corner cases where the two ends of the bridge work subtly different. A Telepathy dev wrote a long post on the subject a while back, worth reading: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2017-September/msg00047.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2017-Sept...
znpy 8y ago
Well then matrix developers can develop a bridge for COI then :P
- xf86alsa 8y ago
  There is already an email bridge! https://github.com/kamax-matrix/matrix-appservice-email https://github.com/kamax-matrix/matrix-appservice-email
ppjet6 8y ago
Jeremie Miller, 1999: > "Jabber is a new project I recently started to create a complete open-source platform for Instant Messaging with transparent communication to other IM systems(ICQ, AIM, etc). Matthew Hodgson, 2019: > I think they missed the the bit where Matrix is called Matrix because it bridges (matrixes) the existing networks (Slack, IRC, Telegram, Discord, XMPP, etc) in, rather than needing to convince everyone to join.
- Moru 8y ago
  https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
  - rafbuff 8y ago
    https://xkcd.com/1810/ https://xkcd.com/1810/ even better. But hey, we are using IMAP and Mail which is already in the picture.
    - Arathorn 8y ago
      https://matrix.org/blog/2017/03/11/how-do-i-bridge-thee-let-me-count-the-ways/ https://matrix.org/blog/2017/03/11/how-do-i-bridge-thee-let-... is the matrix take on that one ;P
    - chrisweekly 8y ago
      haha, awesome. Love the lonely "Apache request logs" circle. :)
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - anilakar 8y ago
        I remember paging a sysadmin once through the failed auth log with sudo.
    - noisy_boy 8y ago
tiglionabbit 8y ago
So you mean to say that I can use matrix.org to talk to someone on Telegram? How? I just went to riot.im and I don't get it.

lima 8y ago

In reality, those bridges work badly and hardly anyone uses them. I had to give up on my attempt at using Matrix as IRC client - it had questionable uptime and some channels even banned Matrix users due to frequent reconnects (on Freenode). Hackint recently shut down their Matrix bridge due to how maintenance-intensive it was (and the fact that it logged all messages in its own database). It's great in theory but impractical to use.

rschulman 8y ago
This is completely the opposite of my experience. I'm in probably a dozen Freenode channels via bridge and another 5-6 Mozilla IRC channels, and haven't had a problem in as long as I can remember.
- jlkuester7 8y ago
  Same. It was a little 'interesting' to get setup (because IRC) but all-in-all it works great!
Arathorn 8y ago
This info is a bit stale - it's true we had stability problems in Freenode until July 2018 (exasperated by their spam issues), but since then it's been pretty stable and the reconnects are considerably rarer than freenode netsplits. It's not perfect, but many people use it fine as a casual IRC client. There are over 24,000 active users using the Freenode bridge in the last month, for instance, so I'm unsure that 'hardly anyone uses them'... The Hackint story is a different one; the bridge itself is not maintenance intensive at all. But it is true that the default Matrix server implementation is resource & relatively admin heavy; we're working on that currently. Meanwhile we're also fixing the data retention behaviour - https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc1763/proposals/1763-configurable-retention-periods.md https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc176... etc.
- alrs 8y ago
  I tried Matrix last month. It's neat, but slow and a little buggy. Recommending it to anyone other than a Matrix developer right now seems a bit of a stretch.
  - SamWhited 8y ago
    Not to mention that it's just re-solving all the same problems other messaging protocols (XMPP, IRC, etc.) spent time solving 10+ years ago. I always feel that the Matrix organization is a bit disingenuous. Not only are they not developed by any recognized standards body (meaning they have no long-term sustainable funding model), but if they really just wanted to connect all the other chat protocols and make sure everything was interoperable they could have built bridges for existing protocols instead of reinventing the wheel yet again and making the chat scene even more fragmented. Not invented here syndrome is not okay when there are plenty of good (or at least "good enough" even if they're not my favorite) alternatives on the market already.
    - jancsika 8y ago
      > Not only are they not developed by any recognized standards body (meaning they have no long-term sustainable funding model), I don't see a clear relationship between the sentence and its parenthetical. I don't know about Matrix' funding model. But I do know Signal, for example, isn't developed by a recognized standards body. What can I infer from that about the sustainability of its long-term funding?
      - SamWhited 8y ago
        That's fair; these should have been two separate points.
    - Arathorn 8y ago
      i'd argue that the Matrix.org Foundation is just as 'recognized' as the XMPP Standards Foundation :) In terms of disingenuousness - i'd argue that the definition of disingenuous is accusing us of reinventing the wheel rather than acknowledging that Matrix is an entirely different type of technology to IRC or XMPP. It's more similar to NNTP or Git than either IRC or XMPP. For better or worse, trying to solve existing problems using new approaches is how things evolve. On which note, it's cool to see delta.chat and COI trying a totally different approach too.
gsich 8y ago
Bridges usually suck, even for IRC. Split brain, someone needs to monitor it constantly, you are not sure if Matrix clients have received it and vice versa.
mst 8y ago
Speaking in my personal capacity but as somebody's who's a freenode oper: The ridiculous crashing every few minutes thing of the IRC bridge has been fixed enough I haven't noticed a problem for quite a while. I have a looooot of disagreements with matrix, which I have discussed and will discuss with them, but honestly they're not doing it completely wrong anymore.
- Arathorn 8y ago
  > I have a looooot of disagreements with matrix, which I have discussed and will discuss with them, but honestly they're not doing it completely wrong anymore. \o/ :) The other stuff is very much on our radar, fwiw (and in an ideal world i hope we'll finally be able to implement a services or TS6-based bridge). We've been a bit distracted over the last few months with an XMPP bridge (matrix-bifrost) but will be back on IRC bridging shortly.
Proven 8y ago
I was going to comment how this French idea with hundreds of non-expert users maintaining and operating Matrix servers seems unrealistic. The software itself may be secure and configurable but instances of such service, especially if operated by government hacks, may not be. 100s of ObamaCare portals with 0.01% of the budget. Yeah that will go well.

