11 ms·

Automattic invests in Matrix

203 points by ptman 6y ago

tmikaeld 6y ago
Good news! Now if only they can figure out how to make Riot usable with Encryption enabled without pulling your hair out every time you enter a room or chat with non-matching keys. While Riot has a lot of features, it is also not easy for new users. I've tried to convert at least 10 persons and none of them use it any more, citing not being able to figure out how to use it or simply not having the time to waste figuring it out. It needs to be intuitive out of the box, how to contact people, how to find a room, how to chat.
- cyphar 6y ago
  They've been working on that for quite a while and just had a major update to Riot (Web/X on Android/iOS) -- E2EE is now on by default. Have you tried the latest version? Most of the issues with key verification have been resolved (and now having users you haven't verified isn't as big of a scary warning as it was in the past -- in fact, I believe the default is that there isn't a warning unless there is a device present which a verified user hasn't signed). Also now there are per-account identities which are used to sign devices (the ever-elusive "cross-signing" feature), so you only need to verify a user once.
- Arathorn 6y ago
  Have you tried since we relaunched encryption and turned it on by default 2 weeks ago? The UX has completely been rewritten and it should now be transparent - see https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing-is-here/ https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing.... edit: To be clear, we no longer nag whenever there's an unverified login present - and unverified logins should increasingly be a thing of the past anyway given we now have cross-signing and so let users verify their own sessions at login.
  - danmur 6y ago
    I have and it's now at the point where I can recommend it to my family :) (with e2e, the UX otherwise I found fine) edit: also, congratulations, really hope matrix can get the market share it deserves
    - Arathorn 6y ago
      thanks :D
  - erdii 6y ago
    Wait... Naive question: shouldn't you, especially in this case, still nag the account owner about his own unverified sessions? What if a bad-actor homeserver slides in a new session to snoop around? BTW: I absolutely love the cross-signing move and riot/matrix in general! :) Thanks for your great work on this!
    - Open-Sourcery 6y ago
      AFAIK as more and more chats become encrypted (as it is the default for private rooms) then a rogue server operator wont to be able to snoop because they can't decrypt the messages unless you go through the verification process. And this aside, there are are few unobtrusive, but noticeable icons letting you know that you have an unverified session.
    - Arathorn 6y ago
      We do nag, in that all the green shields will suddenly go bright red. But we don't block the user from being able to send messages until they've resolved the problem. It's possible we'll reintroduce this once cross-signing has been fully adopted though; it's tricky because we need to distinguish between encrypted rooms where you simply don't care if random users have unverified slides... versus ones where it's a disaster if an unverified session slides in. Finding the right UX for that is tough, but we think the current balance is an improvement.
      - erdii 6y ago
- oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
  No offense, but this comment is outdated since the recent UX overhaul. You should check it out sometime.
  - tmikaeld 6y ago
    The UX overhaul was two weeks ago, I don't check Riot website daily.
    - oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
      I was hoping not to come off as unreasonable. Just wanted to make it clear to everyone that things have changed while being terse.
- boudin 6y ago
  For me the main issue is the battery usage of Riot fdroid which is way too high (i don't know if the google play version have the same issue). Last time i tried it was using more than 50% of my battery just by sitting in the background.
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    is this on Riot or RiotX on Android? All dev in the last year has been on RiotX, which should be an unrecognisably better app and will shortly replace Riot on Android (hopefully end of June).
    - morceauxdebois 6y ago
      Completely unrelated but are there any plans for setting a explicit content filter for riot? At the moment on RiotX you only need to scroll down 7 times in the room directory on matrix.org to see rooms dedicated to sexual content. I think it would be beneficial for broader mass adoption.
      - Arathorn 6y ago
        Yup. 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... is the sort of direction this work is going; meanwhile we manually try to keep the matrix.org public directory uncontroversial.
    - boudin 6y ago
      Sorry, i missed you comment. It's both for riot and riotx. Reading at opened issues on riotx though it seems that the approach to solve this would be to add server side events
- grizzles 6y ago
  Security/crypto usability has a tragedy of the commons type underinvestment problem. No one does it well. You can have beautiful designs but it's pretty much impossible to monetize them because crypto exists at such a fundamental level, so nothing ever evolves. Exempli gratia, ~10 years of blockchain apps/investment have passed and I still use vim to hand edit my ~/.ssh/known_hosts file.
TekMol 6y ago
Has this ever worked out? 1: A new technology is being worked on by enthusiasts. Nobody knows if it will get mainstream traction or not. 2: A company puts in a siginificant amount of money to accelerate development and marketing. 3: The new technology gains mainstream traction. Two examples I can think of for point 1 are Linux and PHP. I think both grew without money coming in, right?
- lwansbrough 6y ago
  I think you could argue that the is the story of many popular open source projects that were developed first by employees of large companies: React, Go, JavaScript, TensorFlow come to mind.
- morsch 6y ago
  Those criteria are so vague that they could apply to all technologies; or none of them. What separates a tech from another, who's considered to be a enthusiast and who isn't, what is traction and when is it mainstream, at what point does a pile of money stop being insignificant, ...
- nicoburns 6y ago
  The internet itself?
- Arathorn 6y ago
  The Web & Netscape? At least, this is the pattern we're trying to copy with Matrix & New Vector. (Minus the AOL bit :/)
