8 ms·

Cerulean: Experimental micro-blogging app for Matrix

206 points by ignoramous 6y ago

Arathorn 6y ago
dendrite.matrix.org is being slightly hugged to death by being on the front page of HN, but we're about to redeploy it with a fix. (All these guest accounts shouldn't be generating bcrypt passwords ;P) Meanwhile, happy to answer any questions about the Cerulean mad science experiment :)
- cmonagle 6y ago
  This is a really interesting use of the protocol and looks very cool, congratulations! I am curious how this experiment fits with the longer term goals for the project. Do you see Matrix as a social media protocol in addition to chat? If so, do you have plans to integrate with the fediverse/speak ActivityPub?
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    Matrix is a generic realtime data sync protocol, so yes - we always built it with general social media uses in mind as well as chat (as well as VoIP, VR/AR, IoT etc). Hopefully someone will build an ActivityPub bridge now that Cerulean exists! :)
    - Arathorn 6y ago
      (more importantly, surely we need a HN bridge!)
- Arathorn 6y ago
  We're having way too much fun live-profiling and optimising Dendrite thanks to the impromptu load test :D Sorry the server bounces a bit, but we're deploying stuff like https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite/pull/1666 https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite/pull/1666
- vlmutolo 6y ago
  A week or so ago, you mentioned on HN [1] that Matrix is in a pretty good position to support a Discus-like comment section for personal blogs and articles. I think something like Cerulean may even be a better idea. It would probably be straightforward to just make every blog post create a corresponding Cerulean/Matrix post and then have a link to it automatically inserted into the bottom of the post. One question I have, though, is how performant it is to have thousands and thousands of these small Matrix rooms around. Are rooms that lightweight? One for each post seems like it could be a lot, but I'm not familiar with the intended internals for servers to use in how they represent rooms. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25336352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25336352
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    yup, rooms are lightweight - not much heavier than just sending a message. I suspect the only reason that people assume they are heavyweight is psychological because in real life rooms are... heavy :) Totally agreed that turning Cerulean into a Disqus-clone would be awesome; hopefully someone will pick it up and do so!
robto 6y ago
I'm really excited about using Matrix for more than instant messaging. This November I spent a week reading all the specs (which were really well documented!) and some spec proposals that I think are really important for non-IM clients (room types, event relations (replies), portable identities). I was able to get a simple web client up and running in ~300 lines of clojurescript. Cerulean is looking great! Does it support e2e threads? I'm about to take a stab at implementing e2e in my application and I'm curious how much overhead it is.
- Arathorn 6y ago
  Cerulean doesn't have E2EE yet because it deliberately doesn't use a Matrix SDK but just talks simple raw Matrix directly via HTTPS. However, it'd be easy to swap out for a real SDK like the one in https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web to get E2EE (or pipe it via pantalaimon :)
- Hamuko 6y ago
  I'd be excited to even start using Matrix for instant messaging. Elements seems pretty half-baked on my phone and I'd feel bad for convincing anyone to switch from Whatsapp to it.
  - solarkraft 6y ago
    I would agree, while the UI looks nice on first glance I think some UI concepts are way weird and it's over all overloaded. On Android I quite like SchildiChat, which is a simple-at-first-look client.
    - Arathorn 6y ago
      We're constantly iterating on Element's UI, and the concepts are getting constantly de-weirded. For instance, one of the things many people complain about is that it's possible (and indeed easy) to end up with multiple DMs with the same person. So we're in the process of defaulting to "canonical DMs" (i.e. one DM for each pair of people). Others complain about the hassle of managing E2EE (verifying new logins; backing up your keys with recovery passphrases/keys, etc) - the Matrix equivalent of the Signal recovery PIN drama. We're going to be reworking that all (again) next year, too. So yeah, the UI isn't perfect, but hopefully we're working on it, and it should get better. Meanwhile, the nice thing about Matrix is you can use whatever app you like - e.g. SchildiChat is a fork of Element Android, FluffyChat's good too, so use whatever floats your boat.
ryukafalz 6y ago
This is very cool, although every additional use case for Matrix makes me wish there were ways to grant access to a subset of my account. Worst case scenario logging into a Mastodon client is that it wrecks my microblogging data. Worst case scenario logging into a Matrix microblogging app is that it wrecks my microblogging data and drops my admin privileges on all of my Matrix chatrooms. OAuth scope by room type, maybe? https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/1840 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/1840
- kegsay 6y ago
  We've had this idea for a really long time e.g https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/531 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/531 and is something I would like to tinker with in Dendrite for sure. Typed rooms helps categorise but doesn't allow control over a subset of your account.
