36 ms·

Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

541 points by gsnedders 7y ago

driminicus 7y ago
Congrats to Mozilla and matrix.org! I am at least very happy they went with a FOSS solution.
sandGorgon 7y ago
Congrats to Riot/Matrix. I'm hoping with Mozilla's backing the product, there's a lot of features that get built out. There's no reason this cant be a Slack-beating product now. I'm betting a Rust based homeserver replacing Synapse.
- sreevisakh 7y ago
  The official successor to Synapse homeserver is Dendrite written in Go (https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite). There is homeserver project in Rust called Ruma (https://github.com/ruma/ruma https://github.com/ruma/ruma). Ruma was waiting for async/await to stabilize. But it doesn't seem to have much activity even after that.
  - kibwen 7y ago
    It looks like Ruma was waiting for an async web framework to emerge, and the web frameworks were waiting on hyper to upgrade, and hyper was waiting on h2 to upgrade, and h2 was waiting on http to upgrade, and http was waiting on bytes to upgrade, and everyone was waiting on tokio to upgrade. In the six weeks since async await has stabilized, the web framework that my company uses has only just managed to upgrade to stable async/await last week. I wouldn't fault Ruma for waiting for other frameworks to upgrade before making a choice.
    - sreevisakh 7y ago
      Thank you for that perspective. I apologize if it sounded like I am blaming Ruma - just waiting eagerly for its development.
      - kibwen 7y ago
        No problem. :) I just don't want potential contributors to write off Ruma as something worth looking at, especially since with this announcement it ought to be be more relevant than ever. And having multiple independent implementations of a federated protocol is very important to proving out the specification (the Ruma author has already filed several bugs against the spec as a result of implementing it).
  - kick 7y ago
    No longer true. To quote the founder: There are quite a lot of Synapses out there right now, and Synapse's featureset is pretty mature. Given we have pretty high profile people running Synapse (e.g. all of the French government) we have no choice but to invest the time to polish it and make it more efficient and stable. In an ideal world we'd have paused on Synapse ages ago and focused purely on a next-gen server, but we can't leave Synapse users in the lurch. Dendrite will be getting some attention in the coming months though, but not as a direct Synapse-replacement, but more of a playground for more experimental stuff. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21767057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21767057
    - dashwav 7y ago
      From two Matrix members, one who is the matrix.org team lead today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21836684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21836684
      - hu3 7y ago
        Two new full-time employees were hired to work on Dendrite (written in Go) and p2p matrix? Interesting. I had the impression that the Rust version would have priority.
        Arathorn 7y ago
        Ruma isn't written by the core matrix.org team, and has its own community. Dendrite is much further along, so makes sense for us to hack on the projects we created :)
webboynews 7y ago
After the matrix repo hack (alright ) and the piss poor response and a complete lack of transparency (not alright) I would never touch matrix . One of the responses there was: "there is so much hate here that it is making impossible to discuss asensitive issues like security " It was the lamest excuse ever.
- Majestic121 7y ago
  I don't find much info about this hack on google, can you provide some sources on this so that I can assess the response ?
  - feanaro 7y ago
    Here's the post-mortem writeup: 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...
- jeltz 7y ago
  Are you talking about a different hack because the only hack I have heard of was not a repo hack (someone stole the SSH keys of a sysadmin via a compromised jenkins server), and they were very transparent about it. The hack was pretty bad but I do not agree with your description of it unless you are talking about a different hack.
kibwen 7y ago
I'm pleasantly surprised! They took the route of "promising but underdeveloped technology" rather than settling for a well-developed solution that compromises their principles (which, frankly, I wouldn't have faulted them for; at the end of the day you still have to get work done). With luck maybe we'll see Mozilla contribute to Matrix? There is, after all, an implementation written in Rust: https://github.com/ruma https://github.com/ruma
- est31 7y ago
  The last ruma commit was in August, which was after a long period where nothing happened at all. Is the project dead?
  - Mathnerd314 7y ago
    The latest status seems to be https://github.com/ruma/ruma/issues/189#issuecomment-553955556 https://github.com/ruma/ruma/issues/189#issuecomment-5539555... from a month ago. It looks like he is working on the client while he waits for Rust web server frameworks to adopt the recently-released async-await language features.
    - Mathnerd314 7y ago
      edit: https://www.ruma.io/status/ https://www.ruma.io/status/ is a better overview
  - ReverseCold 7y ago
    The author says they’re waiting on Rust and Matrix features/documentation. There’s an open issue with more details https://github.com/ruma/ruma/issues/189 https://github.com/ruma/ruma/issues/189
  - kibwen 7y ago
    I actually interviewed the author in August for our Rust podcast, on which he says he's waiting for async to mature before progressing further: https://rustacean-station.org/episode/001-ruma/ https://rustacean-station.org/episode/001-ruma/
xfalcox 7y ago
Can't wait for Mozilla to back a stable, native desktop client into a daily driver state so we can finally ditch Mattermost at work.
- rtpg 7y ago
  Seriously, I feel like it’s such an indictment on native app tool development that we have a bazillion new electron apps written by ppl all the time for weekend projects yet almost no one spitting out native apps to interface with services. It’s clearly in demand (if a bit of a niche kind of demand)
  - swiley 7y ago
    Native development on OSX and iOS both kind of suck unless you completely embrace objective C and coaca. I think that’s what’s turned so many people off to it. It’s comparatively easy to write complex portable applications with tk (or even just strait win32 and whichever X11 widget toolkit is your favorite.)
    - deleted 7y ago
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    - deleted 7y ago
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    - shd4 7y ago
      https://github.com/neilalexander/seaglass https://github.com/neilalexander/seaglass looks promising.
      - swiley 7y ago
        That’s exactly what I’m talking about; you can’t reuse code on OSX and more or less have to start from scratch.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > Native development on OSX and iOS both kind of suck unless you completely embrace objective C and coaca. You can try all-Swift development with SwiftUI.
jeltz 7y ago
Nice, given how the discussions were going some months ago I was worried that they would pick some closed source solution like Discord or Slack. I have not used Matrix so I do not know how good it is, but I do not like the lock-in of Discord and Slack.
- mehhh 7y ago
  Matrix can bridge in IRC, Slack, Gitter and a few other protocols very nicely, it reminds me of Pidgin but with much better UX.
  - Vinnl 7y ago
    I haven't managed to properly use Matrix myself, but I am part of a number of Gitter rooms that includes people using the Matrix bridge. I certainly wouldn't call that bridge "nice": all their messages are posted by a single user called matrixbot, that simply prefixes it message by their Matrix username in backticks. I'm not sure if the people in the room who aren't aware of Matrix understand that that's what's going on.
    - ptman 7y ago
      Maybe a limitation of the gitter api? Better than nothing, but improvement welcome
      - Vinnl 7y ago
        I understand why it works this way and I wouldn't know how to do it better; it was more of a general critique of the bridging approach, I guess, and hence a reluctance from my side to call it nice.
- jordigh 7y ago
  Agreed, this is a huge relief. I was getting quite worried that Mozilla would go to Discord, like Rust and other projects have done. I don't know anything about Matrix, but I know it's free, and if it has Mozilla's endorsement, now I'm actually curious to try it... maybe even via an IRC bridge!
dzypa 7y ago
Daily reminder that Rust uses Discord, a closed source piece of software with draconian privacy and data retention terms. Steve Klabnik will predictably reply to me saying that it was the decision of the community and blah blah, but the Mozilla Corporation should not have allowed it.
- scrollaway 7y ago
  So you want mozco to go against the community's and project leaders decisions? Do you see the problem with that line of thinking or do I have to explain further?
  - gsnedders 7y ago
    (Also, Rust isn't under MoCo, it's under MoFo directly.)
    - pcwalton 7y ago
      Rust isn't "under" either. The core team, who are ultimately in charge, don't report to anybody in the Mozilla organization.
    - est31 7y ago