- photomatt 6y ago
  WordPress itself.
skbohra123 6y ago
Reading the headline I thought Matrix is acquiring Automattic.
dang 6y ago
We changed the URL from https://matrix.org/blog/2020/05/21/welcoming-automattic-to-matrix https://matrix.org/blog/2020/05/21/welcoming-automattic-to-m... to an article that gives more background. (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23256180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23256180)
- the_duke 6y ago
  Weird change to me. The official post is concise and contains all of the important information, while the Techcrunch "article" is mostly just a string of rambling quotes with filler sentences. Techcrunch has horrible quality in general, and is only accessible in Europe through a basically malicious tracking opt out. Since when are low effort aggregators preferred over the original source/announcement? The TC article would be just fine as a comment...
- gravitas 6y ago
  I disagree with this editorialization. You have driven clicks away from the source website (content origin) over to a 3rd party entity running ads and writing their own narrative "Automattic pumps..."). uBlock has blocked 31 (actually, 38 and counting - dynamic while open - oops, up to 41 now) intrusive ads/trackers on your new link to a commercial website, and zero on the original link to the source of information. I do not want this as a reader and feel given the subject matter (privacy, e2e chats, etc.) that this move is not in the best interests of the people reading this link or article.
  - dang 6y ago
    Generally we prefer original sources, of course (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but corporate press releases are special in a bad way. They tend not to contain background or interesting detail. They are written in bland PR language that surely every intelligent reader finds gross. (I'm by no means saying that media articles are great, but PR language is truly the bottom of the barrel.) Whatever is interesting in a new development, they often obscure. They lead to more generic discussion, which is worse discussion for HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20generic%20discussion&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). So they're more or less deprecated here. I hear you about the ads etc. and agree in principle, but it's a separate issue. That's how media work right now. We may not like it but it doesn't mean we should bite our nose off to spite them. Btw, it's possible that I made the wrong call in this case. I didn't look closely either at the PR release or at the TC article—I just skimmed them. But the above is the heuristic we use, and I'm pretty sure it's the right one for HN.
xondono 6y ago
Can someone give the “elevator pitch” of what sets Matrix apart?
- bertman 6y ago
  Apart from what? Compared to xmpp: Marketing mostly.
  - oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
    XMPP vs Matrix is a really interesting discussion. I don't think marketing is the main difference though, I think most developers would prefer to work with Matrix and the user experience is much better. Here's a decent past discussion that also links to older discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12880860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12880860
  - xondono 6y ago
    I’m just not “in the know” to see if this is the case, but I just found myself taking a look at the site and thinking “what’s new about this?”
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    From a technical perspective, Matrix & XMPP are about as different as you can get. It's not just a marketing thing. Matrix is a decentralised encrypted conversation store; where all conversation history gets replicated across all the participating servers/nodes. It's a bit like Git, or NNTP (Usenet) or possibly IMAP, depending on how you squint. XMPP is a message-passing protocol; where stanzas get passed between servers/nodes. It's a bit like SMTP or SIP. There are a bunch of other differences philosophically (Matrix is one big monolithic versioned spec; XMPP is a cloud of XEPs, etc) too. The only similarity in the end is that you can use both to build chat systems (and you can use both to build a bunch of other things too - e.g. IOT use cases). Another way of thinking of it is SVG versus Canvas. Or OpenGL versus a Scene Graph library (Open Inventor, or whatever that's become now). Sure you can use both to draw pretty pictures, but architecturally they couldn't be more different.
- benparsons 6y ago
Ebenus 6y ago
With E2E encryption in place by default is there any real advantage in using Signal instead of Riot client for everyday communication with my friends? Riot desktop app is definitely more polished and customizable, video quality on all of my devices also seems to be a lot better. Surprisingly the only thing that I am really missing is the ability to use custom sticker packs which got added to Signal a few months ago.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  A short while ago (maybe 2 months?) I tried an audio call from Android and while I don't remember the details, the experience was bad enough that we both agreed to not do that again and use Signal in the future. RiotX Android doesn't support calls at all according to the Play store page, while the old Riot Android client doesn't support cross-signing, search doesn't work, and it overall feels unpolished. It's still very much beta software.
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    VoIP has historically been a second class citizen in Riot, but we're trying to fix that right now. The implementation in RiotX is in mid flight up at https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/compare/feature/voip?expand=1 https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/compare/feature/v... and Riot Android will be killed off shortly in favour of RiotX.
- bilal4hmed 6y ago
  I think they had more metadata collection than signal mainly due to the design. They were making progress on it however, but I dont know the status of the work.
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    If you don't have any servers, you don't collect any metadata ;) We're playing with this at https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/dip_p2p_matrix/ https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/dip_p2p_matrix/ and live at https://p2p.riot.im https://p2p.riot.im (albeit very alpha)
jondubois 6y ago