  - ryukafalz 6y ago
    >Typed rooms helps categorise but doesn't allow control over a subset of your account. Sure, but they could in the future, right? Couldn't a homeserver in theory generate a more restricted credential for which it would reject e.g. "PUT /rooms/<roomid>/send/..." requests after checking the room type? None of the machinery around that exists now, but it feels like it could be done. (FWIW, I did write MSC1840 with this use case in mind.)
    - kegsay 6y ago
      Absolutely it could. In fact it would be an elegant way to handle grouping rooms together rather than specifying individual room IDs.
bikeshaving 6y ago
I wonder if the Matrix protocol can be extended to do realtime document collaboration. I’ve been yearning for end-to-end encrypted realtime collaboration solution via OT or CRDT, I just don’t really have the skills to do the encryption part on my own. The idea would be that the “room” is just a shared document, and the messages are the edits to the document.
- remirk 6y ago
  People have tried doing document collaboration in a project called matrix-notepad. Though, I'm not sure how active it still is. https://github.com/KB1RD/matrix-notepad https://github.com/KB1RD/matrix-notepad
- Arathorn 6y ago
  There's a whole community of folks on Matrix focused on experimenting with realtime document collaboration over Matrix - they hang out at #matrix-collaboration:kb1rd.net. It's pretty early days, but https://github.com/KB1RD/matrix-notepad https://github.com/KB1RD/matrix-notepad is fun, and if coupled with some of the stuff that Martin Kleppmann & co are up to (https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.03960 https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.03960 etc) it could be super interesting :)
  - Technically 6y ago
    This forum is such a great technical resource, thank you.
kovek 6y ago
Awesome! Is it going to be possible to do Craigslist on Matrix? Does anyone see it? Is there going to be a way to index the blog posts and for some servers/participants to hold the index?
- Arathorn 6y ago
  yeah :) the idea is to be able to use Matrix for moderated forums etc too - and perhaps we'll have payments in there one day too.
  - kovek 6y ago
    I was wondering, where would the indexes be stored? If I search "blog post about cats", where does it search the forum posts about cats? Also, if payments can be done, that would be awesome, though it seems that is not something Matrix is trying to achieve?
    - Arathorn 6y ago
      search isn’t a solved problem yet. you could search your local server, or spider your neighbours, or build some kind of decentralised search engine. it’s the same problem for Matrix in general; we tend to cheat and just rely on Google to have indexed everything for now :)
anderspitman 6y ago
Matrix is an exciting platform. I would love to see someone build a simple universal notification system on top of it.
- Arathorn 6y ago
  We did the groundwork for this with the ultra-low-bandwidth Matrix stuff last year: https://matrix.org/blog/2019/03/12/breaking-the-100-bps-barrier-with-matrix-meshsim-coap-proxy/ https://matrix.org/blog/2019/03/12/breaking-the-100-bps-barr.... But frustratingly nobody has picked up that work yet.
jeroenhd 6y ago
Features like these make me wonder what the goal and direction of Matrix really is. I can see how this is a nifty demo of how the Matrix protocol can support many use cases, but the base use case (open communications) isn't nearly complete yet. Element is the only application supporting all Matrix features, but it's look and feel are off, it's speed leave things to be desired and I'm still getting issues with fetching the right keys for a chatroom on some of my devices. The file picker on mobile is wonky, some very basic features (like adding a caption to an image you're sending) just don't work. I'm definitely not convincing anyone to consider this over the existing, isolated, closed-source messaging applications out there. Then there's the fact that there's very little chat clients that support most of the protocol, especially with encryption. To combat this, you can run pantalaimon if you can ever get it to work (its dependency on things like dbus makes it very hard to run well on a VM or in a container) to add encryption to more well-integrated chat clients like Fractal. I love the premise and the idea behind Matrix, but I do fear that the focus on expanding and experimenting will eventually prevent it from reaching the critical mass necessary to ever be used outside of the enthusiast circle. All the (optional?) additions to the protocol also make me fear that Matrix will end up dead like XMPP, with different features implemented across different applications all in a way that things just don't work well together. Why put all of this work into running a daemon 24/7 on your phone that will end up sucking battery to run an app with bad usability in peer to peer mode? What's the end goal? I just want to rid myself of Whatsapp and Telegram, is that even a valid use case for the Matrix system anymore? Should I start looking in other directions?
- Arathorn 6y ago
