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Matrix 1.0 – Are We Ready Yet?
- jMyles 8y agoWhen is the kickass Riot UI remaster that y'all showed off at Web3 coming to town?
- Perceptes 8y agoIt's already released, as of a few weeks ago.
- neiljohnson 8y agoThe future is now https://medium.com/@RiotChat/the-big-1-0-68fa7c6050be https://medium.com/@RiotChat/the-big-1-0-68fa7c6050be
- jMyles 8y agoOh awesome, thanks man.
- meruru 8y agoOnly Riot Web though :( Riot (both web and mobile) desperately needs to make room and user search more obvious. Everyone I give Riot to has issues finding me and my channels. I get around this by asking their usernames and sending invites to the right channels.
- baroffoos 8y agoHave you checked recently? The mobile version has gone blue for me.
- meruru 8y agoYes, I in fact just installed it. They changed the text in the "search bar" present in the homescreen, which is a great improvement (it now says "filter rooms"). However this feature is only useful for really heavy users with tons of rooms, yet it's displayed front and center while the global search option which is fundamental for onboarding is still hidden. The full redesign has been postponed because they are rewriting the whole program: https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android But this issue I'm complaining about is also present on the redesigned Riot Web. Edit: sorry, I think I'm wrong. The current mobile version seems to already be the redesign though it looks mostly the same to me: https://medium.com/@RiotChat/riot-mobile-update-brand-new-riot-im-website-cc11534ad685 https://medium.com/@RiotChat/riot-mobile-update-brand-new-ri... I think it still needs a lot of work.
- Arathorn 8y agothe recent mobile update is just a cosmetic redesign (getting rid of all the green!) You're completely right that RiotX is where the overall usability fixes are happening, including ones which would solve your problem here. Good news is that RiotX is evolving fast though - we're putting all our resources into it rather than Riot/Android, and then the same UX will be ported over to Riot/iOS. We're aiming to get a daily-usable RiotX into the app stores in the next 1-2 months. N.B. that the UX will change substantially from the current prototype at https://matrix.org/jenkins/job/RiotXAndroidDevelop/ https://matrix.org/jenkins/job/RiotXAndroidDevelop/.
- meruru 8y agoThanks for the clarification. Those are great news!
- hawski 8y agoRight now is it generally recommended to use Riot or is RiotX stable/good enough? Also is RiotX like a beta channel, so when it's considered complete/stable will an update effectively replace Riot with RiotX for all current users?
- Arathorn 8y agoRiotX is alpha right now, but should be usable day-to-day in a month or so. Once it has parity with Riot we'll replace Riot with it.
- nicklaf 8y agoI don't want to knock the hard work the Riot developers have put into their application, but I just don't understand: why does 'modern' web design seem to require wasting so much white space? Looking at the screenshot on that blog post, the actual chat transcript is somewhere in the middle of the screen (sandwiched between giant sidebars on either side). Compare to irssi (or any other console IRC program), which uses just about the entire width of the terminal to print chat messages. Is this really just a side-effect of developers all having large, high-DPI monitors, making the white space look smaller to them? Because on my tiny little Chromebook, no more than 50% of the screen width is actually used to display chat messages.
- Gigablah 8y agoWhy would you want messages to span the entire screen? https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/108801/what-is-the-best-number-of-paragraph-width-for-readability https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/108801/what-is-the-be...
- nicklaf 8y agoBecause: window managers! http://i.imgur.com/4K0pa6m.jpg http://i.imgur.com/4K0pa6m.jpg That said...I must confess that irssi uses a non-trivial amount of margin space as well!
- johntash 8y agoI think some developers either only have one window open at a time, or always use fullscreen/maximized windows. There are so many things that are just difficult to use when windows are tiled to fit ~4 things on one monitor.
- Freak_NL 8y agoThe user list on the right can be closed, and the channel list on the left can be collapsed.
- johnisgood 8y agoI use Wire which has a similar problem to Riot. That is now 2 different workspaces just for "chatting" (they take up an entire workspace to be usable, because it wastes space, not good, IMO), then there is another for IRC on which I can also have a browser anyway because the terminal is only 80x24. I stopped using Riot because of it, and I might stop using Wire, too. :/ I hope they will fix it in Wire though, for example, by making the friend list collapsible or something.
- xingped 8y agoI hear about Matrix a lot, but I have no idea why I should use it. Can anyone explain why I should use Matrix?