This will not work. There are no incentives for different groups of people to collaborate on a single shared communication standard. The incentive is for entities to keep data to themselves. Also, this standard is too complex and unclear. Complex standards which try to bring together many different technologies under one abstraction never seem to work. Also, universal standards are not necessarily a good thing. Decentralization with multiple competing tools and standards is good as it provides redundancy and opportunities for specialization.
- ijpsud 6y ago
  > This will not work. They seem to be doing fine: ~10.0M global visible accounts ~2.5M messages per day ~4.5M unbridged accounts ~500K unbridged messages per day ~2.1M rooms that Matrix.org participates in ~20,000 federated servers ~3000 msgs/s out, ~30 msgs/s in on Matrix.org ~400 projects building on Matrix ~70 companies building on Matrix https://matrix.org/faq/ https://matrix.org/faq/ They're up to 20k visible servers from about 5.5k servers in September 2018, and if you look here: https://youtu.be/1TPICntbC5w?t=1692 https://youtu.be/1TPICntbC5w?t=1692 you can see the growth curve looks pretty good. > Also, universal standards are not necessarily a good thing. Decentralization with multiple competing tools and standards is good Matrix explicitly doesn't try to be "the one true standard". That's the whole idea of their bridging model: https://youtu.be/1TPICntbC5w?t=296 https://youtu.be/1TPICntbC5w?t=296
  - Markoff 6y ago
    10M accounts with 2M rooms sounds odd, any explanation?
    - detaro 6y ago
      What seems odd about that?
    - Arathorn 6y ago
      10M (nowadays 16.8M) is the total number of matrix IDs we can see from matrix.org based on phone-home stats from Synapse. 2M (nowadays 5.18M) is the total number of matrix rooms from Synapse. The ratio is about what we'd expect - there's a mix of DMs, private rooms, and massive public rooms; the DMs will dominate, hence this ratio. Every conversation in Matrix happens in a "room" (even DMs), under the hood, which might be the point of confusion here.
david_draco 6y ago
I wish they would help fix/maintain the Matrix-Purple bridge, which would allow more people to use riot servers with clients such as pidgin. https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix/issues/95 https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix/issues/95
- benparsons 6y ago
  libpurple bridging support is being achieved through matrix-bifröst (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-bifrost https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-bifrost), this is via node-purple.
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    Much confusion here. There are three different Matrix projects related to libpurple: https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix is a very basic proof-of-concept PRPL plugin that lets a libpurple client like Pidgin or Adium or Purism's Chatty connect to Matrix. We wrote it as a demo to inspire others hoping that someone from the Pidgin community might pick it up and polish it, but sadly there hasn't been much progress. We don't have bandwidth to finish it off ourselves. Then there was matrix-appservice-purple (https://github.com/matrix-org/node-purple/tree/f5ad4ef7989046bb1c1e963a0a7510737d527eef/appservice https://github.com/matrix-org/node-purple/tree/f5ad4ef798904...), which was a proof of concept bridge using node-purple which let Matrix connect to anything that libpurple can speak. We used it to demo bridging from Matrix into Skype via the skypeweb PRPL - but it was a very fragile quick hack demo. Then this was replaced by Bifrost, a proper production-grade bridge engine: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-bifrost https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-bifrost. It supports different plugins for the bridging, one of which is libpurple via node-purple (although most people use it as an XMPP bridge, via the xmpp.js plugin). This lets you connect from Matrix into any protocol supported by libpurple - effectively an equivalent of Bitlbee, but for Matrix rather than IRC.
7532yahoogmail 6y ago
Off topic but the language here ... What is it about it that makes it plastic? For example it employs the phrases "that said" and "not least" which are generic, throw aways. New projects are a kind of success itself so we expect the principals to be ebullient. But the prose is over the top. It gushes. Quantum computing wasn't invented here. It's the IT corporate form of Hollywood but in words: Another theoretically innvoative industry except it isn't: It largely can't make an original film. The older I get, the more I am in agreement with English Profs: use a better adjective, could you? Don't repeat. Avoid generic over used phrasing. In short: is it too much to ask that your language had a pulse? Game? Personality?
rambojazz 6y ago
Excuse me... what am I missing here? Is this just some sort of donation or does Matrix have plans to make money (how?)?
- Arathorn 6y ago
  It's not a donation to the Matrix.org Foundation, it's an equity investment in New Vector (https://vector.im https://vector.im), the startup that the folks who created Matrix began in order to make money to support Matrix development. New Vector makes money by selling Matrix hosting (https://modular.im https://modular.im) and providing consulting/support/services to large folks building on Matrix.
Boulth 6y ago
VC money mixed with open source software again. It didn't end well for Keybase. I hope Matrix has a monetization strategy. Edit: for people interested there are company docs at https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10873661/filing-history https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10873661/filing-h... eg. "25 Mar 2020 Total exemption full accounts" document (2.2) shows a yearly loss of almost 2M pounds. Edit 2: it seems Matrix people no longer control 50% of their company shares, or I'm reading it wrong: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10873661/persons-with-significant-control https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10873661/persons-...
- mawalu 6y ago
  But keybase still has their server software that people depend on and that isn't open source. Worst that could happen with New Vector is that they stop paying developers to work for the Matrix.org foundation but that would not prevent anyone from continuing to use the existing software