  The reason we occasionally do experiments on Matrix (VR, 3D video calling, low-bandwidth, P2P and Cerulean) is to try to remind folks of the broader use cases of Matrix beyond chat and to encourage contributions and experimentation from the wider community, so these ideas can evolve outside the core team. In the case of Cerulean, it's also as a test jig to test out threading in Matrix for use in Element and other clients. Meanwhile, just because one person (kegsay) spent a few weeks putting together Cerulean doesn't mean that the other thousands of people in the Matrix ecosystem were idle. For instance, Fractal merged matrix-rust-sdk support 2 weeks ago, which implements full E2EE (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/fractal/-/merge_requests/626 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/fractal/-/merge_requests/626), so your complaints about pantalaimon should shortly be irrelevant. (Plus it seems pretty miserable to complain about pantalaimon's dependencies; the fact that the project exists at all as an E2EE stopgap is unusual - XMPP has no equivalent for instance, as far as I know). In terms of other clients supporting E2EE: weechat-matrix, Mirage, FluffyChat, Seaglass, Nheko, Gomuks, Daydream and more have support. Complaining that there are clients which don't have E2EE is like trying to denounce the Web because there are browsers out there which don't implement HTTPS. Element Android still has work to be done, as you've pointed out, but it is growing rapidly (https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/graphs/contributors https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/graphs/contribu...) and if development continues at this rate you should see perf, encryption bugs (almost all caused by https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/issues/2518 https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/issues/2518), and even the "wonky file picker" and "off look and feel" and "captioned images" fixed. Ironically, Cerulean is the first Matrix client to implement captioned images (after a fashion), so your captioned images on Android might benefit directly from Cerulean's work there...
niutech 6y ago
It reminds me of Diaspora* (https://diasporafoundation.org https://diasporafoundation.org) and GNU Social (https://gnusocial.network https://gnusocial.network) - both free and federated.
jiofih 6y ago
> It has zero dependencies (other than React) Well, if you’re gonna draw the line there... React alone and the tooling it requires already gives you about 1400 dependencies. That is not what people mean by “zero dependencies”, especially choosing the framework that is one of the worst offenders.
- Arathorn 6y ago
  sigh the point is that the interesting bit is the Matrix client, and we are not cheating and using some preexisting Matrix SDK but doing it all raw so people can see how it works. The web framework is irrelevant.
- akx 6y ago
  > React alone and the tooling it requires already gives you about 1400 dependencies When you throw around FUD like this, can you please also give us some credible sources? You can use cdnjs to get react and react-dom in exactly 2 .js files.
  - progval 6y ago
    $ npm install https://github.com/matrix-org/cerulean [71 lines of logs] added 2371 packages from 808 contributors in 62.487s
    - dstaley 6y ago
      Once built, the only frontend dependency is React. Most of those packages are tooling related to the build process.
      - progval 6y ago
        > Most of those packages are tooling related to the build process. So? jiofih's claim was about "React alone and the tooling".
        deleted 6y ago
neogodless 6y ago
Is Matrix/Riot/Element related to Cerulean Studios that built Trillian for Instant Messaging? (Because I need to be a bit more confused!) > Matrix is an open standard for interoperable, decentralised, real-time communication over IP. > Element is a new type of messaging app. You choose where your messages are stored, putting you in control of your data. It gives you access to the Matrix open network, so you can talk to anyone. > Cerulean Studios was officially founded in 2000, the same year Trillian started its long journey as an interoperable instant messaging client. > Trillian[0] is modern and secure instant messaging. > Cerulean: a highly experimental new microblogging app for Matrix [0] https://trillian.im/ https://trillian.im/
- Arathorn 6y ago
  No connection. And Cerulean here is just a codename; we have no desire to use it seriously - it’s more likely the threading will get pulled into Element and other Matrix clients when baked. (also, microblogging is sufficiently far from Trillian that we assumed nobody could get confused. there’s a lot of shades of cerulean out there.)
pmlnr 6y ago
Movim tried this with xmpp as backend.
idclip 6y ago
Im sorry but React is not zero deps.
didip 6y ago
I am curious about the backend server of Matrix. Can it be scaled beyond 1 server? For example, by using Kafka or Nats?
- Arathorn 6y ago
  Cerulean is backed by Dendrite, which scales horizontally via Kafka, but is in beta: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/08/dendrite-is-entering-beta https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/08/dendrite-is-entering-beta Most other production deployments of Matrix are backed by Synapse, which is out of beta, and which scales horizontally via Redis: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapses-scalability https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapses-sca...
infogulch 6y ago
How should I approach learning about the matrix protocol? The api is a simple json over rest, but that doesn't seem to reveal much about how eg conflict resolution strategies are defined and implemented or how to conceptualize the data model. Any pointers?
- Arathorn 6y ago
  the spec covers more than just the client/server API. the server/server API covers the basis of how data is replicated, and conflict resolution is defined on a per room version as per https://matrix.org/docs/spec/rooms/v2 https://matrix.org/docs/spec/rooms/v2. there are then guides like https://matrix.org/docs/guides/implementing-stateres https://matrix.org/docs/guides/implementing-stateres which help expand on that and other areas to make it easier to conceptualise.