- thinkloop 8y ago- no vendor lock-in - decentralized - encrypted/private/secure - open-source It's like irc or email for private decentralized encrypted chat.
- dboreham 8y agoMatrix isn't really decentralized. It's federated.
- zaarn 8y agoFederation is a form of decentralization.
- erdii 8y agoAlso you can host a completely isolated matrix server, that does not connect to "the Matrix network"
- thinkloop 8y agoFor example, every client could choose to run its own server to have a perfectly decentralized network. Federation is a feature that allows for greater than 1:1 mapping between clients and servers.
- amiraliakbari 8y agoNo, decentralization is invented alongside the blockchain and nothing without a blockchain is decentralized. :)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fro0116 8y agoI had a pretty positive view of Matrix until I came across this post and the follow up responses from the developer behind an unofficial Matrix server implementation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19365968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19365968 I'd say tread carefully given their apparent hostility towards competing server implementations, which is literally the only thing that makes the protocol meaningfully "federated" to begin with. This part in particular was deeply disturbing: > I can quote the CEO of new vector in an argument we had about the insecurities of the protocol and what needs to be done to fix them where he said "good luck talking to your own federation." That reveals a lot. Not exactly the kind of attitude I'd like to see from the stewards of an "open" protocol.
- cetra3 8y agoI would be interested in knowing whether anyone else has confirmed these accusations or created a writeup as to why the protocol is insecure.
- maxidorius 8y agoI can confirm. One of the write-ups I did: https://gist.github.com/maxidorius/b25769f1a89c8860b928babe795bbaaf https://gist.github.com/maxidorius/b25769f1a89c8860b928babe7...
- Arathorn 8y agothis write-up boils down to saying that servers that don't uphold server ACLs (server-bans) will leak messages from banned servers. it's a feature, not a bug; if you want to deploy the nuclear option of a server-ban in a room, you also have to ban any other servers which don't know what a server-ban is.
- maxidorius 8y agoIt also has very questionable choices towards respect of Privacy: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/4540 https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/4540
- 8y ago
- l0b0 8y agoI don't know about Matrix, but Riot, the default frontend, certainly isn't: https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/7062 https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/7062 Copy/paste is a pretty fundamental feature.
- bepvte 8y agoThis only applies to text with embedded formatting, like bold and italic
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- l0b0 8y agoIt doesn't have to have any explicit formatting, it just needs to be rich text. If you try pasting anything from a web browser or WYSIWYG editor it will break.
- mindB 8y agoI was the original reporter of linked bug. In fairness to Riot team, it appears to be an upstream bug with their rte: https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate/issues/2612 https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate/issues/2612
- superkuh 8y agoLets Encrypt has been enabling bad behavior quite a bit lately. Here Matrix says they will no longer accept federation from peers that self sign their certs. Why? Because Lets Encrypt exists. That's the entire argument. They do not address the problems of centralization this creates.
- Arathorn 8y agono, the argument is that Let's Encrypt is doing a better job at trustworthiness than our previous attempt at using Perspectives to vouch for self-signed certificates, and so at least self-signed folk can have a fairly seamless upgrade to LE if they want. However, if you want better trust, you can always use a CA you trust more than Lets Encrypt (including a private one, if you're on a private federation, of course).
- krick 8y agoCould you please point me in the direction of someplace where this problem is better explained? I'm struggling to understand, how the certificate choice of the peer X should be a problem, given you send them only the information directly related to the peer X, so it seems like you shouldn't care if the traffic between you 2 is encrypted using X's key or MitM's key, because it's only their part of the network that potentially gets compromised. If so, it should be the choice of every given node, if they trust that part of the network they are connecting to, and, conclusively, if they want to accept a certificate they see for the first time, no matter if it's signed by any common CA or not.
- Arathorn 8y agohttps://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/docs/MSC1711_certificates_FAQ.md#it-used-to-work-just-fine-why-are-you-breaking-everything https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/docs/MSC17... is the best explanation. You can’t just make it a per-node decision otherwise everything would splitbrain.
- Animats 8y agoThe home page gives no clue as to what "Matrix" is. It seems to be yet another "federation" system. Is this worth any attention?