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    Yeah, we (Matrix) have a fundamentally different model to Keybase. The Matrix.org Foundation (https://matrix.org/foundation https://matrix.org/foundation) is an independent neutral entity that safeguards the protocol and ecosystem, with the mission to protect it from being sabotaged by any actors in the ecosystem (including New Vector - https://vector.im https://vector.im, the startup founded by the team who created Matrix). Even if New Vector did go evil (e.g: bought by EvilCorp; coerced into adding backdoors; tried to monetise user data/metadata; tried to relicense opensource stuff as proprietary; tried to add core functionality as paid-only) then both the Foundation and the wider ecosystem would fight back; rejecting the obnoxious changes to the spec, or simply going and supporting an alternative provider. Meanwhile, if New Vector did implode, the team could still go elsewhere and keep working on Matrix if they wanted to - and there are an increasing number of folks who might hire them to do so. <plug>e.g. Automattic's new Matrix job opening! https://automattic.com/work-with-us/matrix-integrations-engineer/</plug> https://automattic.com/work-with-us/matrix-integrations-engi... edit: the monetisation strategy for New Vector is selling Matrix hosting (https://modular.im https://modular.im) and helping out big folks like Governments who want to jump on board Matrix. While the company is certainly not profitable yet, it certainly has a path to being sustainable (otherwise folks like Automattic wouldn't invest!)
olah_1 6y ago
> Imagine if every WP site automatically came with its own Matrix room or community? Imagine if all content in WP automatically was published into Matrix as well as the Web?… Imagine there was an excellent Matrix client available as a WordPress plugin for embedding realtime chat into your site?” I want to imagine it, but I really struggle to. Matrix is just too slow, bloated, and heavy. I cannot even fathom what a snappy experience with Matrix would be like. I look forward to something like this if it happens though!
- justaj 6y ago
  The main Matrix.org homeserver is pretty slow because it's usually overloaded: https://matrixservers.anchel.nl/783115140 https://matrixservers.anchel.nl/783115140 This is IMO mainly because they've stuck with the main implementation of the homeserver (Synapse) being written in Python. Had they've gone through with developing Dendrite as the main implementation, or perhaps even gone with one written in Rust, all of this would feel much snappier. In a way, Dendrite is now being primed to be compiled to WASM and used in a p2p setup of Matrix, but hopefully we'll also see it running on servers instead of Synapse one day. Although, to be fair, you can't really blame them too much though, they're a casualty to the Coronavirus effects like a lot of similar services are currently.
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    There are a bunch of Dendrites already running serverside on the public network there - it's almost out of alpha. Meanwhile Conduit (http://conduit.rs/ http://conduit.rs/) is a new implementation in Rust which is making spectacular progress (it's overtaken Dendrite in some places already). Both of them are unrecognisably snappy, relative to Synapse - even when Synapse isn't completely overloaded.
    - justaj 6y ago
      Very interesting! I hadn't heard of Conduit before. So, if that's available, why not use Conduit as a candidate for the p2p-matrix? Wouldn't it be a better choice than Dendrite? AFAIK Mozilla is already heavily pushing Rust into the WASM territory so perhaps that would make a lot of sense.
vertex-four 6y ago
Every individual Matrix room is a multi-master, non-ACID database which uses its own data as security- and privacy-related configuration. Given how hard this is to get right, I'd really, really like to see Jepsen tests and a security audit done on more than the crypto aspect of Matrix.
- Arathorn 6y ago
  There's a massive academic paper dedicated to Matrix's theoretical correctness (and the correctness of the Synapse implementation) going to be published in a few weeks. Wish it was already out, because it's spectacular :) That said, nobody's done any Jepsen tests yet as far as we know, but we'd really welcome them!
  - vertex-four 6y ago
    Getting a Jepsen test done involves paying Aphyr for it, which I imagine you could do with this lovely new investment. Information here: https://jepsen.io/analyses https://jepsen.io/analyses
    - Arathorn 6y ago
      The first thing we earmarked the new investment for is doing a proper audit on the full stack - not just libolm (the e2ee ratchet implementation), but ideally an end-to-end audit of a typical best practice setup (e.g. E2EE-enabled registration/login/msg flows for Riot Web <-> Synapse <-> Riot Web), so we can then stamp a LTS label on it. We'll want to finish sorting teething problems on the new E2EE stuff though, as well as the scaling mess on Synapse first. Sounds like Jepsen could certainly be part of that; we'll ping Aphyr when the time is right.
  - cvwright 6y ago
    That is great news! Please post a link to a preprint when you can.
  - Well_hello 6y ago
    looking forward to that
Markoff 6y ago
is there some Matrix Android app with SMS support to replace Signal?
ValentineC 6y ago
> Talking of moving, Hodgson says he expects Automattic to move over from Slack to Riot following this investment. Here's hoping Automattic has enough influence to move the WordPress.org open source and community discussions (which are currently hosted on Slack, but used to take place on IRC) to Matrix too.
- Arathorn 6y ago
  That's the hope - the pressure is on the Riot/Matrix side to ensure that the transition is a no-brainer in terms of UX :)
  - buboard 6y ago
    Are we currently able to easily integrate an existing community (usernames) to a matrix server?
dnpp123 6y ago
Let's hope they use that money to make synapse more lightweight... Synapse plus a few bridge just eats all my server's resources. Go wonder why they chose to do it in python...
acd 6y ago
Glad to see this, I hope open source communication will be the preferred first choice. Why? openness Archiving Enabling access to all IRC used to be used open I hope Matrix and IRCv3 takes over.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tmwed 6y ago
i think this is great, VC $ aside. my biggest issue with contributing to Riot or Matrix ecosystem from a Client UI perspective is (from what i remember) the weirdness of the Riot client being half separated into two repos. it makes the barrier to entry seem too high. my hope is that this investment can resolve these concerns