206 points by ignoramous 6y ago

dendrite.matrix.org is being slightly hugged to death by being on the front page of HN, but we're about to redeploy it with a fix. (All these guest accounts shouldn't be generating bcrypt passwords ;P) Meanwhile, happy to answer any questions about the Cerulean mad science experiment :)

cmonagle 6y ago
This is a really interesting use of the protocol and looks very cool, congratulations! I am curious how this experiment fits with the longer term goals for the project. Do you see Matrix as a social media protocol in addition to chat? If so, do you have plans to integrate with the fediverse/speak ActivityPub?
- Arathorn 6y ago
  Matrix is a generic realtime data sync protocol, so yes - we always built it with general social media uses in mind as well as chat (as well as VoIP, VR/AR, IoT etc). Hopefully someone will build an ActivityPub bridge now that Cerulean exists! :)
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    (more importantly, surely we need a HN bridge!)
Arathorn 6y ago
We're having way too much fun live-profiling and optimising Dendrite thanks to the impromptu load test :D Sorry the server bounces a bit, but we're deploying stuff like https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite/pull/1666 https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite/pull/1666
vlmutolo 6y ago
A week or so ago, you mentioned on HN [1] that Matrix is in a pretty good position to support a Discus-like comment section for personal blogs and articles. I think something like Cerulean may even be a better idea. It would probably be straightforward to just make every blog post create a corresponding Cerulean/Matrix post and then have a link to it automatically inserted into the bottom of the post. One question I have, though, is how performant it is to have thousands and thousands of these small Matrix rooms around. Are rooms that lightweight? One for each post seems like it could be a lot, but I'm not familiar with the intended internals for servers to use in how they represent rooms. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25336352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25336352
- Arathorn 6y ago
  yup, rooms are lightweight - not much heavier than just sending a message. I suspect the only reason that people assume they are heavyweight is psychological because in real life rooms are... heavy :) Totally agreed that turning Cerulean into a Disqus-clone would be awesome; hopefully someone will pick it up and do so!

robto 6y ago

I'm really excited about using Matrix for more than instant messaging. This November I spent a week reading all the specs (which were really well documented!) and some spec proposals that I think are really important for non-IM clients (room types, event relations (replies), portable identities). I was able to get a simple web client up and running in ~300 lines of clojurescript. Cerulean is looking great! Does it support e2e threads? I'm about to take a stab at implementing e2e in my application and I'm curious how much overhead it is.