- rb666 8y agoYes, a good place to start reading: https://www.ruma.io/docs/matrix/ https://www.ruma.io/docs/matrix/
- speedplane 8y ago> It seems to be yet another "federation" system. Is this worth any attention? In the current internet environment of walled gardens and a siloed and decimated internet, any federation system is worthy of attention.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoGiven Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have shown they're against federated messaging the more pertinent question for me is "can it work? Will anyone other than geeks switch from Facebook, et al.. You'd probably need some legislation to force those running large communication platforms to open their protocols and allow federation before there can be significant progress. I really can't see their being political will for that at present.
- speedplane 8y ago> Given Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have shown they're against federated messaging the more pertinent question for me is "can it work? You're probably right, the legacy companies won't buy-in without a fight, but I see two avenues of success. - New companies: If a federated messaging system existed five years ago, Slack may have chosen to run on an open standard rather than build its own. - Large corporates: they may want the self-hosting, security customizeation, and lack of vendor lock-in of an open standard. For example, I know that Goldman Sachs has built their own in-house messaging service (crazy, I know). They may be a good candidate to switch to an open standard.
- est 8y agoI sincerely hope someone took the Telegram client code and add Matrix protocol to it. Really, Telegram client is open source and the app is more usable than any other bloatware on the market.
- cloogshicer 8y agoAgreed, the Telegram desktop client is super fast. EDIT: Someone seems to already have done this: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/nheko.html https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/nheko.html
- Arathorn 8y agoI think nheko is a clone of the telegram UI rather a fork of it. I agree it'd be awesome if someone took the actual Telegram FOSS clients and ripped out the TG backend and replaced it with Matrix (a bit like the Delta.chat folks did, but replacing with email)
- est 8y agoNo need to replace it, just add dual protocol support :D
- aitchnyu 8y agoOff-topic, but Whatsapp provides E2E for groups upto 256. Matrix can apparently provide E2E for bigger groups. Did they do scaling better?
- Arathorn 8y agoyup. we layer megolm on top of olm (double ratchet) to scale to ~1000 or further.
- ajconway 8y agoLooks like every device still has to establish an olm channel with every other device in the group. Does that scale?
- Arathorn 8y agoyou're right that that's the slow bit (typically about 50ms to set up each channel, so across 1000 devices that's 5s to establish the initial mesh), but the important thing is that having established the channels, they are only used to sync key data for the megolm layer which sits on top. megolm keys typically rotate every 100 messages or every day (whichever comes first), and this uses the existing olm channels. In turn, the olm channels themselves only resetup when conversation changes direction (or if they stall). https://blog.jabberhead.tk/2019/03/10/a-look-at-matrix-orgs-olm-megolm-encryption-protocol/ https://blog.jabberhead.tk/2019/03/10/a-look-at-matrix-orgs-... is quite a good overview of this (from the XMPP perspective!), as is https://www.uhoreg.ca/blog/20170910-2110 https://www.uhoreg.ca/blog/20170910-2110 (from the Matrix perspective).
- wholemoley 8y agoI made a seq2seq chatbot with Matrix/Riot, the python-api implementation (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-python-sdk https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-python-sdk) and https://github.com/tensorlayer/seq2seq-chatbot https://github.com/tensorlayer/seq2seq-chatbot: Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCggOcKZn-c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCggOcKZn-c (There's a fun interaction at 25:52)
- Hendrikto 8y agoThat triple nested if is horrible though…
- tannhaeuser 8y agoI'm not very much into chat apps and protocols, but isn't it possible to just revive XMPP? Ten years ago we used Adium and Pidgin, and federated chat seemed like a solved problem. I understand XMPP with its extensions and use of XML fragments might be complex, but it sounds like matrix or another new protocol isn't easier. In a way, those willing to invest time into F/OSS chat apps have done the best they could with XMPP, and creating a new community around a protocol for no good reasons seems like a wasteful thing to do. XMPP folks shouldn't stop using it just because of Google's kiss of death.
- vbezhenar 8y agoNobody buried XMPP. Write good server and client, comparable with proprietary protocols by features and it might work.
- Arathorn 8y agoWe have almost finished a pretty decent XMPP to Matrix bridge, if you are attached to XMPP (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-bifrost https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-bifrost with a bridge running at bridge.xmpp.matrix.org). However, Matrix has a fundamentally different architecture: replicating conversation history over a full mesh of participating nodes, rather than passing messages via a star topology, and we opted to build that as a fresh stack rather than creating a mutant hybrid of XMPP.
