11 ms·

Rocket.chat leverages the Matrix protocol for interoperable communications

194 points by vanburen 4y ago

haolez 4y ago
Slightly related, but Rocket Chat is one of the most important projects using the Meteor framework. How's this going in 2022? Is Meteor still relevant when compared to new players like AWS Amplify and Remix?
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  So I can't speak for Rocket.Chat, but I can say the hairiest stuff we deal with for Sandstorm.io is MongoDB-related at this point. It'd be really nice to use a different database at this point I think. (I think nearly every database should probably be SQLite.)
- e9 4y ago
  Yes! I’ve built startup with Meteor in 2014-2017 and came back to it this year for my current job and I want to say it is still the best. It’s the only thing that works out of the box. I can get designers and PMs running it locally in minutes and have them help make things pretty in css/html etc Amplify: I’ve worked with Amplify but it’s not production ready, they change and break things and you have to intimately know cloudformation. Developers used to wait for me to fix the problems. It was taking a lot of time from me to keep things reproducible across all dev environments. You don’t have time for this stuff when you run a startup and you have to prove business is viable.
  - haolez 4y ago
    Have you faced serious scalability issues with it? In my shallow research, a lot of devs complain about Meteor's performance, but it might be misuse or a misunderstanding of how the platform works.
    - e9 4y ago
      There are number of areas where scalability issues can come up. Most of them are usually due to not well optimized database queries. There was time when real-time data subscriptions were too slow for me with Mongo but now you can seamlessly add Redis for that and bottleneck goes away. Any particular area you are concerned about?
      - haolez 4y ago
        No! It's just a little worrying jumping in Meteor on 2022, but I might make it regardless. Thanks!
jokowueu 4y ago
I just wish if the rocket chat app wasn't so ugly
cuillevel3 4y ago
> announced it is building its new federation capabilities on the Matrix protocol to allow its users to communicate with users on other platforms. This is only for federation apparently.
abashore 4y ago
Offtopic: is there an on-prem alternative for Discord? Is there not a demand for SSO enabled, self hosted, open source communications app with persistent voice chat channels with pushtotalk?
phpisatrash 4y ago
Really interesting. I do believe that this is the way to go. We already have a lot of communication platforms and apps that unfortunally can't communicate among them. I hope this should be the kickstart for a change in how communication apps are built, because communication doesn't means being able to communicate only with people who use the same app i use.
- ezconnect 4y ago
  We already had this when XMPP was king. I was only using Pidgin and chatting with my friends and colleague on different networks.
- indigochill 4y ago
  > I hope this should be the kickstart for a change in how communication apps are built We've had this since 1988. Its name is IRC. Anyone could communicate on a protocol shared by any kind of app you wanted (not that I'm arguing that IRC is the gold standard of chat protocols necessarily - Matrix seems an improvement to me - but it was an open chat protocol before most of what we now think of as the internet existed). The fact commercial chat apps aren't interoperable is a decision they made to screw the user for corporate interests (i.e. force everyone who wants in on the network onto their app that they can track and advertise on), not because cross-app communication is a new or novel concept. But yes, I believe this is the way to go. Unfortunately it will never be the way the mainstream goes because the ad money from the walled-garden apps funds their own marketing campaign to keep them in the forefront of users' minds, but both ecosystems will probably exist side by side in perpetuity (at least until the walled-garden lobbyists convince the government that open apps have to be outlawed because of children or terrorism or something).
  - kqr 4y ago
    There are plenty of commercial chat apps (particularly ones embedded in other applications) that use IRC under the hood. You don't always know that this has happened, though. In fact, almost every non-IRC chat app around starts out as some variant of "trying to improve on drawback X of IRC." For a long time, IRC was the default choice and you only did something different if you wanted to fix one of the problems with IRC. I hope matrix can become this new default.
na85 4y ago
So, a Beeper competitor?
- ibeckermayer 4y ago
  Not really, they’re just speaking matrix natively. In theory this will help Beeper, since they won’t have to maintain a Rocket.chat bridge. In practice, I’ve tried to sign up to Beeper multiple times, but they never get back to me.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    Same here. Just ended up rolling my own solution from the great open source out there.
    - ibeckermayer 4y ago
      Good call, I'm working on that project this weekend for myself. I grabbed this resource from Beeper's landing page: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy Is that what you're using?
      - hammyhavoc 4y ago
        No, but that's interesting. I manually setup Docker containers for Mautrix bridges alongside my Docker container for Synapse. Thinking I might switch to this though for less maintenance, that's a very nice find!
        your_challenger 4y ago