203 points by ptman 6y ago

Good news! Now if only they can figure out how to make Riot usable with Encryption enabled without pulling your hair out every time you enter a room or chat with non-matching keys. While Riot has a lot of features, it is also not easy for new users. I've tried to convert at least 10 persons and none of them use it any more, citing not being able to figure out how to use it or simply not having the time to waste figuring it out. It needs to be intuitive out of the box, how to contact people, how to find a room, how to chat.

cyphar 6y ago
They've been working on that for quite a while and just had a major update to Riot (Web/X on Android/iOS) -- E2EE is now on by default. Have you tried the latest version? Most of the issues with key verification have been resolved (and now having users you haven't verified isn't as big of a scary warning as it was in the past -- in fact, I believe the default is that there isn't a warning unless there is a device present which a verified user hasn't signed). Also now there are per-account identities which are used to sign devices (the ever-elusive "cross-signing" feature), so you only need to verify a user once.
Arathorn 6y ago
Have you tried since we relaunched encryption and turned it on by default 2 weeks ago? The UX has completely been rewritten and it should now be transparent - see https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing-is-here/ https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing.... edit: To be clear, we no longer nag whenever there's an unverified login present - and unverified logins should increasingly be a thing of the past anyway given we now have cross-signing and so let users verify their own sessions at login.
- danmur 6y ago
  I have and it's now at the point where I can recommend it to my family :) (with e2e, the UX otherwise I found fine) edit: also, congratulations, really hope matrix can get the market share it deserves
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    thanks :D
- erdii 6y ago
  Wait... Naive question: shouldn't you, especially in this case, still nag the account owner about his own unverified sessions? What if a bad-actor homeserver slides in a new session to snoop around? BTW: I absolutely love the cross-signing move and riot/matrix in general! :) Thanks for your great work on this!
  - Open-Sourcery 6y ago
    AFAIK as more and more chats become encrypted (as it is the default for private rooms) then a rogue server operator wont to be able to snoop because they can't decrypt the messages unless you go through the verification process. And this aside, there are are few unobtrusive, but noticeable icons letting you know that you have an unverified session.
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    We do nag, in that all the green shields will suddenly go bright red. But we don't block the user from being able to send messages until they've resolved the problem. It's possible we'll reintroduce this once cross-signing has been fully adopted though; it's tricky because we need to distinguish between encrypted rooms where you simply don't care if random users have unverified slides... versus ones where it's a disaster if an unverified session slides in. Finding the right UX for that is tough, but we think the current balance is an improvement.
    - erdii 6y ago
oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
No offense, but this comment is outdated since the recent UX overhaul. You should check it out sometime.
- tmikaeld 6y ago
  The UX overhaul was two weeks ago, I don't check Riot website daily.
  - oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
    I was hoping not to come off as unreasonable. Just wanted to make it clear to everyone that things have changed while being terse.
boudin 6y ago
For me the main issue is the battery usage of Riot fdroid which is way too high (i don't know if the google play version have the same issue). Last time i tried it was using more than 50% of my battery just by sitting in the background.
- Arathorn 6y ago
  is this on Riot or RiotX on Android? All dev in the last year has been on RiotX, which should be an unrecognisably better app and will shortly replace Riot on Android (hopefully end of June).
  - morceauxdebois 6y ago
    Completely unrelated but are there any plans for setting a explicit content filter for riot? At the moment on RiotX you only need to scroll down 7 times in the room directory on matrix.org to see rooms dedicated to sexual content. I think it would be beneficial for broader mass adoption.
    - Arathorn 6y ago
      Yup. 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... is the sort of direction this work is going; meanwhile we manually try to keep the matrix.org public directory uncontroversial.
  - boudin 6y ago
    Sorry, i missed you comment. It's both for riot and riotx. Reading at opened issues on riotx though it seems that the approach to solve this would be to add server side events
grizzles 6y ago
Security/crypto usability has a tragedy of the commons type underinvestment problem. No one does it well. You can have beautiful designs but it's pretty much impossible to monetize them because crypto exists at such a fundamental level, so nothing ever evolves. Exempli gratia, ~10 years of blockchain apps/investment have passed and I still use vim to hand edit my ~/.ssh/known_hosts file.

TekMol 6y ago

Has this ever worked out? 1: A new technology is being worked on by enthusiasts. Nobody knows if it will get mainstream traction or not. 2: A company puts in a siginificant amount of money to accelerate development and marketing. 3: The new technology gains mainstream traction. Two examples I can think of for point 1 are Linux and PHP. I think both grew without money coming in, right?

lwansbrough 6y ago
I think you could argue that the is the story of many popular open source projects that were developed first by employees of large companies: React, Go, JavaScript, TensorFlow come to mind.
morsch 6y ago
Those criteria are so vague that they could apply to all technologies; or none of them. What separates a tech from another, who's considered to be a enthusiast and who isn't, what is traction and when is it mainstream, at what point does a pile of money stop being insignificant, ...
nicoburns 6y ago
The internet itself?
Arathorn 6y ago
The Web & Netscape? At least, this is the pattern we're trying to copy with Matrix & New Vector. (Minus the AOL bit :/)
photomatt 6y ago
WordPress itself.