Arathorn 6y ago
Cerulean doesn't have E2EE yet because it deliberately doesn't use a Matrix SDK but just talks simple raw Matrix directly via HTTPS. However, it'd be easy to swap out for a real SDK like the one in https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web to get E2EE (or pipe it via pantalaimon :)
Hamuko 6y ago
I'd be excited to even start using Matrix for instant messaging. Elements seems pretty half-baked on my phone and I'd feel bad for convincing anyone to switch from Whatsapp to it.
- solarkraft 6y ago
  I would agree, while the UI looks nice on first glance I think some UI concepts are way weird and it's over all overloaded. On Android I quite like SchildiChat, which is a simple-at-first-look client.
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    We're constantly iterating on Element's UI, and the concepts are getting constantly de-weirded. For instance, one of the things many people complain about is that it's possible (and indeed easy) to end up with multiple DMs with the same person. So we're in the process of defaulting to "canonical DMs" (i.e. one DM for each pair of people). Others complain about the hassle of managing E2EE (verifying new logins; backing up your keys with recovery passphrases/keys, etc) - the Matrix equivalent of the Signal recovery PIN drama. We're going to be reworking that all (again) next year, too. So yeah, the UI isn't perfect, but hopefully we're working on it, and it should get better. Meanwhile, the nice thing about Matrix is you can use whatever app you like - e.g. SchildiChat is a fork of Element Android, FluffyChat's good too, so use whatever floats your boat.

ryukafalz 6y ago

This is very cool, although every additional use case for Matrix makes me wish there were ways to grant access to a subset of my account. Worst case scenario logging into a Mastodon client is that it wrecks my microblogging data. Worst case scenario logging into a Matrix microblogging app is that it wrecks my microblogging data and drops my admin privileges on all of my Matrix chatrooms. OAuth scope by room type, maybe? https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/1840 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/1840

kegsay 6y ago
We've had this idea for a really long time e.g https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/531 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/531 and is something I would like to tinker with in Dendrite for sure. Typed rooms helps categorise but doesn't allow control over a subset of your account.
- ryukafalz 6y ago
  >Typed rooms helps categorise but doesn't allow control over a subset of your account. Sure, but they could in the future, right? Couldn't a homeserver in theory generate a more restricted credential for which it would reject e.g. "PUT /rooms/<roomid>/send/..." requests after checking the room type? None of the machinery around that exists now, but it feels like it could be done. (FWIW, I did write MSC1840 with this use case in mind.)
  - kegsay 6y ago
    Absolutely it could. In fact it would be an elegant way to handle grouping rooms together rather than specifying individual room IDs.

bikeshaving 6y ago

I wonder if the Matrix protocol can be extended to do realtime document collaboration. I’ve been yearning for end-to-end encrypted realtime collaboration solution via OT or CRDT, I just don’t really have the skills to do the encryption part on my own. The idea would be that the “room” is just a shared document, and the messages are the edits to the document.

remirk 6y ago
People have tried doing document collaboration in a project called matrix-notepad. Though, I'm not sure how active it still is. https://github.com/KB1RD/matrix-notepad https://github.com/KB1RD/matrix-notepad
Arathorn 6y ago
There's a whole community of folks on Matrix focused on experimenting with realtime document collaboration over Matrix - they hang out at #matrix-collaboration:kb1rd.net. It's pretty early days, but https://github.com/KB1RD/matrix-notepad https://github.com/KB1RD/matrix-notepad is fun, and if coupled with some of the stuff that Martin Kleppmann & co are up to (https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.03960 https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.03960 etc) it could be super interesting :)
- Technically 6y ago
  This forum is such a great technical resource, thank you.

kovek 6y ago

Awesome! Is it going to be possible to do Craigslist on Matrix? Does anyone see it? Is there going to be a way to index the blog posts and for some servers/participants to hold the index?

