7 ms·
Wow, that's a lot of negativity. You forgot to disclose your XMPP/XSF affiliation, btw. Matrix as a protocol is neither bloated or slow, and ~32.1M folks have
by Arathorn 5y ago
Wow, that's a lot of negativity. You forgot to disclose your XMPP/XSF affiliation, btw.
Matrix as a protocol is neither bloated or slow, and ~32.1M folks have managed to use it successfully, directly or indirectly, as a global chat network. Presumably that counts as a 'large network'; it's certainly bigger than Freenode.
Synapse as an implementation has historically been bloated, but it's been steadily improving (and in fact last week's Matrix Live has a fascinating analysis of how the remaining memory usage is being fixed: https://youtu.be/694VuhmVmfo https://youtu.be/694VuhmVmfo). Meanwhile implementations like Dendrite & Conduit are positively skinny.
- jrwr 5y agoOverall, I would pick XMPP over Matrix at this point. it is rather bloated and the clients are a little bit obtuse for newbies. I do wonder what the DAU for Matrix is at this point. as I suspect that 32 Million number might be a little overstated.
- Arathorn 5y agofrankly, as long as folks are communicating via open standards rather than being locked into some vendor silo then they should use whatever protocol works best for them - XMPP & Matrix bridge together fairly well these days. Based on the phone-home stats in Synapse there's around 300K DAU currently on the network, but this is a major underestimate given other stats which suggest only about 30% of public servers enable phone-home.
- zaik 5y ago> XMPP & Matrix bridge together fairly well these days Does Matrix support OMEMO for e2e encryption?
- Arathorn 5y agoYup, OMEMO and Olm are bit compatible. In fact XEP-0384 went through a phase of recommending Olm as the implementation to use (grep https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0384.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0384.html for Olm). (Although the bifrost bridge doesn't currently implement E2EE - and it would have to reencrypt anyway to turn the Matrix event payloads into XMPP stanzas and vice versa)
- haasn 5y ago> XMPP & Matrix bridge together fairly well these days. I want to test this claim. After an hour of google searching I'm none the wiser: 1. Can I bridge private messages, or just MUCs? I use XMPP only to keep in contact with friends that use XMPP. I would love to integrate them into a single client, but afaict it does not appear possible. 2. Do I have to run my own XMPP bridge, or is there some automatic integration service I'm completely missing? For comparison, the experience of bridging a matrix room to IRC was as easy as clicking "add new bridge" in the Element UI.
- benschulz 5y ago> You forgot to disclose your […] affiliation, btw. Um.. :D
- quaintdev 5y agoPsychological projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection
- ameminator 5y agoSpeaking of disclosure, aren't you the CEO of Matrix?
- Arathorn 5y agoI'm the project lead of Matrix (as it says in my HN bio). (I'm also ceo/cto of Element, but that's less relevant).
- remram 5y agoLess relevant? You are the CEO of a company which sells Element Home, a product based on Matrix... and you accuse others of not disclosing properly?
- gojomo 5y agoAn entry in the HN bio should be considered sufficient disclosure.
- squeaky-clean 5y agoI disagree, I don't click the bio link for every comment I read. I'd have never known they were the project lead if another commenter didn't call them out on it.
- 40four 5y agoSorry, but I agree with @gojomo. Making it public in your bio that you are afilliated with a project, is very sufficient disclosure in my opinion. No one expects you to read every bio of every comment you read, but conversely we shouldn’t expect him to preface every single one of his comments with “Hey guys, I’m the project lead of Matrix.” Arathorn is very active in comments, and it’s well known to frequent readers he is the project lead of Matrix.
- gojomo 5y agoYou may want to make clicking through a habit when commercial & project interests may be involved. HN's minimalist post format isn't amenable to adding such disclosures all the time - but making them available in bios is practical. You may also want to assume deep undisclosed conflicts may exist whenever there's no bio info at all – as with your user page. Oh, for all the bigco employees to have their affiliations declared for when they're flacking their company interests under a pseudonym! Oh, for net upvotes/downvotes on highly critical/opinated posts to be cross-tabulated by employer conflicts! Unlikely, but things to think about.
- SamWhited 5y agoYou'll note that I didn't show up and advocate for XMPP. Also I have no real affiliation with the XSF except being a volunteer and maintaining a library and having written a few specs (in the past I have had more strong affiliations, but never any financial considerations or anything that I'd need to disclose, I have just volunteered more in the past than I do now)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kbenson 5y ago> You'll note that I didn't show up and advocate for XMPP. Can't XMPP be considered a competitor? If so, that's like saying an oil company exec has no reason to disclose their affiliation when advocating against renewable energy sources. It's not about whether you are advocating for or against something specifically, it's about whether you have a vested interest in the outcome which could conceivably affect your veracity, or even just your outlook and how you perceive the facts (it doesn't need to be nefarious, nobody can be completely impartial). To clarify my intent, I'm not sure I think you should have noted your affiliations in this case, but I don't think the reason stated for not doing so is really evidence either way.
- SamWhited 5y agoI was arguing that it makes no sense to use Matrix for this and they should continue using IRC, but yes, I have written some XMPP related specs in the past. But fair enough, consider this my belated disclosure.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- packetlost 5y agoI've tried Matrix multiple times, and each time have been turned off by the broken and/or slow clients, both on mobile and desktop. No thanks.
- mike-cardwell 5y ago"Matrix as a protocol is neither bloated or slow" The protocol may not be, but in practice, the servers and clients that nearly everyone uses sure as hell are. I run a synapse server for half a dozen people on a reasonably beefy box and it sure feels that way when I'm using it on a daily basis.
- 40four 5y agoReally? I run Synapse for a half a dozen people, on an EC2 Ubuntu server with 2GB memory and it works great for me!
- mike-cardwell 5y agoYes. 8GB and 4 Xeon cores here.
- Arathorn 5y agoAre your users in loads of massive federated rooms?
- mike-cardwell 5y agoNo. they pretty much only use it to talk to each other. Until their clients start randomly complaining about encryption keys and they no longer can.
- Arathorn 5y agoThis sounds really weird. What was the perf problem you were seeing? (aside from whatever has gone wrong with encryption failures) For context, message sending latency should be measured in tens of milliseconds, at worst, unless the server is completely overloaded with federation traffic.
- mike-cardwell 5y agoI haven't investigated too deeply. It may just be the clients rather than the server, but it's been there from the beginning. Just a slow laggy experience on all three of iOS, Debian and OSX with Element. Spinning progress bars, blank appearing rooms whilst stuff waits to load. Messages sometimes appearing in different orders for different people in the same room. Messages just not appearing for other people occasional. Random undecipherable complaints about encryption keys leading to some people not being able to read other peoples messages in the same room. I regret getting people onto Matrix now. I'm keeping it running with the hope that things improve and because I don't want to get people to move to another system which may also have problems. Should have just stuck with XMPP and my Prosody server, and IRC.