enough 8y ago

Very true, but have you tried just reaching out to someone via email on Matrix in practice? I tried with Riot and am not able to do that. Maybe just a bug, but if you want the real Matrix experience, you need a Matrix account. Don't get me wrong, I do love Matrix, but I also love XMPP - both not spectacular successes so far. AFAIK, the French Matrix version is even locked down and does not federate across the network.

Arathorn 8y ago
You can reach out to folks by email in Riot by hitting "start chat" and entering an email address. I'm not sure how much easier we can make that ;) We should run a general purpose email bridge though, and in fact there's a massive public sector outfit asking for such a thing currently so it'll probably happen sooner than later. In terms of Matrix not being a spectacular success - well, that's a matter of perspective. The intention for France is absolutely for it to federate with the public network (once there's are sufficient border gateways in place). And France is far from the only high profile Matrix deployment out there, it's just one that we can speak about. But eitherway, COI looks cool, and I hope it helps OX sell more mail servers :)

zaarn 8y ago

>Discord Yet, there is no option to bridge without involving the administrator of all servers you want to talk to. That and I had a very bad experience with the other bridges. Outside of IRC it's basically unusable.

Zash 8y ago

The XMPP-IRC bridge Biboumi is great tho, https://biboumi.louiz.org/ https://biboumi.louiz.org/ But any bridge will be restricted to the lowest common denominator, often you get into weird corner cases where the two ends of the bridge work subtly different. A Telepathy dev wrote a long post on the subject a while back, worth reading: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2017-September/msg00047.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2017-Sept...

znpy 8y ago

Well then matrix developers can develop a bridge for COI then :P

xf86alsa 8y ago
There is already an email bridge! https://github.com/kamax-matrix/matrix-appservice-email https://github.com/kamax-matrix/matrix-appservice-email

ppjet6 8y ago

Jeremie Miller, 1999: > "Jabber is a new project I recently started to create a complete open-source platform for Instant Messaging with transparent communication to other IM systems(ICQ, AIM, etc). Matthew Hodgson, 2019: > I think they missed the the bit where Matrix is called Matrix because it bridges (matrixes) the existing networks (Slack, IRC, Telegram, Discord, XMPP, etc) in, rather than needing to convince everyone to join.

Moru 8y ago
https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- rafbuff 8y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1810/ https://xkcd.com/1810/ even better. But hey, we are using IMAP and Mail which is already in the picture.
  - Arathorn 8y ago
    https://matrix.org/blog/2017/03/11/how-do-i-bridge-thee-let-me-count-the-ways/ https://matrix.org/blog/2017/03/11/how-do-i-bridge-thee-let-... is the matrix take on that one ;P
  - chrisweekly 8y ago
    haha, awesome. Love the lonely "Apache request logs" circle. :)
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - anilakar 8y ago
      I remember paging a sysadmin once through the failed auth log with sudo.
  - noisy_boy 8y ago

tiglionabbit 8y ago

So you mean to say that I can use matrix.org to talk to someone on Telegram? How? I just went to riot.im and I don't get it.