4 ms·

Matrix is merely federated, right? Why is it unlikely that a situation like email or the Internet will emerge, where the network still ends up massively central

• Ericson2314 6y ago
  matrix.org is already 30% of network I read once? For the general public I expect this to continue (at least until we with NixOS making self hosting things far easier someday :P). However, just as regular users want to get off the Facebook ecosystem, business's should want to get away from GSuite (Really, it's embarrassing if you are anything close to a google competitor) and I have some optimism there. The "element matrix services" of course isn't political decentralization, but is a helpful stepping stone, and still more isolated per tenant than GSuite (e.g. completely distinct accounts).
  • Arathorn 6y ago
    your causality is wrong here; on day 1, matrix.org was 100% of the network, because there weren't any other servers. since then it's been decreasing steadily - at around 30% atm.
    • creata 6y ago
      But when Matrix gains massive adoption from the mainstream, wouldn't you expect those people to primarily rush to matrix.org?
      • 29083011397778 6y ago
        When Matrix enters the mainstream, it will be helped along by technical friends telling people about it. Hopefully friends technical enough that hosting their own server for their group isn't too big a deal.
• Arathorn 6y ago
  We're proactively working on P2P matrix, as per https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/02/introducing-p-2-p-matrix/ https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/02/introducing-p-2-p-matrix/, to prevent this risk.
  • creata 6y ago
    Thanks for the official response; I look forward to P2P Matrix.
    • VyperCard 6y ago
      Me too
  • aaravchen 6y ago
    This is literally the saving grace for Matrix in my opinion. As can be seen with Mastodon, federation tends toward centralization of the servers if there's even an incremental benefit to doing so and nothing encouraging otherwise. Matrix at least seems to have fewer barriers to usability/functionality when self-hosting, which decreases the detriments of self-hosting and slightly lowers the drive to centralize, but until P2P is default standard for clients the convergence is likely to remain with a mostly centralized federation infrastructure target than a heavily decentralized one.
  • h0p3 6y ago
    Thank you, btw. I know it's a hard problem, but there is no substitute for going P2P as far down as you can. To my understanding, there is profound moral merit in your work.
• Evidlo 6y ago
  While e-mail usercount is not evenly distributed across many servers, the fact that it's open an interoperable gives you several things: - you can use whatever client/server you want (or host your own) - you can still communicate with your friends if they're on another server - servers are run by separate entities in politically distinct regions None of these things depend on there being a uniform spread of users across servers.
• eredengrin 6y ago
  As I recently said in another thread, an email sort of scenario is exactly what I'd like, or at least it would be many times better than what we currently have for im systems. The most important thing to me (and I suspect many other people in favor of decentralization/federation) is the ability to host my own service. I couldn't care less if 90% of email users are on gmail as long as I can run own email server or pay someone else to run one for me while still communicating with everyone. I'm sure some people would disagree with my priorities above but for my experience as a user, that is what makes the most difference to me - not being boxed into what someone else thinks my client should look/act like or being locked into their server. Naturally I think more decentralization is better, but that's more a philosophical preference whereas wanting to run my own server or pick my own client is more about usability and control.