      In which way? I've thought the Rust engineers were employees of the Mozilla corporation? And the Rust trademark seems to be owned by the Mozilla corporation as well: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87796977&caseSearchType=US_APPLICATION&caseType=DEFAULT&searchType=statusSearch https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87796977&caseSearchType=U...
      - steveklabnik 7y ago
        All Mozilla employees working on Rust are under Moco, not Mofo, that's correct. Unless something extremely drastic that nobody has talked about has happened in the last year. Almost all of Mozilla is under Moco.
  - dzypa 7y ago
nickstinemates 7y ago
Are there any other projects using this setup? Also, any write up on the compelling reasons to switch? Are they hoping this move will attract more contributors? Article is unclear.
- feanaro 7y ago
  Compelling reasons to switch: it's an open standard, it's federated (so you can own your own server and avoid vendor lock-in), it has end-to-end encryption, it supports bridging with many other protocols, there's quite a growing ecosystem of tools and libraries around it, etc. The protocol itself is designed to be really flexible in the kind of data you can send through it (and therefore automatically propagated to and synchronized with other servers) so it can support a lot of different use cases. This includes standard chat app things like audio/video calls but it could also be used for stuff like forums or even serve as a backend for syncing information between organization (I'm thinking of things like medical information between health institutions). All in all, there's a lot of potential in Matrix.
  - pteraspidomorph 7y ago
    I try matrix on occasion (as in, I set up my own server from scratch). The last time I tried it, support for multi-participant audio and video calls (and screensharing) was still between terrible and nonexistant. Definitely much worse than Discord. Has it improved?
    - feanaro 7y ago
      There were some bug fixes in the last year (IIRC) though nothing very substantial, I think. Then again, it's always worked reasonably well for me and I'm using it regularly. I heard it was going to get worked on soon, though.
      - Arathorn 7y ago
        There was a major upgrade to the conference calling about 6 months ago which took it from being "barely usable" to "almost as good as Zoom". It's different semantics to Discord in that it's classic conferencing rather than a voice channel, but it works well enough for the whole core Matrix team to use it basically constantly for remote collaboration. The conferencing servers are currently in London however, so you may suffer from transatlantic traffic problems if you are elsewhere in the world.
johnchristopher 7y ago
This screenshot https://discourse-prod-uploads-81679984178418.s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/optimized/2X/e/eb4fca27c1cbaa588c150e981f8f8eb94ed3cdb6_2_690x458.png https://discourse-prod-uploads-81679984178418.s3.dualstack.u... shows a UI that seems way wore easier to grip than the riot UI. I remember screenshots https://img.bfmtv.com/c/840/625/06e8/68cd7316f6a279a3899fcf81dfd7.jpg https://img.bfmtv.com/c/840/625/06e8/68cd7316f6a279a3899fcf8... http://www.tchap.fr/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/interface-tchap-800x582.png http://www.tchap.fr/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/interface-tch... of the client used set up by the France efforts. Are those clients ever going to be released to the general public ?
- Arathorn 7y ago
  the first image is Riot circa 2015 (back when it was called Vector). You can run it if you really want from https://riots.im https://riots.im. Tchap meanwhile is opensource at https://github.com/dinsic-pim https://github.com/dinsic-pim and there are unofficial builds which let you use it as a general purpose Matrix client. However, we're busy improving Riot's UX in general to make it easier to grip - on Mobile that ends up being a rewrite (RiotX), on Web we're iterating incrementally.
  - johnchristopher 7y ago
    Ah, cool ! I am off to installing tchap then. Really glad to hear you are upgrading the game on the front-end/UX/UI ! edit: well, I give up :D. Been playing for 40 minutes with yarn build/dist and config.json and missing olm and async_hooks dependencies.
dstaley 7y ago
I really hope this means more development and focus on building great mobile apps for Matrix. For the past four months the Riot Android app has had this bug where login state expires after a day and the app gets stuck in an infinite loop trying to refresh the token. Supposedly a fix was merged [1], but after four months of not being able to use Riot (and thus Matrix) my friend group has fallen back to Discord. [1] https://github.com/vector-im/riot-android/issues/3249 https://github.com/vector-im/riot-android/issues/3249
- billCarsonFr 7y ago
  Have you tried RiotX https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.riotx https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.riot... Most efforts are going to this new android client. The issue you refer to has been properly handled on RiotX (soft logout)
  - dstaley 7y ago
    I don't think this issue is related to soft logout, which is what happens when the user logs out of a device remotely. The issue I was running into was that the app, after 24 hours of being logged in, would get stuck in an initialization loop.
    - billCarsonFr 7y ago
      Sry, to be more precise, token invalidation has been properly handled in riotX as part of the soft logout feature;
      - dstaley 7y ago
        Oh, awesome! I just installed Riot 0.9.9, so I'm going to test that out and see if the issue occurs. After that I'll switch to RiotX and check there as well and report any issues I find.
wildduck 7y ago
Any one knows the progress of dendrite? Have not used matrix/riot for a while. It was too heavy to run awhile back. Hopefully they make the client and server more light weight.
- anoa_ 7y ago
  We've just hired a new full-time employee to work on Dendrite and p2p matrix. Expect rapid progress on Dendrite as of a few days ago. https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite
  - Arathorn 7y ago
    (two new employees actually ;P)
- Arathorn 7y ago
  Riot should be way lighter these days, at least on web. We reduced RAM by 5x by lazyloading about a year ago.
chrisseaton 7y ago
Wow this already looks like a fractured mess! https://matrix.org/clients/ https://matrix.org/clients/ Why are there so many clients with different supported functionality?
- Arathorn 7y ago
  That page could have (much) better UX - n.b. that it defaults to showing you only Linux clients; you have to click around to filter by other platforms. It also is outdated and misses many of the newer exciting clients such as http://dittochat.org/ http://dittochat.org/ or https://github.com/kiliankoe/nio https://github.com/kiliankoe/nio. A more comprehensive view can be found at https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now/ https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now/. Updating all this is on the todo list, but writing software >> writing website atm.
- nebulous1 7y ago
  because it's an open protocol and that's how open protocols work
- rocky1138 7y ago
  Presumably Matrix is the protocol and the clients implement that protocol. Some may be at a further stage of development than others.
- lnanek2 7y ago
  Matrix advertises themselves as an eventually consistent global JSON DB. So it makes sense anyone can build a client and stuff something in there and maybe only their client really handles it. Seems like a better idea given the failure of XMPP. XMPP was a communications protocol lots of products used like Google Talk, but got dumped when they wanted to do their own proprietary stuff. It feels like Matrix will be less likely to get dumped like that since they are just a general purpose global DB.
- olah_1 7y ago
  > Why are there so many clients with different supported functionality? If a client has different functionality from the spec, then it simply means that the client is unfinished. It's not like XMPP where different servers/clients implement different XEPs. A client either implements the spec and is complete or it does not and it is "beta".
jasonzemos 7y ago
This is really good news. I have only one question for Mozilla: why choose a solution whose hallmark is decentralization and the libre model- only to become a customer of a centralized host (modular.im). Why can't Mozilla actually federate? That's a step backward from your IRCd in my opinion. I hope Mozilla gets onboard with everyone else running their own Synapse, hacks on it, and pay their dues with patches, rather than with their cash.
- gtirloni 7y ago
  What benefits would Mozilla get from running their own server and federation (that they have with ircd today)?
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Good publicity for decentralization. If they can get it to work, it shows that it’s possible to run a large instance from a non-central host.
    - gtirloni 7y ago
      Well, sure it's possible. They don't need to prove it. But I don't think Mozilla has such a large userbase that it would make any difference. I like the publicity angle but maybe that's for the future. If Mozilla validates the transition and wants to get more involved with Matrix.org then it'd make sense to own and manage their own stuff. I like that they are being cautious and not jumping with both feet in.
