4 ms·

For what it’s worth, Matrix is trying to be the protocol that Jack describes here - complete with relative reputation systems (https://github.com/matrix-org/mat

For what it’s worth, Matrix is trying to be the protocol that Jack describes here - complete with relative reputation systems (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/proposals/2313-moderation-policy-rooms.md https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/propos...) and an open standard (https://matrix.org/docs/spec https://matrix.org/docs/spec) and even an open governance process and foundation (https://matrix.org/foundation https://matrix.org/foundation) - and with work progressing towards fully decentralised p2p matrix. Rather than building a new initiative from the ground up, we hope there’s some opportunity to join forces on this.

pat2man 7y ago
But Matrix is mostly built around chat rooms, not feeds like Twitter. I would assume any new system would take some parts of Matrix and some parts of ActivityPub but not the entire thing.
- Arathorn 7y ago
  We built Matrix to synchronise any kind of comms data - we just call the primitive a “room” rather than (say) a “pubsub topic” or whatever more general term. You can absolutely build microblogging on top of Matrix; there are already a few toy examples already.
  - hobofan 7y ago
    Really glad you mentioned that! I was looking into building something on top of SecureScuttleButt, but didn't like some of the opinionated choices in it (same goes for ActivityPub). Looking at Matrix spec, the two seem to be somewhat conceptually similar, and Matrix seems to cover my needs. Never even thought to consider it before, but it might actually be a really good fit!
    - asymmetric 7y ago
      What were the choices you didn’t like about Scuttlebutt?
  - stevenicr 7y ago
    I'm considering launching a couple matrix instances this month, any chance there are ways for me to dub a few users as moderators and give them the ability to silence / kick / ban users by ip, hostname, ip subnets and cidr? I'll be looking into whatever bridge things there are for combining matrix with some microblogging, that would be a really perfect fit for 2 of the projects I've had on the idea shelf this year. If it can connect with wordpress / buddypress for logging / blogging things from chat by user, that could prove interesting for some uses indeed. Of course if it connect to mastadon or anything else similar that could work too. It's been a while since I've checked in on Matrix and what's new. I'd love to find someone who knows the code and could help me mod it a couple hours a month for a reasonable fee.
    - Arathorn 7y ago
      I should emphasise that microblogging in Matrix is pretty early, but we built the protocol to be able to scale for it. There are some very basic bridges to Wordpress and Mastodon etc but they could be way more sophisticated. Moderation has improved loads though - https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation/ https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation/ has the details. You can't ban users via IP though (unless they're on your server), as otherwise it's a massive privacy leak to expose IPs.
      - stevenicr 7y ago
        Very impressive progress on the moderation additions and the documentation is excellent (compared to my expectations for open source stuff especially!) - I can tell there is forward thinking and flexibility is being baked in. Really glad to see this, I've been searching hard for a chat system replacement, and now it seems this might be it. With the ip addy api thing, if I can get someone who knows the code enough to help me use that to ban / block (on our own server) or bridge it to iptables, access.watch or something similar - this may be our future. As far as a bridge to WP being basic at the moment, that is just fine, all I need is a way to port conversations from a certain room to posts, pages or whatever into WP and the rest can be handled from there later. Really glad to see the progress with this!
- weego 7y ago
  Once you strip the perceptive differences from the UI isn't twitter just a bunch of chat rooms and private conversations that update less 'live' than you'd expect a chat room to do. I wrote a toy twitter clone using a discord server as a data source and it worked pretty coherently
  - anderspitman 7y ago
    Twitter has nothing to do with functionality and everything to do with scale/audience reach.
- hi5eyes 7y ago
  > chat rooms, not feeds like Twitter Twitter is a global chatroom what i think jack/twitter is moving towards is a model thats catering to the direction the youth are headed, with twitters implementation of topics, its akin to discords (gamer chat app) interest servers
munfred 7y ago
Agreed (I'm a matrix user myself). When I saw the thread I was confused about what exactly (if anything) he wanted to achieve that couldn't be done with matrix. I'd be surprised if he wasn't familiar with it already. Perhaps it's largely about branding/development control? I imagine it looks better to investors to say "we're making this new thing" rather than "we're gonna use this other thing that we don't own".
- x3haloed 7y ago
  I stumbled upon Matrix the other day. The reason I passed it over was it sounds like all discussions happen in rooms, which made me think Matrix is basically chat room software. Is there a way to have a public discussion on Matrix with the entire user base like Twitter?
  - Arathorn 7y ago
    “Rooms” in Matrix are more a space in which you persist arbitrary data rather than a literal chatroom. They can absolutely be world visible and used to create per-user timeline or per-tag timelines as you need for microblogging.
    - x3haloed 7y ago
      Hmmm. So Twitter would basically be a room, and users could pretty much ignore the rest of the Matrix network?
      - Arathorn 7y ago
        There are lots of different ways of skinning it. One we've thought of in the past is to have a room per sending user, and have the members of the room be that user's followers. The rooms are of course publicly visible to allow everyone else to follow along too. You the need some mechanism to index the messages based on hashtag etc, but that could just be a search engine - or possibly copying/referencing the messages from per-hashtag etc rooms.
mr__y 7y ago
I doubt that matrix could scale even remotely enough to handle twitter-size amount of messages
- Arathorn 7y ago
  I suspect you're confusing the protocol (which can scale fine) with the Synapse implementation (which was never written for performance in mind). The protocol itself should be fine for twitter-size amount of messages however, and there are more performant implementations in the works.
buboard 7y ago
at least with regards to identity management, twitter seems to favor a blockchain idea, which could actually simplify user management and make obsolete the need for home-server identifiers, 3rd party ids etc

pat2man 7y ago

But Matrix is mostly built around chat rooms, not feeds like Twitter. I would assume any new system would take some parts of Matrix and some parts of ActivityPub but not the entire thing.

