5 ms·

> I think the most important aspect of social media to most people is that it allows for people who are friends "in real life" to share text / media with a circ

> I think the most important aspect of social media to most people is that it allows for people who are friends "in real life" to share text / media with a circle of friends in a semi-private forum. I agree with this. In all of the decentralized social media iterations I've seen, the main two things I've always missed were the "personal aspect," and appealing visual design. It's worth asking, though, how possible it is to achieve that in a truly decentralized fashion, while still providing a good user experience. From a user's perspective, it doesn't make much sense to have separate sites with limited interoperability when you can simply just one (centralized) site. I guess that for the Fediverse to truly take off, there really needs to be a concept that simply cannot be implemented without de-centralization. Until then, it'll be an uphill battle.

bscphil 7y ago
I agree that that's a problem. If Discord is "good enough" for social media, then Matrix is trying to be an open source, decentralized Discord. It's also (in my personal experience) unbelievably crappy, even if you stick to 1-1 conversations on the "default" matrix.org instance that Riot.im uses. Some security experts have indicated that it's not up to par with Signal for those who need the strongest confidentiality guarantees. (I wouldn't fully trust Signal either if my adversary was the NSA, but there might also be no better alternative you could get people to use.) So it's really telling to me that years of work on decentralized "personal" social media hasn't come up with anything that's fully functional, let alone a replacement to existing social media sites.
- Arathorn 7y ago
  suprising and depressing that riot feels unbelievably crappy; lots of people seem to be able to use it ok. would be helpful to know what bits sucked most if you can face it.
  - bscphil 7y ago
    Okay, so maybe "unbelievable crappy" was a bit of an exaggeration. After all, I do use it. But I'll try to explain. It starts with the fact that so many of the features still aren't up to par with what e.g. Discord provides. It feels like a knock-off. The biggest problem I've faced is dealing with the encryption. Every new device in a conversation has to be verified with every other, which means you need n(n-1)/2 pairings for a room with n devices. That's right, if you're trying to set up a chat with 10 people who have an average of three devices, you're going to need to do 435 pairings. The pairings themselves are a huge pain: there are different pairing "methods" to use, and different clients will make guesses about the method the other client supports, and the whole thing falls apart if it guesses wrong (there's no negotiation, as far as I can tell) or if the person with the device doesn't immediately respond. There's no notion of a web of trust or trusting a person instead of a specific device. Even if everything goes right (it usually doesn't) it's going to take about 30 seconds per person to do each pairing, which means your group chat with just 10 people is going to take over 7 hours to set up. You could just ignore the verification stuff, but presumably the reason you wanted to use Matrix (instead of a centralized service) in the first place was because you thought it was more secure / private. Someone adds a new device, or logs out of a device, or there's some glitch (it's happened to me)? Everyone in the room gets to do another pairing. With every one of their devices. Another issue has been the unreliability of the service itself. Sometimes it breaks, logging you out. (Hope everyone backed up their keys!) Or they get hacked and the server goes down for days: https://matrix.org/blog/2019/05/08/post-mortem-and-remediations-for-apr-11-security-incident https://matrix.org/blog/2019/05/08/post-mortem-and-remediati... And then there's just the random client bugs. I literally just opened the tab for Riot to remind myself of other issues and was greeted with this: https://i.imgur.com/8Rgebfr.png https://i.imgur.com/8Rgebfr.png They don't seem to be keeping up with them, either. Riot Web alone has almost 4000 open issues: https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues Having a searchable history is supposed to be one of the major advantages of a Discord-like interface, but I just did a search for a word that I'm looking at in the chat and got no results. So basically, it's a mess right now. I'm using it with one person because they're the only person who wants a Discord-like chat with me and are willing to put up with the amount of nonsense needed to use an alternative that doesn't siphon off your data to a private company.

bscphil 7y ago

I agree that that's a problem. If Discord is "good enough" for social media, then Matrix is trying to be an open source, decentralized Discord. It's also (in my personal experience) unbelievably crappy, even if you stick to 1-1 conversations on the "default" matrix.org instance that Riot.im uses. Some security experts have indicated that it's not up to par with Signal for those who need the strongest confidentiality guarantees. (I wouldn't fully trust Signal either if my adversary was the NSA, but there might also be no better alternative you could get people to use.) So it's really telling to me that years of work on decentralized "personal" social media hasn't come up with anything that's fully functional, let alone a replacement to existing social media sites.

Arathorn 7y ago
suprising and depressing that riot feels unbelievably crappy; lots of people seem to be able to use it ok. would be helpful to know what bits sucked most if you can face it.
- bscphil 7y ago
  Okay, so maybe "unbelievable crappy" was a bit of an exaggeration. After all, I do use it. But I'll try to explain. It starts with the fact that so many of the features still aren't up to par with what e.g. Discord provides. It feels like a knock-off. The biggest problem I've faced is dealing with the encryption. Every new device in a conversation has to be verified with every other, which means you need n(n-1)/2 pairings for a room with n devices. That's right, if you're trying to set up a chat with 10 people who have an average of three devices, you're going to need to do 435 pairings. The pairings themselves are a huge pain: there are different pairing "methods" to use, and different clients will make guesses about the method the other client supports, and the whole thing falls apart if it guesses wrong (there's no negotiation, as far as I can tell) or if the person with the device doesn't immediately respond. There's no notion of a web of trust or trusting a person instead of a specific device. Even if everything goes right (it usually doesn't) it's going to take about 30 seconds per person to do each pairing, which means your group chat with just 10 people is going to take over 7 hours to set up. You could just ignore the verification stuff, but presumably the reason you wanted to use Matrix (instead of a centralized service) in the first place was because you thought it was more secure / private. Someone adds a new device, or logs out of a device, or there's some glitch (it's happened to me)? Everyone in the room gets to do another pairing. With every one of their devices. Another issue has been the unreliability of the service itself. Sometimes it breaks, logging you out. (Hope everyone backed up their keys!) Or they get hacked and the server goes down for days: https://matrix.org/blog/2019/05/08/post-mortem-and-remediations-for-apr-11-security-incident https://matrix.org/blog/2019/05/08/post-mortem-and-remediati... And then there's just the random client bugs. I literally just opened the tab for Riot to remind myself of other issues and was greeted with this: https://i.imgur.com/8Rgebfr.png https://i.imgur.com/8Rgebfr.png They don't seem to be keeping up with them, either. Riot Web alone has almost 4000 open issues: https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues Having a searchable history is supposed to be one of the major advantages of a Discord-like interface, but I just did a search for a word that I'm looking at in the chat and got no results. So basically, it's a mess right now. I'm using it with one person because they're the only person who wants a Discord-like chat with me and are willing to put up with the amount of nonsense needed to use an alternative that doesn't siphon off your data to a private company.