      - Arathorn 7y ago
        At a technical level, the Mozilla homeserver will be as decentralised as any other server in Matrix: i.e. entirely independent, and federating with the rest of the Matrix as normal. At a legal level, it's true that the server will be admined by New Vector via Modular.im - but this is basically Mozilla just outsourcing their sysadmin to Modular, while also helping fund Matrix development (given that Modular subscriptions are used to fund development on Synapse and Matrix in general).
superkuh 7y ago
> effectively using Matrix as a big decentralised IRC bouncer in the sky. No. In theory it is, but in practice it's a big centralized IRC bouncer in the sky where everyone is reliant on riot.im servers.
- Arathorn 7y ago
  Not really: anyone can run an IRC bridge, and many people do. The #mozilla_#wherever:matrix.org namespace is the preexisting moznet bridge run by Matrix.org (not Riot.im), but anyone with their own server could also run their own bridge, much like they could run their own bouncer today. There is then additional decentralisation from the fact that the room history is replicated throughout all the participating Matrix servers.
  - superkuh 7y ago
    Anyone can, few do. At least in terms of what I see on the 20 IRC networks I'm connected to. The only one where people actually tend to run their own Matrix servers is on OFTC with the Freedombox (https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox) people. On Freenode I don't think I have ever seen someone connect from a Matrix server that wasn't riot.im since the creation of the Matrix protocol.
    - Arathorn 7y ago
      How would you even know, though? When running personal bridges I just have them auth as my normal user account like a bouncer. Or are you looking at CTCP versions?
      - superkuh 7y ago
        The 'Real Name' field shows where they're proxying in from. Like the normal riot.im "@username:matrix.org" or self-hosted "@username:theirserver.address.tld". Is this an option that isn't the default for most matrix bridges/clients/whatever? I guess if it doesn't show in their realname field I wouldn't see it. But I imagine since the defaults seems to be what I described above the amount of users that turned that off will be fairly small and irrelevant.
ttctciyf 7y ago
> we have decided to replace IRC with Riot/Matrix, hosted by Modular.IM. Looking at the pricing on modular.im[1] it starts at $10/month for up to 5 "active users," $73/m for up to 50, on and up.. Though modular's credentials look good, it seems like there'd be scope for some serious price gouging if Matrix had more takeup. The standard (android) client's default servers are patchy enough to make this worth looking into, IME. 1: https://modular.im/services/matrix-hosting https://modular.im/services/matrix-hosting
davidw 7y ago
Is there a low-friction way to give Matrix a try? Like a Hacker News channel that you can join with a web client or something?
- neiljohnson 7y ago
  Riot is a popular Matrix client and a good place to start., pointing your browser at https://riot.im/app/#/welcome https://riot.im/app/#/welcome I'm unaware of a hacker news matrix channel (perhaps others can enlighten me), but joining the Matrix HQ channel (https://riot.im/app/#/room/#matrix:matrix.org https://riot.im/app/#/room/#matrix:matrix.org) is a good place to learn more about Matrix.
  - Arathorn 7y ago
    There's https://riot.im/app/#/room/#hn:matrix.org https://riot.im/app/#/room/#hn:matrix.org, but it's sadly very dead and not bridged anywhere useful. Is there actually a good chat community for HN anywhere?
- johnchristopher 7y ago
  https://riot.im/app/ https://riot.im/app/ You need to register an account but you can log into many public channels.
vkaku 7y ago
I've always asked this question : Can't we make better IRC clients yet, more Slack like, but just works over traditional IRC?
- WimLeers 7y ago
  Yes. See https://ircv3.net/ https://ircv3.net/. An example: https://blog.irccloud.com/slack-integration/ https://blog.irccloud.com/slack-integration/
jangid 7y ago
Can I access the network from Emacs? I use ERC as of now.
- Arathorn 7y ago
  yup. https://github.com/alphapapa/matrix-client.el https://github.com/alphapapa/matrix-client.el is your best bet (it probably doesn't support SSO though, but should be pretty easy to add).
  - jangid 7y ago
    Thanks for sharing. Actually, I searched MELPA before posting my question. It is time to support this package to get included into MELPA/ELPA.
Aardwolf 7y ago
How does one visit the Mozilla channel on it? No links anywhere in there or in Mozilla's post. Is the discussion channel publicly visible? (excuse me if channel is not the correct terminology)
- Arathorn 7y ago
  It's not live yet :) (and we called channels 'rooms' in Matrix).
userstudy2 7y ago
Test
shd4 7y ago
New Vector (https://www.vector.im/ https://www.vector.im/) is hiring more designers to come work fulltime on Riot’s UI and UX as they shift Riot’s focus from being developer-led to design-led. That's great news! https://apply.workable.com/new-vector/j/6CB817C79E/ https://apply.workable.com/new-vector/j/6CB817C79E/
- Ardon 7y ago
  Fantastic, though I wish they weren't burdened with such a bad name. I wonder if they would ever change it...
shmerl 7y ago
Good, but what about Rust project jumping to Discord instead? They should have used Matrix as well.
- gdxhyrd 7y ago
  Yeah, that was a bummer for me. Discord is admittedly awesome, but not in line with openness.
- kibwen 7y ago
  Each individual Rust team (which govern individual aspects of Rust) got to choose where to jump to; I believe one did choose to use Matrix, but the others mostly chose Discord (because there was already a very large Rust user community there), a few chose Zulip, and one is still on IRC. If Matrix clients were more well-developed and widely-used, I believe there would be good incentive for them to transition--the Rust developers already have enough on their plate without feeling like they need to also develop their own communication protocol.
  - shmerl 7y ago
    I still find it inappropriate for a FOSS project to promote closed non federated communication tools. Hopefully they won't be stuck with Discord because "we already switched to it".
    - stjohnswarts 7y ago
      I think they are just being pragmatic. No one, not even RMS, ever felt that open source needed to be open source from bottom to top, just the final product. You have to be pragmatic in this life. We can't wait for open source processors running on open source hardware on and open source OS compiled on an open source compiler before something gets released. I find it entirely appropriate for them to be pragmatic and use the tools to get done what they need to get done.
      - shmerl 7y ago
Ericson2314 7y ago
Very excited for this; It's the one worthy successor to IRC. Self plug: it also makes me more motivated to return to https://github.com/Ericson2314/matrix-client https://github.com/Ericson2314/matrix-client
jokoon 7y ago
I'm curious, what's wrong with IRC? Is it too old? Too difficult to monitor and moderate? Too easy to spam? I don't understand. I've never really understood why mozilla chose their own servers and not freenode. I've never really grasped the whole history of enet vs freenode either.
- jeltz 7y ago
  Mozilla has said they thought it was too difficult to monitor and moderate. Could that have been solved by moving to Freenode? Probably, but there are other issues with IRC. Having to run your own IRC bouncer increases the barrier of entry, as does nickserv based auth. Modern people also expect to be able to seamlessly post images, large code examples, files, etc. Some people also want support for threaded conversations. None of this is offered by the typical IRC setup which Mozilla probably thinks that it scares away users. I do not think Matrix solves all of these yet, but it solves some of them.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  A lot of younger developers consider IRC limited and crusty. They are more easily attracted to platforms they've grown used to that behave similar to discord, teams, and slack.
- steveklabnik 7y ago
  http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/ http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/
- alkonaut 7y ago
  How is the feature parity with newer alternatives? Can I share my screen with someone easily? Can I post a screenshot? Can I be sure every client shows the screenshot properly? Will it handle an animated screenshot? I wouldn’t want to use one tool for typing text and another for calling a third for sharing files and a fourth for sharing a screen and so on. For example: Sharing an image as a link isn’t really an acceptable UX these days I think.
- bsder 7y ago
  > I'm curious, what's wrong with IRC? It seems that the most significant complaint is bad mobile experience.
gramakri 7y ago
Which server does modular.im run? Synapse? Ruma?
- Arathorn 7y ago
  synapse. ruma is pretty alpha, alas.
- lioeters 7y ago
  In their hosted service description (https://modular.im/services/matrix-hosting#what-you-get https://modular.im/services/matrix-hosting#what-you-get), under the section Open Source, they mention Riot.im and Synapse.
lousken 7y ago
