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Element wins deal to supply half a million licences to two German states
- jeremiahlee 6y agoDigital sovereignty is becoming differentiating. Open source, on servers you control, end-to-end encryption by default. This is how European SaaS can win.
- znpy 6y ago> on servers you control > SaaS that's not really a saas though. a managed services offering maybe, but that would be a differend type of business.
- neiljohnson 6y agoOne supports the other. Running high profile on premise solutions helps support the Matrix eco-system as a whole, especially if the installation federates. The SaaS offering means that smaller organisations can also get come onboard without going to extra expense of a large scale self hosted installation.
- jacobr1 6y agoLooks like things are driving towards a kind of "cloud escrow" or shared-management model. You grant a managed-serivces/saas company access to your cloud account to spin up resources. They do the day-to-day management, but you could bring it in-house or go to another firm at any time if they are no longer a good partner. In practice you get a SaaS product. But you actually have the assets of self-hosting.
- anoncake 6y agoIt is if you're a country.
- Proven 6y ago> can win That's not really a victory though, when it's something forced upon users by State. It's nothing but an undue burden and cost for users.
- sam_lowry_ 6y agoThat's why they renamed it. Welcome to hell! EU-funded projects suck the souls of tinkerers better than nazgûls.
- cecja 6y agoRight better get that VC money and sell to tencent.
- znpy 6y agovery good counter argument. However, to reply to GP: the full explaination for the rebranding is here: https://element.io/blog/the-world-is-changing/ https://element.io/blog/the-world-is-changing/ it was posted to HN some weeks ago.
- sam_lowry_ 6y agoWhat an ugly piece of copywriting ;-(
- fifnir 6y agoThe reds are coming, run!
- Proven 6y agoCorrect. Of course, also voted down to oblivion by the statist hordes of HN who've never seen a software or cloud subsidy they didn't like. The other day I even saw a call for a state owned Internet search service (haven't they learned anything from Obamacare's IT debacle!)
- sandGorgon 6y agodoes Element/Riot have private rooms/org-level permissions ? if i want to move my company from slack to element - can i have permissions at the company level (all rooms in a company) and on a per room level ?
- Akronymus 6y agoYou can set up a non federated matrix server where you can then control who gets access to what via invites to rooms and communities. So, you can kinda do it, altough it is probably not the best service for a 1:1 translation of a slack setup. But if you are willing to somewhat alter it, I am sure it'd end up with a overall better setup.
- neiljohnson 6y agoMany organisations have made this switch (and of course we use Element at Element for running the org). We do have support for org wide management in the form of the Communities feature, but we want to completely revamp it to make exactly what you are describing easier. It is the next big thing on the roadmap and I would expect it land in the next few months.
- Arathorn 6y agohttps://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc1772/proposals/1772-groups-as-rooms.md https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc177... is the plan for revamped communities, ftr
- anotherevan 6y agoMust admit, when setting up our company server I didn't even consider allowing it to federate as it just looked a bit to complicated, making it easy to get wrong and potentially have confidential information leak.
- hnarn 6y agoFor anyone interested in why it was renamed from Riot, znpy posted a comment under a now heavily downvoted comment below[1] that links to an explanation blog post[2]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23842974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23842974 [2]: https://element.io/blog/the-world-is-changing/ https://element.io/blog/the-world-is-changing/
- neiljohnson 6y agoMore related content here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23842179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23842179
- taneq 6y agoHonestly I think “riot” is pretty recognisable as a software company and it’s fair that they defend their brand against another software company. You wouldn’t expect to be able to trademark “epic.im” or “blizzard.im”.
- carstenhag 6y agoDifferent area of business (games vs chat program). But I see your point, all companies you mentioned have a messenger with mobile apps (AFAIK).
- gadders 6y agoI thought Element was Discord, not Slack?
- k__ 6y agoI thought Discord was an alternative to Slack and Element/Riot was an alternative to WhatsApp.
- CydeWeys 6y agoI wouldn't even call Discord/Slack/WhatsApp discrete categories of software anyway. They're all way more similar than they are different. So another entrant in the field doesn't need to be a X competitor vs a Y competitor; it can just be another messaging app that has a blend of functionalities available in other messaging apps.
- smichel17 6y agoMy opinion/analysis: Element (formerly Riot), Discord, and Slack are all irc successors; Signal, Whatsapp, and Snapchat are sms/mms successors. The differences used to be desktop vs mobile, primarily [semi]public group/community chats vs primarily private 1:1, and realtime with presence vs async. As technology has advanced, the differences have shrunk. I'd say the last real remaining difference is that the irc successors have named channels with granular permissions and static invite links, while the texting apps might have a group owner but otherwise give everyone full permissions, and people are usually added directly to the group (not invited). In short: the texting replacements are geared towards communication with friends (ie, based on who you're talking to), while the irc replacements are geared towards communication, possibly with strangers, based on what you're talking about.
- gadders 6y agoObviously more complicated than I thought :-)
- ryukafalz 6y agoTo throw another wrench into this: here’s another Matrix client, compatible with the same accounts you’d use in Element, with a UX more like what you’d expect from SMS/WhatsApp/etc: https://dittochat.org/ https://dittochat.org/ When it comes to open protocols, I think it’s a bit silly to say they’re “for” anything in particular; the protocol constrains their uses somewhat, but you can do whatever you want with them. I myself use Matrix for all of the above. (Also, I suspect if you added chat bubbles and invite auto-acceptance to Element you’d have people arguing that of course it’s meant for small group communication! UX seems to shape expectations about these things.)