Arathorn 7y ago
We built Matrix to synchronise any kind of comms data - we just call the primitive a “room” rather than (say) a “pubsub topic” or whatever more general term. You can absolutely build microblogging on top of Matrix; there are already a few toy examples already.
- hobofan 7y ago
  Really glad you mentioned that! I was looking into building something on top of SecureScuttleButt, but didn't like some of the opinionated choices in it (same goes for ActivityPub). Looking at Matrix spec, the two seem to be somewhat conceptually similar, and Matrix seems to cover my needs. Never even thought to consider it before, but it might actually be a really good fit!
  - asymmetric 7y ago
    What were the choices you didn’t like about Scuttlebutt?
- stevenicr 7y ago
  I'm considering launching a couple matrix instances this month, any chance there are ways for me to dub a few users as moderators and give them the ability to silence / kick / ban users by ip, hostname, ip subnets and cidr? I'll be looking into whatever bridge things there are for combining matrix with some microblogging, that would be a really perfect fit for 2 of the projects I've had on the idea shelf this year. If it can connect with wordpress / buddypress for logging / blogging things from chat by user, that could prove interesting for some uses indeed. Of course if it connect to mastadon or anything else similar that could work too. It's been a while since I've checked in on Matrix and what's new. I'd love to find someone who knows the code and could help me mod it a couple hours a month for a reasonable fee.
  - Arathorn 7y ago
    I should emphasise that microblogging in Matrix is pretty early, but we built the protocol to be able to scale for it. There are some very basic bridges to Wordpress and Mastodon etc but they could be way more sophisticated. Moderation has improved loads though - https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation/ https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation/ has the details. You can't ban users via IP though (unless they're on your server), as otherwise it's a massive privacy leak to expose IPs.
    - stevenicr 7y ago
      Very impressive progress on the moderation additions and the documentation is excellent (compared to my expectations for open source stuff especially!) - I can tell there is forward thinking and flexibility is being baked in. Really glad to see this, I've been searching hard for a chat system replacement, and now it seems this might be it. With the ip addy api thing, if I can get someone who knows the code enough to help me use that to ban / block (on our own server) or bridge it to iptables, access.watch or something similar - this may be our future. As far as a bridge to WP being basic at the moment, that is just fine, all I need is a way to port conversations from a certain room to posts, pages or whatever into WP and the rest can be handled from there later. Really glad to see the progress with this!
weego 7y ago
Once you strip the perceptive differences from the UI isn't twitter just a bunch of chat rooms and private conversations that update less 'live' than you'd expect a chat room to do. I wrote a toy twitter clone using a discord server as a data source and it worked pretty coherently
- anderspitman 7y ago
  Twitter has nothing to do with functionality and everything to do with scale/audience reach.
hi5eyes 7y ago
> chat rooms, not feeds like Twitter Twitter is a global chatroom what i think jack/twitter is moving towards is a model thats catering to the direction the youth are headed, with twitters implementation of topics, its akin to discords (gamer chat app) interest servers

munfred 7y ago

Agreed (I'm a matrix user myself). When I saw the thread I was confused about what exactly (if anything) he wanted to achieve that couldn't be done with matrix. I'd be surprised if he wasn't familiar with it already. Perhaps it's largely about branding/development control? I imagine it looks better to investors to say "we're making this new thing" rather than "we're gonna use this other thing that we don't own".

x3haloed 7y ago
I stumbled upon Matrix the other day. The reason I passed it over was it sounds like all discussions happen in rooms, which made me think Matrix is basically chat room software. Is there a way to have a public discussion on Matrix with the entire user base like Twitter?
- Arathorn 7y ago
  “Rooms” in Matrix are more a space in which you persist arbitrary data rather than a literal chatroom. They can absolutely be world visible and used to create per-user timeline or per-tag timelines as you need for microblogging.
  - x3haloed 7y ago
    Hmmm. So Twitter would basically be a room, and users could pretty much ignore the rest of the Matrix network?
    - Arathorn 7y ago
      There are lots of different ways of skinning it. One we've thought of in the past is to have a room per sending user, and have the members of the room be that user's followers. The rooms are of course publicly visible to allow everyone else to follow along too. You the need some mechanism to index the messages based on hashtag etc, but that could just be a search engine - or possibly copying/referencing the messages from per-hashtag etc rooms.

mr__y 7y ago

I doubt that matrix could scale even remotely enough to handle twitter-size amount of messages

Arathorn 7y ago
I suspect you're confusing the protocol (which can scale fine) with the Synapse implementation (which was never written for performance in mind). The protocol itself should be fine for twitter-size amount of messages however, and there are more performant implementations in the works.

buboard 7y ago

at least with regards to identity management, twitter seems to favor a blockchain idea, which could actually simplify user management and make obsolete the need for home-server identifiers, 3rd party ids etc