So after testing matrix and riot with friends for a couple of months, there're still a ton of work to be done. We all used the most common setup - matrix.org homeserver, riot and riotX as apps. (Also please don't point me to dev version, I am only considering what's in stable.) Random stuff not in particular order: 1a) e2e is a choice that affects experience in riot, a lot - you can't use search, you don't see recent images/files ... 1b) you have to verify each others devices, N:M; although they're working on a change 2) I hoped that riotX will be a lot better at the end of this year, but there're still lots of bugs, messages get stuck at the bottom, mobile - mobile e2e can't be decrypted sometimes, you have to have another device online; and you can't even zoom in or save an image that's sent to you which is infuriating 3) matrix.org homeserver performance, although a lot better now is still sometimes utterly slow 4) riot is still missing crucial functions like copy entire message, online status, jump to date, and lacking any good notification system(the current one is really simple/stupid) and you can't even enable notifications without sound e.g. 4) also it's still lacking custom emote support although many ppl asked, there's no option to pin/save messages...
- Arathorn 7y ago
  1a/1b and 2 is where all our work is going currently. We're trying to get E2E on by default in Jan, and likewise exit beta for RiotX/Android around the same time. We're going as fast as we can. 3: Matrix.org homeserver performance should be absolutely fine now. Delays when doing things like joining big rooms are unrelated to the hardware, but perf optimisations we need to do to synapse in general. They're on the radar. 4: This is literally the first time i've heard an ask for 'copy entire message'. The other features exist in labs, and yes, we need to fix notifs and add custom emoji. "Many people asking" doesn't magically produce features unfortunately, especially when we are battling points 1 & 2. Contributions help though. Thanks for testing though.
  - boring_twenties 7y ago
    After spending several months convincing a few friends to use Riot, the ongoing fiasco with E2E has caused all of them to leave within a couple of days. Obviously they're unlikely to ever come back. It's a real shame. These are technical people who don't particularly mind verifying a key by hand. In fact I personally even prefer it. The problem is not only that certain things are not done automatically, but that the UI is designed to make it difficult to do them even manually! E.g., I have one device 'foo' which you already trust. I add a new device 'bar'. Why on earth would you want to verify its key manually when I could just send you the new key from 'foo' which you already trust? Even worse, the key for 'bar' is not straightforwardly available anywhere in the UI on device 'foo'. It should be easily viewable in the right hand pane where the list of devices is, but it's not. The only way to get the device ID and key is to send a message from 'bar' to 'foo' and view the details of the message. Why?
bloopernova 7y ago
Has anyone had experience with both Matrix and Mattermost? What are the main differences between the two? Apropos of nothing, currently I am running: * Signal * Wife * Family * Google Hangouts (web) * Friends and ex-coworkers * Slack * Vendor A * Vendor B * Team C * Team D * Keybase * Some friends * SMS * My Stepdaughter * Skype * Coworkers too stubborn to open Mattermost or change what they do * Mattermost * Coworkers * Various teams and groups * Remote Desktop * Microsoft Teams * My team * Client coworkers * Other teams at client * Microsoft Skype for Business * Chats from people who don't use MS Teams * Meetings * Gitter * Spacemacs chat * IRC (web) * Various random channels Out of all of those, only SMS isn't on my macbook, and I'm sure I could put it on there if I wanted to.
- kethinov 7y ago
  Mattermost is currently a better UX with a more stable codebase, but I suspect that the Matrix/Riot federated model will one day overtake Mattermost. Personally I use Mattermost at work and Matrix/Riot for personal chat. If Matrix/Riot began to overtake Mattermost in terms of UX, we would probably replace Mattermost with Matrix/Riot at work.
  - bloopernova 7y ago
    Thank you!
- ajxs 7y ago
  You've just described my nightmare scenario. I'm currently experiencing "Messaging app fatigue" and I'm not using even a quarter of the apps that you are.
  - bloopernova 7y ago
    Yes, fatigue is a great word for it.
- __d 7y ago
  My list isn't quite that long, but I'm using Franz to put most of them into a single window (albeit, with many tabs). Sadly, it doesn't work with iMessage, nor Signal. I just wish it was a native app, although I appreciate that'd make the effort involved 100x more.
cowedbyprgrssvs 7y ago
The announcement mentions only two features: safety and accessibility, but places no emphasis on the technical merits of the choice for the majority of users. That is disappointingly irrational for a technology organization. I don't feel comfortable with the strong emphasis on "progressive" concerns that mozilla (and the rust community) have. It's not inclusive: I have normal liberal views (I'm from a European country and under 40) and I don't think I'd feel comfortable working for one of those organizations because I suspect the progressives there would be angry or offended with my reluctance to embrace the identity politics dogma. I didn't even feel comfortable posting this under my usual account, such is the atmosphere. Accessibility is clearly important. But "safety" concerns have become overblown: reasonable concerns have become polluted by the politics of the "safe space" contingent, and the sorts of people that are closing down legitimate debate in the name of progressive/identity politics. And technical suitability for the 95% of modally-abled users is still an important consideration.
- mwcampbell 7y ago
  > technical suitability for the 95% of modally-abled users is still an important consideration. Are you saying that we should give more advantages to people who already have the advantage of having no significant disability, while adding difficulty for people who already have extra difficulties (or at best making only token efforts toward accessibility)? That seems unreasonable to me. Fortunately, with an open system like Matrix, everyone can have a client that works well for them.
- bzbarsky 7y ago
  Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla, and I was quite happy with IRC personally. The announcement may not mention it, but there were trial instances of a number of messaging apps set up, people could use them and submit feedback, and that feedback was in fact considered as far as I know. Accessibility and safety were not the only criteria at all. As far as "safety" concerns being overblown... I personally had approximately zero problems with IRC that way, though some of the random spammers who sounded like foul-mouthed 12-year-olds could be annoying at (rare, in my experience) times. But I absolutely have co-workers whose IRC experience was a lot less pleasant. And if moving to a different system lets us get rid of that unpleasantness for them, that is a _very_ strong reason to consider such a move, both on general moral grounds and on purely business-reasons "people who can get their work done sanely get more work done" efficiency grounds. Note that we're not talking about safety from debate or opposing viewpoints or whatnot. We're talking about people being able to discuss a bugfix with others without being constantly spammed with invective and threats in the process. _That_ is what "safety" means in this context.
zzo38computer 7y ago
IRC has the advantage of being usable without any specialized software (although the usability is not as well as if you do have specialized IRC software, it is still at least usable).
sandGorgon 7y ago
Are you guys planning "private communities" usecases ? When I last evaluated Riot, it was vehemently public...so Slack/Mattermost like usecases were very hard to do. Ideally a private community should be possible, where users invited to that community have access to all channels. however within the community, I should have private channels restricted to only few invited users. I was told that the only possible way to do this was make all channels of a community private ..and when adding a new user, you should explicitly invite to every single one of the channels. This is not viable for an org. I really hope this has changed.
- ptman 7y ago
  AFAIK it is planned but not done
  - ptman 7y ago
    https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/5857 https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/5857 or https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/4762 https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/4762
k_sze 7y ago
I'm confused. Is Matrix actually synchronous or asynchronous? The Matrix FAQ (https://matrix.org/faq/#what-is-a-homeserver%3F https://matrix.org/faq/#what-is-a-homeserver%3F) makes it sound like it can be asynchronous. Otherwise, why store communication history at all?
- Arathorn 7y ago
  Matrix is asynchronous. You send a message into a room; other people can receive it later or respond to it subsequently - it's not like the data blocks the room somehow until it's read, or that messages disappear after reading.
mxuribe 7y ago
As a fan of the matrix protocol, this is great news to hear about Mozilla's decision!