skbohra123 6y ago

Reading the headline I thought Matrix is acquiring Automattic.

dang 6y ago

We changed the URL from https://matrix.org/blog/2020/05/21/welcoming-automattic-to-matrix https://matrix.org/blog/2020/05/21/welcoming-automattic-to-m... to an article that gives more background. (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23256180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23256180)

the_duke 6y ago
Weird change to me. The official post is concise and contains all of the important information, while the Techcrunch "article" is mostly just a string of rambling quotes with filler sentences. Techcrunch has horrible quality in general, and is only accessible in Europe through a basically malicious tracking opt out. Since when are low effort aggregators preferred over the original source/announcement? The TC article would be just fine as a comment...
gravitas 6y ago
I disagree with this editorialization. You have driven clicks away from the source website (content origin) over to a 3rd party entity running ads and writing their own narrative "Automattic pumps..."). uBlock has blocked 31 (actually, 38 and counting - dynamic while open - oops, up to 41 now) intrusive ads/trackers on your new link to a commercial website, and zero on the original link to the source of information. I do not want this as a reader and feel given the subject matter (privacy, e2e chats, etc.) that this move is not in the best interests of the people reading this link or article.
- dang 6y ago
  Generally we prefer original sources, of course (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but corporate press releases are special in a bad way. They tend not to contain background or interesting detail. They are written in bland PR language that surely every intelligent reader finds gross. (I'm by no means saying that media articles are great, but PR language is truly the bottom of the barrel.) Whatever is interesting in a new development, they often obscure. They lead to more generic discussion, which is worse discussion for HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20generic%20discussion&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). So they're more or less deprecated here. I hear you about the ads etc. and agree in principle, but it's a separate issue. That's how media work right now. We may not like it but it doesn't mean we should bite our nose off to spite them. Btw, it's possible that I made the wrong call in this case. I didn't look closely either at the PR release or at the TC article—I just skimmed them. But the above is the heuristic we use, and I'm pretty sure it's the right one for HN.

xondono 6y ago

Can someone give the “elevator pitch” of what sets Matrix apart?

bertman 6y ago
Apart from what? Compared to xmpp: Marketing mostly.
- oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
  XMPP vs Matrix is a really interesting discussion. I don't think marketing is the main difference though, I think most developers would prefer to work with Matrix and the user experience is much better. Here's a decent past discussion that also links to older discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12880860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12880860
- xondono 6y ago
  I’m just not “in the know” to see if this is the case, but I just found myself taking a look at the site and thinking “what’s new about this?”
- Arathorn 6y ago
  From a technical perspective, Matrix & XMPP are about as different as you can get. It's not just a marketing thing. Matrix is a decentralised encrypted conversation store; where all conversation history gets replicated across all the participating servers/nodes. It's a bit like Git, or NNTP (Usenet) or possibly IMAP, depending on how you squint. XMPP is a message-passing protocol; where stanzas get passed between servers/nodes. It's a bit like SMTP or SIP. There are a bunch of other differences philosophically (Matrix is one big monolithic versioned spec; XMPP is a cloud of XEPs, etc) too. The only similarity in the end is that you can use both to build chat systems (and you can use both to build a bunch of other things too - e.g. IOT use cases). Another way of thinking of it is SVG versus Canvas. Or OpenGL versus a Scene Graph library (Open Inventor, or whatever that's become now). Sure you can use both to draw pretty pictures, but architecturally they couldn't be more different.
benparsons 6y ago

Ebenus 6y ago

With E2E encryption in place by default is there any real advantage in using Signal instead of Riot client for everyday communication with my friends? Riot desktop app is definitely more polished and customizable, video quality on all of my devices also seems to be a lot better. Surprisingly the only thing that I am really missing is the ability to use custom sticker packs which got added to Signal a few months ago.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
A short while ago (maybe 2 months?) I tried an audio call from Android and while I don't remember the details, the experience was bad enough that we both agreed to not do that again and use Signal in the future. RiotX Android doesn't support calls at all according to the Play store page, while the old Riot Android client doesn't support cross-signing, search doesn't work, and it overall feels unpolished. It's still very much beta software.
- Arathorn 6y ago
  VoIP has historically been a second class citizen in Riot, but we're trying to fix that right now. The implementation in RiotX is in mid flight up at https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/compare/feature/voip?expand=1 https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/compare/feature/v... and Riot Android will be killed off shortly in favour of RiotX.
bilal4hmed 6y ago
I think they had more metadata collection than signal mainly due to the design. They were making progress on it however, but I dont know the status of the work.
- Arathorn 6y ago
  If you don't have any servers, you don't collect any metadata ;) We're playing with this at https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/dip_p2p_matrix/ https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/dip_p2p_matrix/ and live at https://p2p.riot.im https://p2p.riot.im (albeit very alpha)

jondubois 6y ago

This will not work. There are no incentives for different groups of people to collaborate on a single shared communication standard. The incentive is for entities to keep data to themselves. Also, this standard is too complex and unclear. Complex standards which try to bring together many different technologies under one abstraction never seem to work. Also, universal standards are not necessarily a good thing. Decentralization with multiple competing tools and standards is good as it provides redundancy and opportunities for specialization.