Arathorn 6y ago
yeah :) the idea is to be able to use Matrix for moderated forums etc too - and perhaps we'll have payments in there one day too.
- kovek 6y ago
  I was wondering, where would the indexes be stored? If I search "blog post about cats", where does it search the forum posts about cats? Also, if payments can be done, that would be awesome, though it seems that is not something Matrix is trying to achieve?
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    search isn’t a solved problem yet. you could search your local server, or spider your neighbours, or build some kind of decentralised search engine. it’s the same problem for Matrix in general; we tend to cheat and just rely on Google to have indexed everything for now :)

anderspitman 6y ago

Matrix is an exciting platform. I would love to see someone build a simple universal notification system on top of it.

Arathorn 6y ago
We did the groundwork for this with the ultra-low-bandwidth Matrix stuff last year: https://matrix.org/blog/2019/03/12/breaking-the-100-bps-barrier-with-matrix-meshsim-coap-proxy/ https://matrix.org/blog/2019/03/12/breaking-the-100-bps-barr.... But frustratingly nobody has picked up that work yet.

jeroenhd 6y ago

Features like these make me wonder what the goal and direction of Matrix really is. I can see how this is a nifty demo of how the Matrix protocol can support many use cases, but the base use case (open communications) isn't nearly complete yet. Element is the only application supporting all Matrix features, but it's look and feel are off, it's speed leave things to be desired and I'm still getting issues with fetching the right keys for a chatroom on some of my devices. The file picker on mobile is wonky, some very basic features (like adding a caption to an image you're sending) just don't work. I'm definitely not convincing anyone to consider this over the existing, isolated, closed-source messaging applications out there. Then there's the fact that there's very little chat clients that support most of the protocol, especially with encryption. To combat this, you can run pantalaimon if you can ever get it to work (its dependency on things like dbus makes it very hard to run well on a VM or in a container) to add encryption to more well-integrated chat clients like Fractal. I love the premise and the idea behind Matrix, but I do fear that the focus on expanding and experimenting will eventually prevent it from reaching the critical mass necessary to ever be used outside of the enthusiast circle. All the (optional?) additions to the protocol also make me fear that Matrix will end up dead like XMPP, with different features implemented across different applications all in a way that things just don't work well together. Why put all of this work into running a daemon 24/7 on your phone that will end up sucking battery to run an app with bad usability in peer to peer mode? What's the end goal? I just want to rid myself of Whatsapp and Telegram, is that even a valid use case for the Matrix system anymore? Should I start looking in other directions?

Arathorn 6y ago
The reason we occasionally do experiments on Matrix (VR, 3D video calling, low-bandwidth, P2P and Cerulean) is to try to remind folks of the broader use cases of Matrix beyond chat and to encourage contributions and experimentation from the wider community, so these ideas can evolve outside the core team. In the case of Cerulean, it's also as a test jig to test out threading in Matrix for use in Element and other clients. Meanwhile, just because one person (kegsay) spent a few weeks putting together Cerulean doesn't mean that the other thousands of people in the Matrix ecosystem were idle. For instance, Fractal merged matrix-rust-sdk support 2 weeks ago, which implements full E2EE (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/fractal/-/merge_requests/626 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/fractal/-/merge_requests/626), so your complaints about pantalaimon should shortly be irrelevant. (Plus it seems pretty miserable to complain about pantalaimon's dependencies; the fact that the project exists at all as an E2EE stopgap is unusual - XMPP has no equivalent for instance, as far as I know). In terms of other clients supporting E2EE: weechat-matrix, Mirage, FluffyChat, Seaglass, Nheko, Gomuks, Daydream and more have support. Complaining that there are clients which don't have E2EE is like trying to denounce the Web because there are browsers out there which don't implement HTTPS. Element Android still has work to be done, as you've pointed out, but it is growing rapidly (https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/graphs/contributors https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/graphs/contribu...) and if development continues at this rate you should see perf, encryption bugs (almost all caused by https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/issues/2518 https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/issues/2518), and even the "wonky file picker" and "off look and feel" and "captioned images" fixed. Ironically, Cerulean is the first Matrix client to implement captioned images (after a fashion), so your captioned images on Android might benefit directly from Cerulean's work there...