541 points by gsnedders 7y ago

Congrats to Mozilla and matrix.org! I am at least very happy they went with a FOSS solution.

Congrats to Riot/Matrix. I'm hoping with Mozilla's backing the product, there's a lot of features that get built out. There's no reason this cant be a Slack-beating product now. I'm betting a Rust based homeserver replacing Synapse.

sreevisakh 7y ago
The official successor to Synapse homeserver is Dendrite written in Go (https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite). There is homeserver project in Rust called Ruma (https://github.com/ruma/ruma https://github.com/ruma/ruma). Ruma was waiting for async/await to stabilize. But it doesn't seem to have much activity even after that.
- kibwen 7y ago
  It looks like Ruma was waiting for an async web framework to emerge, and the web frameworks were waiting on hyper to upgrade, and hyper was waiting on h2 to upgrade, and h2 was waiting on http to upgrade, and http was waiting on bytes to upgrade, and everyone was waiting on tokio to upgrade. In the six weeks since async await has stabilized, the web framework that my company uses has only just managed to upgrade to stable async/await last week. I wouldn't fault Ruma for waiting for other frameworks to upgrade before making a choice.
  - sreevisakh 7y ago
    Thank you for that perspective. I apologize if it sounded like I am blaming Ruma - just waiting eagerly for its development.
    - kibwen 7y ago
      No problem. :) I just don't want potential contributors to write off Ruma as something worth looking at, especially since with this announcement it ought to be be more relevant than ever. And having multiple independent implementations of a federated protocol is very important to proving out the specification (the Ruma author has already filed several bugs against the spec as a result of implementing it).
- kick 7y ago
  No longer true. To quote the founder: There are quite a lot of Synapses out there right now, and Synapse's featureset is pretty mature. Given we have pretty high profile people running Synapse (e.g. all of the French government) we have no choice but to invest the time to polish it and make it more efficient and stable. In an ideal world we'd have paused on Synapse ages ago and focused purely on a next-gen server, but we can't leave Synapse users in the lurch. Dendrite will be getting some attention in the coming months though, but not as a direct Synapse-replacement, but more of a playground for more experimental stuff. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21767057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21767057
  - dashwav 7y ago
    From two Matrix members, one who is the matrix.org team lead today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21836684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21836684
    - hu3 7y ago
      Two new full-time employees were hired to work on Dendrite (written in Go) and p2p matrix? Interesting. I had the impression that the Rust version would have priority.
      - Arathorn 7y ago
        Ruma isn't written by the core matrix.org team, and has its own community. Dendrite is much further along, so makes sense for us to hack on the projects we created :)

webboynews 7y ago

After the matrix repo hack (alright ) and the piss poor response and a complete lack of transparency (not alright) I would never touch matrix . One of the responses there was: "there is so much hate here that it is making impossible to discuss asensitive issues like security " It was the lamest excuse ever.

Majestic121 7y ago
I don't find much info about this hack on google, can you provide some sources on this so that I can assess the response ?
- feanaro 7y ago
  Here's the post-mortem writeup: 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...
jeltz 7y ago
Are you talking about a different hack because the only hack I have heard of was not a repo hack (someone stole the SSH keys of a sysadmin via a compromised jenkins server), and they were very transparent about it. The hack was pretty bad but I do not agree with your description of it unless you are talking about a different hack.

kibwen 7y ago

I'm pleasantly surprised! They took the route of "promising but underdeveloped technology" rather than settling for a well-developed solution that compromises their principles (which, frankly, I wouldn't have faulted them for; at the end of the day you still have to get work done). With luck maybe we'll see Mozilla contribute to Matrix? There is, after all, an implementation written in Rust: https://github.com/ruma https://github.com/ruma

est31 7y ago
The last ruma commit was in August, which was after a long period where nothing happened at all. Is the project dead?
- Mathnerd314 7y ago
  The latest status seems to be https://github.com/ruma/ruma/issues/189#issuecomment-553955556 https://github.com/ruma/ruma/issues/189#issuecomment-5539555... from a month ago. It looks like he is working on the client while he waits for Rust web server frameworks to adopt the recently-released async-await language features.
  - Mathnerd314 7y ago
    edit: https://www.ruma.io/status/ https://www.ruma.io/status/ is a better overview
- ReverseCold 7y ago
  The author says they’re waiting on Rust and Matrix features/documentation. There’s an open issue with more details https://github.com/ruma/ruma/issues/189 https://github.com/ruma/ruma/issues/189
- kibwen 7y ago
  I actually interviewed the author in August for our Rust podcast, on which he says he's waiting for async to mature before progressing further: https://rustacean-station.org/episode/001-ruma/ https://rustacean-station.org/episode/001-ruma/

xfalcox 7y ago

Can't wait for Mozilla to back a stable, native desktop client into a daily driver state so we can finally ditch Mattermost at work.

rtpg 7y ago
Seriously, I feel like it’s such an indictment on native app tool development that we have a bazillion new electron apps written by ppl all the time for weekend projects yet almost no one spitting out native apps to interface with services. It’s clearly in demand (if a bit of a niche kind of demand)
- swiley 7y ago
  Native development on OSX and iOS both kind of suck unless you completely embrace objective C and coaca. I think that’s what’s turned so many people off to it. It’s comparatively easy to write complex portable applications with tk (or even just strait win32 and whichever X11 widget toolkit is your favorite.)
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - shd4 7y ago
    https://github.com/neilalexander/seaglass https://github.com/neilalexander/seaglass looks promising.
    - swiley 7y ago
      That’s exactly what I’m talking about; you can’t reuse code on OSX and more or less have to start from scratch.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > Native development on OSX and iOS both kind of suck unless you completely embrace objective C and coaca. You can try all-Swift development with SwiftUI.

jeltz 7y ago

Nice, given how the discussions were going some months ago I was worried that they would pick some closed source solution like Discord or Slack. I have not used Matrix so I do not know how good it is, but I do not like the lock-in of Discord and Slack.

mehhh 7y ago
Matrix can bridge in IRC, Slack, Gitter and a few other protocols very nicely, it reminds me of Pidgin but with much better UX.
- Vinnl 7y ago
  I haven't managed to properly use Matrix myself, but I am part of a number of Gitter rooms that includes people using the Matrix bridge. I certainly wouldn't call that bridge "nice": all their messages are posted by a single user called matrixbot, that simply prefixes it message by their Matrix username in backticks. I'm not sure if the people in the room who aren't aware of Matrix understand that that's what's going on.
  - ptman 7y ago
    Maybe a limitation of the gitter api? Better than nothing, but improvement welcome
    - Vinnl 7y ago
      I understand why it works this way and I wouldn't know how to do it better; it was more of a general critique of the bridging approach, I guess, and hence a reluctance from my side to call it nice.
jordigh 7y ago
Agreed, this is a huge relief. I was getting quite worried that Mozilla would go to Discord, like Rust and other projects have done. I don't know anything about Matrix, but I know it's free, and if it has Mozilla's endorsement, now I'm actually curious to try it... maybe even via an IRC bridge!

dzypa 7y ago

Daily reminder that Rust uses Discord, a closed source piece of software with draconian privacy and data retention terms. Steve Klabnik will predictably reply to me saying that it was the decision of the community and blah blah, but the Mozilla Corporation should not have allowed it.