ijpsud 6y ago
> This will not work. They seem to be doing fine: ~10.0M global visible accounts ~2.5M messages per day ~4.5M unbridged accounts ~500K unbridged messages per day ~2.1M rooms that Matrix.org participates in ~20,000 federated servers ~3000 msgs/s out, ~30 msgs/s in on Matrix.org ~400 projects building on Matrix ~70 companies building on Matrix https://matrix.org/faq/ https://matrix.org/faq/ They're up to 20k visible servers from about 5.5k servers in September 2018, and if you look here: https://youtu.be/1TPICntbC5w?t=1692 https://youtu.be/1TPICntbC5w?t=1692 you can see the growth curve looks pretty good. > Also, universal standards are not necessarily a good thing. Decentralization with multiple competing tools and standards is good Matrix explicitly doesn't try to be "the one true standard". That's the whole idea of their bridging model: https://youtu.be/1TPICntbC5w?t=296 https://youtu.be/1TPICntbC5w?t=296
- Markoff 6y ago
  10M accounts with 2M rooms sounds odd, any explanation?
  - detaro 6y ago
    What seems odd about that?
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    10M (nowadays 16.8M) is the total number of matrix IDs we can see from matrix.org based on phone-home stats from Synapse. 2M (nowadays 5.18M) is the total number of matrix rooms from Synapse. The ratio is about what we'd expect - there's a mix of DMs, private rooms, and massive public rooms; the DMs will dominate, hence this ratio. Every conversation in Matrix happens in a "room" (even DMs), under the hood, which might be the point of confusion here.

david_draco 6y ago

I wish they would help fix/maintain the Matrix-Purple bridge, which would allow more people to use riot servers with clients such as pidgin. https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix/issues/95 https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix/issues/95

benparsons 6y ago
libpurple bridging support is being achieved through matrix-bifröst (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-bifrost https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-bifrost), this is via node-purple.
- Arathorn 6y ago
  Much confusion here. There are three different Matrix projects related to libpurple: https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix is a very basic proof-of-concept PRPL plugin that lets a libpurple client like Pidgin or Adium or Purism's Chatty connect to Matrix. We wrote it as a demo to inspire others hoping that someone from the Pidgin community might pick it up and polish it, but sadly there hasn't been much progress. We don't have bandwidth to finish it off ourselves. Then there was matrix-appservice-purple (https://github.com/matrix-org/node-purple/tree/f5ad4ef7989046bb1c1e963a0a7510737d527eef/appservice https://github.com/matrix-org/node-purple/tree/f5ad4ef798904...), which was a proof of concept bridge using node-purple which let Matrix connect to anything that libpurple can speak. We used it to demo bridging from Matrix into Skype via the skypeweb PRPL - but it was a very fragile quick hack demo. Then this was replaced by Bifrost, a proper production-grade bridge engine: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-bifrost https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-bifrost. It supports different plugins for the bridging, one of which is libpurple via node-purple (although most people use it as an XMPP bridge, via the xmpp.js plugin). This lets you connect from Matrix into any protocol supported by libpurple - effectively an equivalent of Bitlbee, but for Matrix rather than IRC.

7532yahoogmail 6y ago

Off topic but the language here ... What is it about it that makes it plastic? For example it employs the phrases "that said" and "not least" which are generic, throw aways. New projects are a kind of success itself so we expect the principals to be ebullient. But the prose is over the top. It gushes. Quantum computing wasn't invented here. It's the IT corporate form of Hollywood but in words: Another theoretically innvoative industry except it isn't: It largely can't make an original film. The older I get, the more I am in agreement with English Profs: use a better adjective, could you? Don't repeat. Avoid generic over used phrasing. In short: is it too much to ask that your language had a pulse? Game? Personality?

rambojazz 6y ago

Excuse me... what am I missing here? Is this just some sort of donation or does Matrix have plans to make money (how?)?

Arathorn 6y ago
It's not a donation to the Matrix.org Foundation, it's an equity investment in New Vector (https://vector.im https://vector.im), the startup that the folks who created Matrix began in order to make money to support Matrix development. New Vector makes money by selling Matrix hosting (https://modular.im https://modular.im) and providing consulting/support/services to large folks building on Matrix.

Boulth 6y ago

VC money mixed with open source software again. It didn't end well for Keybase. I hope Matrix has a monetization strategy. Edit: for people interested there are company docs at https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10873661/filing-history https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10873661/filing-h... eg. "25 Mar 2020 Total exemption full accounts" document (2.2) shows a yearly loss of almost 2M pounds. Edit 2: it seems Matrix people no longer control 50% of their company shares, or I'm reading it wrong: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10873661/persons-with-significant-control https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10873661/persons-...