niutech 6y ago

It reminds me of Diaspora* (https://diasporafoundation.org https://diasporafoundation.org) and GNU Social (https://gnusocial.network https://gnusocial.network) - both free and federated.

jiofih 6y ago

> It has zero dependencies (other than React) Well, if you’re gonna draw the line there... React alone and the tooling it requires already gives you about 1400 dependencies. That is not what people mean by “zero dependencies”, especially choosing the framework that is one of the worst offenders.

Arathorn 6y ago
sigh the point is that the interesting bit is the Matrix client, and we are not cheating and using some preexisting Matrix SDK but doing it all raw so people can see how it works. The web framework is irrelevant.
akx 6y ago
> React alone and the tooling it requires already gives you about 1400 dependencies When you throw around FUD like this, can you please also give us some credible sources? You can use cdnjs to get react and react-dom in exactly 2 .js files.
- progval 6y ago
  $ npm install https://github.com/matrix-org/cerulean [71 lines of logs] added 2371 packages from 808 contributors in 62.487s
  - dstaley 6y ago
    Once built, the only frontend dependency is React. Most of those packages are tooling related to the build process.
    - progval 6y ago
      > Most of those packages are tooling related to the build process. So? jiofih's claim was about "React alone and the tooling".
      - deleted 6y ago

neogodless 6y ago

Is Matrix/Riot/Element related to Cerulean Studios that built Trillian for Instant Messaging? (Because I need to be a bit more confused!) > Matrix is an open standard for interoperable, decentralised, real-time communication over IP. > Element is a new type of messaging app. You choose where your messages are stored, putting you in control of your data. It gives you access to the Matrix open network, so you can talk to anyone. > Cerulean Studios was officially founded in 2000, the same year Trillian started its long journey as an interoperable instant messaging client. > Trillian[0] is modern and secure instant messaging. > Cerulean: a highly experimental new microblogging app for Matrix [0] https://trillian.im/ https://trillian.im/

Arathorn 6y ago
No connection. And Cerulean here is just a codename; we have no desire to use it seriously - it’s more likely the threading will get pulled into Element and other Matrix clients when baked. (also, microblogging is sufficiently far from Trillian that we assumed nobody could get confused. there’s a lot of shades of cerulean out there.)

pmlnr 6y ago

Movim tried this with xmpp as backend.

idclip 6y ago

Im sorry but React is not zero deps.

didip 6y ago

I am curious about the backend server of Matrix. Can it be scaled beyond 1 server? For example, by using Kafka or Nats?

Arathorn 6y ago
Cerulean is backed by Dendrite, which scales horizontally via Kafka, but is in beta: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/08/dendrite-is-entering-beta https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/08/dendrite-is-entering-beta Most other production deployments of Matrix are backed by Synapse, which is out of beta, and which scales horizontally via Redis: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapses-scalability https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapses-sca...

infogulch 6y ago

How should I approach learning about the matrix protocol? The api is a simple json over rest, but that doesn't seem to reveal much about how eg conflict resolution strategies are defined and implemented or how to conceptualize the data model. Any pointers?

Arathorn 6y ago
the spec covers more than just the client/server API. the server/server API covers the basis of how data is replicated, and conflict resolution is defined on a per room version as per https://matrix.org/docs/spec/rooms/v2 https://matrix.org/docs/spec/rooms/v2. there are then guides like https://matrix.org/docs/guides/implementing-stateres https://matrix.org/docs/guides/implementing-stateres which help expand on that and other areas to make it easier to conceptualise.