scrollaway 7y ago
So you want mozco to go against the community's and project leaders decisions? Do you see the problem with that line of thinking or do I have to explain further?
- gsnedders 7y ago
  (Also, Rust isn't under MoCo, it's under MoFo directly.)
  - pcwalton 7y ago
    Rust isn't "under" either. The core team, who are ultimately in charge, don't report to anybody in the Mozilla organization.
  - est31 7y ago
    In which way? I've thought the Rust engineers were employees of the Mozilla corporation? And the Rust trademark seems to be owned by the Mozilla corporation as well: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87796977&caseSearchType=US_APPLICATION&caseType=DEFAULT&searchType=statusSearch https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87796977&caseSearchType=U...
    - steveklabnik 7y ago
      All Mozilla employees working on Rust are under Moco, not Mofo, that's correct. Unless something extremely drastic that nobody has talked about has happened in the last year. Almost all of Mozilla is under Moco.
- dzypa 7y ago

nickstinemates 7y ago

Are there any other projects using this setup? Also, any write up on the compelling reasons to switch? Are they hoping this move will attract more contributors? Article is unclear.

feanaro 7y ago
Compelling reasons to switch: it's an open standard, it's federated (so you can own your own server and avoid vendor lock-in), it has end-to-end encryption, it supports bridging with many other protocols, there's quite a growing ecosystem of tools and libraries around it, etc. The protocol itself is designed to be really flexible in the kind of data you can send through it (and therefore automatically propagated to and synchronized with other servers) so it can support a lot of different use cases. This includes standard chat app things like audio/video calls but it could also be used for stuff like forums or even serve as a backend for syncing information between organization (I'm thinking of things like medical information between health institutions). All in all, there's a lot of potential in Matrix.
- pteraspidomorph 7y ago
  I try matrix on occasion (as in, I set up my own server from scratch). The last time I tried it, support for multi-participant audio and video calls (and screensharing) was still between terrible and nonexistant. Definitely much worse than Discord. Has it improved?
  - feanaro 7y ago
    There were some bug fixes in the last year (IIRC) though nothing very substantial, I think. Then again, it's always worked reasonably well for me and I'm using it regularly. I heard it was going to get worked on soon, though.
    - Arathorn 7y ago
      There was a major upgrade to the conference calling about 6 months ago which took it from being "barely usable" to "almost as good as Zoom". It's different semantics to Discord in that it's classic conferencing rather than a voice channel, but it works well enough for the whole core Matrix team to use it basically constantly for remote collaboration. The conferencing servers are currently in London however, so you may suffer from transatlantic traffic problems if you are elsewhere in the world.

johnchristopher 7y ago

This screenshot https://discourse-prod-uploads-81679984178418.s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/optimized/2X/e/eb4fca27c1cbaa588c150e981f8f8eb94ed3cdb6_2_690x458.png https://discourse-prod-uploads-81679984178418.s3.dualstack.u... shows a UI that seems way wore easier to grip than the riot UI. I remember screenshots https://img.bfmtv.com/c/840/625/06e8/68cd7316f6a279a3899fcf81dfd7.jpg https://img.bfmtv.com/c/840/625/06e8/68cd7316f6a279a3899fcf8... http://www.tchap.fr/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/interface-tchap-800x582.png http://www.tchap.fr/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/interface-tch... of the client used set up by the France efforts. Are those clients ever going to be released to the general public ?

Arathorn 7y ago
the first image is Riot circa 2015 (back when it was called Vector). You can run it if you really want from https://riots.im https://riots.im. Tchap meanwhile is opensource at https://github.com/dinsic-pim https://github.com/dinsic-pim and there are unofficial builds which let you use it as a general purpose Matrix client. However, we're busy improving Riot's UX in general to make it easier to grip - on Mobile that ends up being a rewrite (RiotX), on Web we're iterating incrementally.
- johnchristopher 7y ago
  Ah, cool ! I am off to installing tchap then. Really glad to hear you are upgrading the game on the front-end/UX/UI ! edit: well, I give up :D. Been playing for 40 minutes with yarn build/dist and config.json and missing olm and async_hooks dependencies.

dstaley 7y ago

I really hope this means more development and focus on building great mobile apps for Matrix. For the past four months the Riot Android app has had this bug where login state expires after a day and the app gets stuck in an infinite loop trying to refresh the token. Supposedly a fix was merged [1], but after four months of not being able to use Riot (and thus Matrix) my friend group has fallen back to Discord. [1] https://github.com/vector-im/riot-android/issues/3249 https://github.com/vector-im/riot-android/issues/3249

billCarsonFr 7y ago
Have you tried RiotX https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.riotx https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.riot... Most efforts are going to this new android client. The issue you refer to has been properly handled on RiotX (soft logout)
- dstaley 7y ago
  I don't think this issue is related to soft logout, which is what happens when the user logs out of a device remotely. The issue I was running into was that the app, after 24 hours of being logged in, would get stuck in an initialization loop.
  - billCarsonFr 7y ago
    Sry, to be more precise, token invalidation has been properly handled in riotX as part of the soft logout feature;
    - dstaley 7y ago
      Oh, awesome! I just installed Riot 0.9.9, so I'm going to test that out and see if the issue occurs. After that I'll switch to RiotX and check there as well and report any issues I find.

wildduck 7y ago

Any one knows the progress of dendrite? Have not used matrix/riot for a while. It was too heavy to run awhile back. Hopefully they make the client and server more light weight.

anoa_ 7y ago
We've just hired a new full-time employee to work on Dendrite and p2p matrix. Expect rapid progress on Dendrite as of a few days ago. https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite
- Arathorn 7y ago
  (two new employees actually ;P)
Arathorn 7y ago
Riot should be way lighter these days, at least on web. We reduced RAM by 5x by lazyloading about a year ago.

chrisseaton 7y ago

Wow this already looks like a fractured mess! https://matrix.org/clients/ https://matrix.org/clients/ Why are there so many clients with different supported functionality?

Arathorn 7y ago
That page could have (much) better UX - n.b. that it defaults to showing you only Linux clients; you have to click around to filter by other platforms. It also is outdated and misses many of the newer exciting clients such as http://dittochat.org/ http://dittochat.org/ or https://github.com/kiliankoe/nio https://github.com/kiliankoe/nio. A more comprehensive view can be found at https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now/ https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now/. Updating all this is on the todo list, but writing software >> writing website atm.
nebulous1 7y ago
because it's an open protocol and that's how open protocols work
rocky1138 7y ago
Presumably Matrix is the protocol and the clients implement that protocol. Some may be at a further stage of development than others.
lnanek2 7y ago
Matrix advertises themselves as an eventually consistent global JSON DB. So it makes sense anyone can build a client and stuff something in there and maybe only their client really handles it. Seems like a better idea given the failure of XMPP. XMPP was a communications protocol lots of products used like Google Talk, but got dumped when they wanted to do their own proprietary stuff. It feels like Matrix will be less likely to get dumped like that since they are just a general purpose global DB.
olah_1 7y ago
> Why are there so many clients with different supported functionality? If a client has different functionality from the spec, then it simply means that the client is unfinished. It's not like XMPP where different servers/clients implement different XEPs. A client either implements the spec and is complete or it does not and it is "beta".

jasonzemos 7y ago

This is really good news. I have only one question for Mozilla: why choose a solution whose hallmark is decentralization and the libre model- only to become a customer of a centralized host (modular.im). Why can't Mozilla actually federate? That's a step backward from your IRCd in my opinion. I hope Mozilla gets onboard with everyone else running their own Synapse, hacks on it, and pay their dues with patches, rather than with their cash.

gtirloni 7y ago
What benefits would Mozilla get from running their own server and federation (that they have with ircd today)?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Good publicity for decentralization. If they can get it to work, it shows that it’s possible to run a large instance from a non-central host.
  - gtirloni 7y ago
    Well, sure it's possible. They don't need to prove it. But I don't think Mozilla has such a large userbase that it would make any difference. I like the publicity angle but maybe that's for the future. If Mozilla validates the transition and wants to get more involved with Matrix.org then it'd make sense to own and manage their own stuff. I like that they are being cautious and not jumping with both feet in.
    - Arathorn 7y ago
      At a technical level, the Mozilla homeserver will be as decentralised as any other server in Matrix: i.e. entirely independent, and federating with the rest of the Matrix as normal. At a legal level, it's true that the server will be admined by New Vector via Modular.im - but this is basically Mozilla just outsourcing their sysadmin to Modular, while also helping fund Matrix development (given that Modular subscriptions are used to fund development on Synapse and Matrix in general).

superkuh 7y ago

> effectively using Matrix as a big decentralised IRC bouncer in the sky. No. In theory it is, but in practice it's a big centralized IRC bouncer in the sky where everyone is reliant on riot.im servers.