mawalu 6y ago
But keybase still has their server software that people depend on and that isn't open source. Worst that could happen with New Vector is that they stop paying developers to work for the Matrix.org foundation but that would not prevent anyone from continuing to use the existing software
- Arathorn 6y ago
  Yeah, we (Matrix) have a fundamentally different model to Keybase. The Matrix.org Foundation (https://matrix.org/foundation https://matrix.org/foundation) is an independent neutral entity that safeguards the protocol and ecosystem, with the mission to protect it from being sabotaged by any actors in the ecosystem (including New Vector - https://vector.im https://vector.im, the startup founded by the team who created Matrix). Even if New Vector did go evil (e.g: bought by EvilCorp; coerced into adding backdoors; tried to monetise user data/metadata; tried to relicense opensource stuff as proprietary; tried to add core functionality as paid-only) then both the Foundation and the wider ecosystem would fight back; rejecting the obnoxious changes to the spec, or simply going and supporting an alternative provider. Meanwhile, if New Vector did implode, the team could still go elsewhere and keep working on Matrix if they wanted to - and there are an increasing number of folks who might hire them to do so. <plug>e.g. Automattic's new Matrix job opening! https://automattic.com/work-with-us/matrix-integrations-engineer/</plug> https://automattic.com/work-with-us/matrix-integrations-engi... edit: the monetisation strategy for New Vector is selling Matrix hosting (https://modular.im https://modular.im) and helping out big folks like Governments who want to jump on board Matrix. While the company is certainly not profitable yet, it certainly has a path to being sustainable (otherwise folks like Automattic wouldn't invest!)

olah_1 6y ago

> Imagine if every WP site automatically came with its own Matrix room or community? Imagine if all content in WP automatically was published into Matrix as well as the Web?… Imagine there was an excellent Matrix client available as a WordPress plugin for embedding realtime chat into your site?” I want to imagine it, but I really struggle to. Matrix is just too slow, bloated, and heavy. I cannot even fathom what a snappy experience with Matrix would be like. I look forward to something like this if it happens though!

justaj 6y ago
The main Matrix.org homeserver is pretty slow because it's usually overloaded: https://matrixservers.anchel.nl/783115140 https://matrixservers.anchel.nl/783115140 This is IMO mainly because they've stuck with the main implementation of the homeserver (Synapse) being written in Python. Had they've gone through with developing Dendrite as the main implementation, or perhaps even gone with one written in Rust, all of this would feel much snappier. In a way, Dendrite is now being primed to be compiled to WASM and used in a p2p setup of Matrix, but hopefully we'll also see it running on servers instead of Synapse one day. Although, to be fair, you can't really blame them too much though, they're a casualty to the Coronavirus effects like a lot of similar services are currently.
- Arathorn 6y ago
  There are a bunch of Dendrites already running serverside on the public network there - it's almost out of alpha. Meanwhile Conduit (http://conduit.rs/ http://conduit.rs/) is a new implementation in Rust which is making spectacular progress (it's overtaken Dendrite in some places already). Both of them are unrecognisably snappy, relative to Synapse - even when Synapse isn't completely overloaded.
  - justaj 6y ago
    Very interesting! I hadn't heard of Conduit before. So, if that's available, why not use Conduit as a candidate for the p2p-matrix? Wouldn't it be a better choice than Dendrite? AFAIK Mozilla is already heavily pushing Rust into the WASM territory so perhaps that would make a lot of sense.

vertex-four 6y ago

Every individual Matrix room is a multi-master, non-ACID database which uses its own data as security- and privacy-related configuration. Given how hard this is to get right, I'd really, really like to see Jepsen tests and a security audit done on more than the crypto aspect of Matrix.

Arathorn 6y ago
There's a massive academic paper dedicated to Matrix's theoretical correctness (and the correctness of the Synapse implementation) going to be published in a few weeks. Wish it was already out, because it's spectacular :) That said, nobody's done any Jepsen tests yet as far as we know, but we'd really welcome them!
- vertex-four 6y ago
  Getting a Jepsen test done involves paying Aphyr for it, which I imagine you could do with this lovely new investment. Information here: https://jepsen.io/analyses https://jepsen.io/analyses
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    The first thing we earmarked the new investment for is doing a proper audit on the full stack - not just libolm (the e2ee ratchet implementation), but ideally an end-to-end audit of a typical best practice setup (e.g. E2EE-enabled registration/login/msg flows for Riot Web <-> Synapse <-> Riot Web), so we can then stamp a LTS label on it. We'll want to finish sorting teething problems on the new E2EE stuff though, as well as the scaling mess on Synapse first. Sounds like Jepsen could certainly be part of that; we'll ping Aphyr when the time is right.
- cvwright 6y ago
  That is great news! Please post a link to a preprint when you can.
- Well_hello 6y ago
  looking forward to that

Markoff 6y ago

is there some Matrix Android app with SMS support to replace Signal?

ValentineC 6y ago

> Talking of moving, Hodgson says he expects Automattic to move over from Slack to Riot following this investment. Here's hoping Automattic has enough influence to move the WordPress.org open source and community discussions (which are currently hosted on Slack, but used to take place on IRC) to Matrix too.

Arathorn 6y ago
That's the hope - the pressure is on the Riot/Matrix side to ensure that the transition is a no-brainer in terms of UX :)
- buboard 6y ago
  Are we currently able to easily integrate an existing community (usernames) to a matrix server?

dnpp123 6y ago

Let's hope they use that money to make synapse more lightweight... Synapse plus a few bridge just eats all my server's resources. Go wonder why they chose to do it in python...

acd 6y ago

Glad to see this, I hope open source communication will be the preferred first choice. Why? openness Archiving Enabling access to all IRC used to be used open I hope Matrix and IRCv3 takes over.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tmwed 6y ago

i think this is great, VC $ aside. my biggest issue with contributing to Riot or Matrix ecosystem from a Client UI perspective is (from what i remember) the weirdness of the Riot client being half separated into two repos. it makes the barrier to entry seem too high. my hope is that this investment can resolve these concerns