- maelito 6y agoWithout threads, I can't advocate the use of Element yet to the communities that want to leave Slack (usually they use free Slack, then grow, then get stuck with a chat software with no history because it's too expensive to go premium). Mattermost has no threads either. RocketChat just implemented them in v3.4. Zulip has its own concept of threads, but Zulip frightens non-dev users in my experience.
- galgalesh 6y agoMattermost actually has threads, but their UI is a little bit more clunky than Slack. All the messages show up in the "main thread" like nornal but once you click on one of the threaded messages, you only see the messages of that thread.
- Shoue 6y agoIn my opinion that's less clunky than Slack because it gives you a good overview of what conversations are taking place in a channel, instead of scrolling up and seeing a 100 reply thread you missed. It's also how Flowdock does it, which has some of the best threading I've experienced in chat software.
- nemetroid 6y agoThe downside is that if there’s one thread with active discussion, everything else gets buried.
- jbister 6y agoI agree in principle that it's nice to be able to see the full conversations without clicking into a bunch of threads, but a problem that I have noticed when people use Mattermost is that they either forget or don't notice that people are using the thread feature and simply reply directly in the channel to an active thread. This makes it so that anyone who isn't looking at the channel loses track of the conversation. You could fix this by repeatedly telling anyone who does it wrong to do it right, but people simply can't make that mistake when the threads are collapsed by default. As things are now, the thread feature in Mattermost doesn't really help that much, because if you want to be really sure not to miss part of a conversation you need to keep a separate window with that channel open anyway instead of just having the thread open in the same window.
- est31 6y agoRegarding the headline, there isn't "the" German education system, it's 16 different systems, one per state. The German constitution puts education as responsibility of the states. In specific, the contract is for the two bordering German states of Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg.
- rob74 6y agoThanks for the clarification! Just wanted to ask about this and noticed that my question is already answered. So that's a combined population of ~4,8 million, which is only about 5,7 % of Germany's total of ~ 83 million...
- cxcorp 6y agoTo be fair, that's practically the population of Ireland.
- doener 6y agoElement's chat is part of the Matrix ecosytem used also by German federal agencies and Bundeswehr: https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/
- tannhaeuser 6y agoSlightly o/t but would anyone know an XMPP browser client? The focus here wouldn't be so much E2E encryption/OMEMO but having a persistent chat. Like in a simple traditional chat log (with the option to create new "elements", of course).
- iicc 6y agohttps://www.jsxc.org https://www.jsxc.org ?
- tannhaeuser 6y agoExactly what I had in mind, thanks. Could've found that myself really, but I'd thought I ask; maybe there are alternatives, or experiences to share with jsxc?
- evandrofisico 6y agothere is converse.js: https://github.com/conversejs/converse.js https://github.com/conversejs/converse.js
- mtgx 6y agoSuddenly, the idea that if the US backdoors its own encryption services then everyone will move to services hosted elsewhere is starting to look very realistic.
- yogthos 6y agoThis is a huge win for open chat protocols, and we really need an open protocol for chat communication to become a standard. The fact that most of the popular chat platforms are proprietary is a travesty. It’s especially painful nowadays where a lot of chat apps are implemented using Electron making them rather hefty in terms of resource usage. Having to run both Slack and Discord for example is pretty taxing. This problem wouldn’t exist using open protocols. I'm old enough to remember the days when you could use a single client to communicate over many networks. Proprietary protocols are the reason that's not possible anymore, and I sincerely hope that every single company peddling them goes out of business.
- devwastaken 6y agoDiscord exists because people are killed, stalked, and otherwise harassed from IP exposure. That's its 'be safe' purpose. It's not simply a chat service. You also have proxied video calls and VoIP. That in itself is far more expensive and resource heavy than decentralized hosters can do at scale. It's not about proprietary protocols, it's that we already had decentralized solutions that cant protect it's users. Centralization is a requirement at that point if you want it to be popular and scale.
- swiley 6y agoI thought discord shared your IP with chat room admins. I don’t remember very well.
- devwastaken 6y agoNo. You can be banned from individual servers by IP, but admins of those servers don't actually see it.
- nitrogen 6y agoI am not familiar with Discord's hosting model. Can you host a server on your own hardware, or are all servers run by Discord?
- exabrial 6y agoHilariously, we have the need for the opposite... SEC requires record keeping of written communication. HIPAA covered industries face a similar plight. There is no great chat solution for this... RocketChat is a mess, it used mongodb as a backend and the server side requires roughly 512mb of RAM per user. Mattermost is not much better, it also uses a terrible database choice and has similar scalability issues, and the license is a minefield. Both have major usability issues. Both crash a lot. I do appreciate E2E encryption for some narrow use cases, but it is not the end-all-be-all.
- vlmutolo 6y agoIt’s not like E2EE is required for Matrix (or Element). It’s just on my default, which is great.
- brunoqc 6y agoAlso, it's only on by default for 1-on-1 conversations.
- neiljohnson 6y agoIt’s on by default for 1:1s _and_ private rooms. Though nothing in the protocol demands an encrypted room so unencrypted 1:1s, say, are entirely possible.
- Reelin 6y agoI would think that ideally you would want E2E encryption that was on by default for everything. Then rather than turn it off, you would also want the ability to configure a server to effectively MITM everything (and the client to cooperate in this, and notify the user about it). Such an arrangement is more or less what happens with key escrow, a feature which I believe at least one self hosted cloud stack offers (sorry I can't remember its name off the top of my head).
- grahamburger 6y agoWhile we're talking about it what's everybody's favorite Matrix chat rooms to hang out in? Are there any unofficial HN discussion rooms? I run a room here for anyone interested in regional / community run Internet Service projects: #startyourownisp:matrix.org and sometimes hang around in the Riot (now Element) and Matrix chatrooms just to see what's happening there.