Arathorn 7y ago
Not really: anyone can run an IRC bridge, and many people do. The #mozilla_#wherever:matrix.org namespace is the preexisting moznet bridge run by Matrix.org (not Riot.im), but anyone with their own server could also run their own bridge, much like they could run their own bouncer today. There is then additional decentralisation from the fact that the room history is replicated throughout all the participating Matrix servers.
- superkuh 7y ago
  Anyone can, few do. At least in terms of what I see on the 20 IRC networks I'm connected to. The only one where people actually tend to run their own Matrix servers is on OFTC with the Freedombox (https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox) people. On Freenode I don't think I have ever seen someone connect from a Matrix server that wasn't riot.im since the creation of the Matrix protocol.
  - Arathorn 7y ago
    How would you even know, though? When running personal bridges I just have them auth as my normal user account like a bouncer. Or are you looking at CTCP versions?
    - superkuh 7y ago
      The 'Real Name' field shows where they're proxying in from. Like the normal riot.im "@username:matrix.org" or self-hosted "@username:theirserver.address.tld". Is this an option that isn't the default for most matrix bridges/clients/whatever? I guess if it doesn't show in their realname field I wouldn't see it. But I imagine since the defaults seems to be what I described above the amount of users that turned that off will be fairly small and irrelevant.

ttctciyf 7y ago

> we have decided to replace IRC with Riot/Matrix, hosted by Modular.IM. Looking at the pricing on modular.im[1] it starts at $10/month for up to 5 "active users," $73/m for up to 50, on and up.. Though modular's credentials look good, it seems like there'd be scope for some serious price gouging if Matrix had more takeup. The standard (android) client's default servers are patchy enough to make this worth looking into, IME. 1: https://modular.im/services/matrix-hosting https://modular.im/services/matrix-hosting

davidw 7y ago

Is there a low-friction way to give Matrix a try? Like a Hacker News channel that you can join with a web client or something?

neiljohnson 7y ago
Riot is a popular Matrix client and a good place to start., pointing your browser at https://riot.im/app/#/welcome https://riot.im/app/#/welcome I'm unaware of a hacker news matrix channel (perhaps others can enlighten me), but joining the Matrix HQ channel (https://riot.im/app/#/room/#matrix:matrix.org https://riot.im/app/#/room/#matrix:matrix.org) is a good place to learn more about Matrix.
- Arathorn 7y ago
  There's https://riot.im/app/#/room/#hn:matrix.org https://riot.im/app/#/room/#hn:matrix.org, but it's sadly very dead and not bridged anywhere useful. Is there actually a good chat community for HN anywhere?
johnchristopher 7y ago
https://riot.im/app/ https://riot.im/app/ You need to register an account but you can log into many public channels.

vkaku 7y ago

I've always asked this question : Can't we make better IRC clients yet, more Slack like, but just works over traditional IRC?

WimLeers 7y ago
Yes. See https://ircv3.net/ https://ircv3.net/. An example: https://blog.irccloud.com/slack-integration/ https://blog.irccloud.com/slack-integration/

jangid 7y ago

Can I access the network from Emacs? I use ERC as of now.

Arathorn 7y ago
yup. https://github.com/alphapapa/matrix-client.el https://github.com/alphapapa/matrix-client.el is your best bet (it probably doesn't support SSO though, but should be pretty easy to add).
- jangid 7y ago
  Thanks for sharing. Actually, I searched MELPA before posting my question. It is time to support this package to get included into MELPA/ELPA.

Aardwolf 7y ago

How does one visit the Mozilla channel on it? No links anywhere in there or in Mozilla's post. Is the discussion channel publicly visible? (excuse me if channel is not the correct terminology)

Arathorn 7y ago
It's not live yet :) (and we called channels 'rooms' in Matrix).

userstudy2 7y ago

Test

shd4 7y ago

New Vector (https://www.vector.im/ https://www.vector.im/) is hiring more designers to come work fulltime on Riot’s UI and UX as they shift Riot’s focus from being developer-led to design-led. That's great news! https://apply.workable.com/new-vector/j/6CB817C79E/ https://apply.workable.com/new-vector/j/6CB817C79E/

Ardon 7y ago
Fantastic, though I wish they weren't burdened with such a bad name. I wonder if they would ever change it...

shmerl 7y ago

Good, but what about Rust project jumping to Discord instead? They should have used Matrix as well.

gdxhyrd 7y ago
Yeah, that was a bummer for me. Discord is admittedly awesome, but not in line with openness.
kibwen 7y ago
Each individual Rust team (which govern individual aspects of Rust) got to choose where to jump to; I believe one did choose to use Matrix, but the others mostly chose Discord (because there was already a very large Rust user community there), a few chose Zulip, and one is still on IRC. If Matrix clients were more well-developed and widely-used, I believe there would be good incentive for them to transition--the Rust developers already have enough on their plate without feeling like they need to also develop their own communication protocol.
- shmerl 7y ago
  I still find it inappropriate for a FOSS project to promote closed non federated communication tools. Hopefully they won't be stuck with Discord because "we already switched to it".
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    I think they are just being pragmatic. No one, not even RMS, ever felt that open source needed to be open source from bottom to top, just the final product. You have to be pragmatic in this life. We can't wait for open source processors running on open source hardware on and open source OS compiled on an open source compiler before something gets released. I find it entirely appropriate for them to be pragmatic and use the tools to get done what they need to get done.
    - shmerl 7y ago

Ericson2314 7y ago

Very excited for this; It's the one worthy successor to IRC. Self plug: it also makes me more motivated to return to https://github.com/Ericson2314/matrix-client https://github.com/Ericson2314/matrix-client

jokoon 7y ago

I'm curious, what's wrong with IRC? Is it too old? Too difficult to monitor and moderate? Too easy to spam? I don't understand. I've never really understood why mozilla chose their own servers and not freenode. I've never really grasped the whole history of enet vs freenode either.

jeltz 7y ago
Mozilla has said they thought it was too difficult to monitor and moderate. Could that have been solved by moving to Freenode? Probably, but there are other issues with IRC. Having to run your own IRC bouncer increases the barrier of entry, as does nickserv based auth. Modern people also expect to be able to seamlessly post images, large code examples, files, etc. Some people also want support for threaded conversations. None of this is offered by the typical IRC setup which Mozilla probably thinks that it scares away users. I do not think Matrix solves all of these yet, but it solves some of them.
stjohnswarts 7y ago
A lot of younger developers consider IRC limited and crusty. They are more easily attracted to platforms they've grown used to that behave similar to discord, teams, and slack.
steveklabnik 7y ago
http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/ http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/
alkonaut 7y ago
How is the feature parity with newer alternatives? Can I share my screen with someone easily? Can I post a screenshot? Can I be sure every client shows the screenshot properly? Will it handle an animated screenshot? I wouldn’t want to use one tool for typing text and another for calling a third for sharing files and a fourth for sharing a screen and so on. For example: Sharing an image as a link isn’t really an acceptable UX these days I think.
bsder 7y ago
> I'm curious, what's wrong with IRC? It seems that the most significant complaint is bad mobile experience.

gramakri 7y ago

Which server does modular.im run? Synapse? Ruma?