- MattJ100 8y agoI'm so happy this bridge exists. I'm using it to join rooms of some open-source projects that opted to use Matrix, and I know of some people on Matrix using it to join similar rooms on XMPP. Meanwhile both sides get to use free and open communication protocols :)
- hannob 8y agoMatrix is the perfect example of xkcd 927 - https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ They built something like XMPP, just a bit different. What they got is more fragmentation in the space of free messaging. None of the justifications they have how their approach is different justifies the costs of additional fragmentation they create. This is super frustrating, people don't seem to have an understanding what the costs of incompatibilities are. You can also observe pretty much the same at the micro level of within XMPP and encryption standards, where everyone seems to think the solution is yet another encryption standard instead of having just one.
- chrisMyzel 8y agoCan't Check my federation, only seeing the square next to the textfield animating the sh*t out of itself :-)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bovermyer 8y agoI'm tempted to spin up a Matrix homeserver. Anyone know if it runs well on Docker via træfik?
- neiljohnson 8y agoYou might find this to be helpful https://jonnev.se/matrix-homeserver-synapse-v0-99-1-1-with-traefik/ https://jonnev.se/matrix-homeserver-synapse-v0-99-1-1-with-t...
- bovermyer 8y agoThanks for that!
- davefp 8y agoFWIW I found installation/upgrade via apt to work very well.
- techntoke 8y agoDoesn't run well per say compared to optimized applications, but it runs.
- davefp 8y agoI think Matrix is brilliant. I run a synapse home server and updating/maintaining it has been a breeze. That said, on a couple of occasions (once a while ago, and once with Riot 1.0) I've tried migrating from my free Slack org to Matrix and it still falls short for the feature set I want. Specifically, I want a community whose members can create rooms for that community that are automatically visible and private to the community. Currently the community features in Riot make that a difficult task. If anyone has had success doing this I'd be more than happy to hear about it!
- 0xb100db1ade 8y agoHow does Matrix's encryption compare to Signal? I've heard they are supposed to be very similar but I'm doubtful
- Arathorn 8y agohttps://blog.jabberhead.tk/2019/03/10/a-look-at-matrix-orgs-olm-megolm-encryption-protocol/ https://blog.jabberhead.tk/2019/03/10/a-look-at-matrix-orgs-... is quite a good comparison.
- DygFiul 8y agoOK, you want XMPP. But without the many XEPs, something with a monolithic specification. And you like to use the latest trendy hipster stuff, like JSON over HTTP instead of XML. Then you get: Monolithic, Awefully Trendy Re-Implementation of XMPP (M.A.T.R.I.X.) Which is also a dedication to XMPP, which has been invented in 1999, the year of the Matrix film.
- MR4D 8y agoNo. But I mean that in a nice way. Here's why... My understanding (limited, to be fair), is that a large percentage (most?) users have a matrix.org account instead of an account somewhere else. By definition, this is not federation. Certainly riot.im users get that by default. Let's look at a different example - email. What if the inventors of email created email.org and created accounts on it. Everyone would also ask "where's the federation?". What ultimately made email really useful (note the use of the word "really"), was the ability to reach people outside your organization. So you could email back and forth to stanford.edu, ibm.com, usna.mil, and even aol.com. What is difficult (today), is for me to go to google or yahoo, or microsoft, or stanford and get an account. Yes, there is this [0] but only one provider is on the page. Further, according to that provider [1] it's only a sub-domain, not my domain. It's a start, but also a version behind from the looks of things, so therefore not truly ready. If any of this is wrong, and I can sign up with a reliable hosting to have server.mydomain.com, I'd sign up. I don't have the time to manage updates & server security, and a reliable provider would allow me to run my own instance. [0] - https://matrix.org/docs/projects/hosting https://matrix.org/docs/projects/hosting [1] - https://www.modular.im/ https://www.modular.im/
- Arathorn 8y agomodular does support custom dns (at no extra charge) - eg webchat.kde.org is hosted on it. there are a bunch of public servers you can sign up on rather than matrix.org - see https://www.hello-matrix.net/public_servers.php https://www.hello-matrix.net/public_servers.php. our hope is to turn off matrix.org sooner or later (or at least disable signups) to prevent these misconceptions.
- MR4D 8y agoThank you! As a side-note, someone should make that link a bit more visible on the matrix.org site.