Arathorn 7y ago
synapse. ruma is pretty alpha, alas.
lioeters 7y ago
In their hosted service description (https://modular.im/services/matrix-hosting#what-you-get https://modular.im/services/matrix-hosting#what-you-get), under the section Open Source, they mention Riot.im and Synapse.

lousken 7y ago

So after testing matrix and riot with friends for a couple of months, there're still a ton of work to be done. We all used the most common setup - matrix.org homeserver, riot and riotX as apps. (Also please don't point me to dev version, I am only considering what's in stable.) Random stuff not in particular order: 1a) e2e is a choice that affects experience in riot, a lot - you can't use search, you don't see recent images/files ... 1b) you have to verify each others devices, N:M; although they're working on a change 2) I hoped that riotX will be a lot better at the end of this year, but there're still lots of bugs, messages get stuck at the bottom, mobile - mobile e2e can't be decrypted sometimes, you have to have another device online; and you can't even zoom in or save an image that's sent to you which is infuriating 3) matrix.org homeserver performance, although a lot better now is still sometimes utterly slow 4) riot is still missing crucial functions like copy entire message, online status, jump to date, and lacking any good notification system(the current one is really simple/stupid) and you can't even enable notifications without sound e.g. 4) also it's still lacking custom emote support although many ppl asked, there's no option to pin/save messages...

Arathorn 7y ago
1a/1b and 2 is where all our work is going currently. We're trying to get E2E on by default in Jan, and likewise exit beta for RiotX/Android around the same time. We're going as fast as we can. 3: Matrix.org homeserver performance should be absolutely fine now. Delays when doing things like joining big rooms are unrelated to the hardware, but perf optimisations we need to do to synapse in general. They're on the radar. 4: This is literally the first time i've heard an ask for 'copy entire message'. The other features exist in labs, and yes, we need to fix notifs and add custom emoji. "Many people asking" doesn't magically produce features unfortunately, especially when we are battling points 1 & 2. Contributions help though. Thanks for testing though.
- boring_twenties 7y ago
  After spending several months convincing a few friends to use Riot, the ongoing fiasco with E2E has caused all of them to leave within a couple of days. Obviously they're unlikely to ever come back. It's a real shame. These are technical people who don't particularly mind verifying a key by hand. In fact I personally even prefer it. The problem is not only that certain things are not done automatically, but that the UI is designed to make it difficult to do them even manually! E.g., I have one device 'foo' which you already trust. I add a new device 'bar'. Why on earth would you want to verify its key manually when I could just send you the new key from 'foo' which you already trust? Even worse, the key for 'bar' is not straightforwardly available anywhere in the UI on device 'foo'. It should be easily viewable in the right hand pane where the list of devices is, but it's not. The only way to get the device ID and key is to send a message from 'bar' to 'foo' and view the details of the message. Why?

bloopernova 7y ago

Has anyone had experience with both Matrix and Mattermost? What are the main differences between the two? Apropos of nothing, currently I am running: * Signal * Wife * Family * Google Hangouts (web) * Friends and ex-coworkers * Slack * Vendor A * Vendor B * Team C * Team D * Keybase * Some friends * SMS * My Stepdaughter * Skype * Coworkers too stubborn to open Mattermost or change what they do * Mattermost * Coworkers * Various teams and groups * Remote Desktop * Microsoft Teams * My team * Client coworkers * Other teams at client * Microsoft Skype for Business * Chats from people who don't use MS Teams * Meetings * Gitter * Spacemacs chat * IRC (web) * Various random channels Out of all of those, only SMS isn't on my macbook, and I'm sure I could put it on there if I wanted to.

kethinov 7y ago
Mattermost is currently a better UX with a more stable codebase, but I suspect that the Matrix/Riot federated model will one day overtake Mattermost. Personally I use Mattermost at work and Matrix/Riot for personal chat. If Matrix/Riot began to overtake Mattermost in terms of UX, we would probably replace Mattermost with Matrix/Riot at work.
- bloopernova 7y ago
  Thank you!
ajxs 7y ago
You've just described my nightmare scenario. I'm currently experiencing "Messaging app fatigue" and I'm not using even a quarter of the apps that you are.
- bloopernova 7y ago
  Yes, fatigue is a great word for it.
__d 7y ago
My list isn't quite that long, but I'm using Franz to put most of them into a single window (albeit, with many tabs). Sadly, it doesn't work with iMessage, nor Signal. I just wish it was a native app, although I appreciate that'd make the effort involved 100x more.

cowedbyprgrssvs 7y ago

The announcement mentions only two features: safety and accessibility, but places no emphasis on the technical merits of the choice for the majority of users. That is disappointingly irrational for a technology organization. I don't feel comfortable with the strong emphasis on "progressive" concerns that mozilla (and the rust community) have. It's not inclusive: I have normal liberal views (I'm from a European country and under 40) and I don't think I'd feel comfortable working for one of those organizations because I suspect the progressives there would be angry or offended with my reluctance to embrace the identity politics dogma. I didn't even feel comfortable posting this under my usual account, such is the atmosphere. Accessibility is clearly important. But "safety" concerns have become overblown: reasonable concerns have become polluted by the politics of the "safe space" contingent, and the sorts of people that are closing down legitimate debate in the name of progressive/identity politics. And technical suitability for the 95% of modally-abled users is still an important consideration.

mwcampbell 7y ago
> technical suitability for the 95% of modally-abled users is still an important consideration. Are you saying that we should give more advantages to people who already have the advantage of having no significant disability, while adding difficulty for people who already have extra difficulties (or at best making only token efforts toward accessibility)? That seems unreasonable to me. Fortunately, with an open system like Matrix, everyone can have a client that works well for them.
bzbarsky 7y ago
Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla, and I was quite happy with IRC personally. The announcement may not mention it, but there were trial instances of a number of messaging apps set up, people could use them and submit feedback, and that feedback was in fact considered as far as I know. Accessibility and safety were not the only criteria at all. As far as "safety" concerns being overblown... I personally had approximately zero problems with IRC that way, though some of the random spammers who sounded like foul-mouthed 12-year-olds could be annoying at (rare, in my experience) times. But I absolutely have co-workers whose IRC experience was a lot less pleasant. And if moving to a different system lets us get rid of that unpleasantness for them, that is a _very_ strong reason to consider such a move, both on general moral grounds and on purely business-reasons "people who can get their work done sanely get more work done" efficiency grounds. Note that we're not talking about safety from debate or opposing viewpoints or whatnot. We're talking about people being able to discuss a bugfix with others without being constantly spammed with invective and threats in the process. _That_ is what "safety" means in this context.

zzo38computer 7y ago

IRC has the advantage of being usable without any specialized software (although the usability is not as well as if you do have specialized IRC software, it is still at least usable).

sandGorgon 7y ago

Are you guys planning "private communities" usecases ? When I last evaluated Riot, it was vehemently public...so Slack/Mattermost like usecases were very hard to do. Ideally a private community should be possible, where users invited to that community have access to all channels. however within the community, I should have private channels restricted to only few invited users. I was told that the only possible way to do this was make all channels of a community private ..and when adding a new user, you should explicitly invite to every single one of the channels. This is not viable for an org. I really hope this has changed.

ptman 7y ago
AFAIK it is planned but not done
- ptman 7y ago
  https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/5857 https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/5857 or https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/4762 https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/4762

k_sze 7y ago

I'm confused. Is Matrix actually synchronous or asynchronous? The Matrix FAQ (https://matrix.org/faq/#what-is-a-homeserver%3F https://matrix.org/faq/#what-is-a-homeserver%3F) makes it sound like it can be asynchronous. Otherwise, why store communication history at all?

Arathorn 7y ago
Matrix is asynchronous. You send a message into a room; other people can receive it later or respond to it subsequently - it's not like the data blocks the room somehow until it's read, or that messages disappear after reading.

mxuribe 7y ago

As a fan of the matrix protocol, this is great news to hear about Mozilla's decision!