        The ansible workbook is great (I use it for my matrix homeserver). I've bridged multiple chat apps into matrix and things just work. But Beeper is a better client for this usecase. It has better UX for a all-in-one chat app - single button to turn bridges ON and OFF, a great client with filters, search (in all chats), etc. So unless you want run your own servers, beeper is a better choice (ems[1] is also an option) [1] https://element.io/matrix-services https://element.io/matrix-services
josephcsible 4y ago
I just wish that Rocket.Chat were actually fully open source, instead of open core that hides features like SSO, read receipts, and canned responses in closed-source modules.
- j1elo 4y ago
  Or you can see it the other way around: if it wasn't for the money those closed-source modules make for them (presumably?), there might be no Rocket.Chat at all, open source or not.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    "might" is kind of a weasel word. And don't forget Zulip exists.
    - j1elo 4y ago
      I just don't know if that's what sustains the people working on the oss parts of the project, so it was all a big supposition on my side. Like, if someone sees a business opportunity for selling proprietary modules, to the point of hiring people, making a team, and creating an oss project to support it all, then without those commercial parts the open pieces of that project wouldn't even have been written to begin with, right?
  - my69thaccount 4y ago
    I'm not going to use rocket while it's proprietary so it's effectively the same as if it didn't exist.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  Since the OSI rejects any license which makes it possible to monetize open source software, open core is one of the only ways to successfully do so.
  - netr0ute 4y ago
    What about the GPL?
rr808 4y ago
I dont know much about rocket.chat, why would you use it over Matrix/Element in the first place?
- DoItToMe81 4y ago
  It has administration features accessible in the UI that no Matrix client does. The capability to edit other people's posts as an administrator without having to go into the database is very useful for when somebody can't update something important, like an announcement. Generally, it's far more customizable out of the box, without having to rewrite parts of it, and many features taken for granted in it are not supported by any Matrix client so far. The downside is that it is, and always has been, incredibly buggy and prone to total failures.
- Saris 4y ago
  It's made more for company/enterprise use, instead of public communities like Matrix is geared towards.
- orthoxerox 4y ago
  A few years ago when we needed an on-prem chat tool (around the time Atlassian killed HipChat), rocket.chat had the benefit of being easy to set up. For Matrix you needed a Synapse (Dendrite wasn't ready back then) backend, a Vector frontend, some arcane backend for authentication, and you had to connect everything together by hand, while rocket.chat had a docker-compose file you could add Keycloak to and spin everything up with a single command.
- kixiQu 4y ago
  I think it was around first -- my university CS department used to have one (cheers to whomever at WSUV made that a thing).
- otachack 4y ago
  I think Rocket Chat started development after the Slack craze and tried to fill the niche of being an open source version of the latter. Since I last used it, it seems like a good alternative for on-premise, open source Slack-like, still. Now that we have Matrix, I'm not sure where it's place is but I'm sure some orgs are fine using it for internal communications without having to pay Slack for your history/premium features?
Mortiffer 4y ago
Cool and now let EU regulation learn from this that you can have interoperability with encryption
- Mortiffer 4y ago
  Also i think big chat apps will be surprised how few of their users switch. I still see open source projects regularly moving from rocket.chat to discord for the UI.
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    It just doesn't have the important features (impromptu voice chats, mainly). Same deal with Element. Maybe soon™, but until then I don't find it fit for all-round collaboration.
DoItToMe81 4y ago
That's pretty cool, but I wish they'd deal with all of their other problems first. I ran Rocket.Chat for over a year and I encountered more errors than any other program I've hosted. It culminated in one problem causing a database corruption, which was the final straw.
- RL_Quine 4y ago
  Sounds like not much has changed since we used it in 2018.

194 points by vanburen 4y ago

Slightly related, but Rocket Chat is one of the most important projects using the Meteor framework. How's this going in 2022? Is Meteor still relevant when compared to new players like AWS Amplify and Remix?

ocdtrekkie 4y ago
So I can't speak for Rocket.Chat, but I can say the hairiest stuff we deal with for Sandstorm.io is MongoDB-related at this point. It'd be really nice to use a different database at this point I think. (I think nearly every database should probably be SQLite.)
e9 4y ago
Yes! I’ve built startup with Meteor in 2014-2017 and came back to it this year for my current job and I want to say it is still the best. It’s the only thing that works out of the box. I can get designers and PMs running it locally in minutes and have them help make things pretty in css/html etc Amplify: I’ve worked with Amplify but it’s not production ready, they change and break things and you have to intimately know cloudformation. Developers used to wait for me to fix the problems. It was taking a lot of time from me to keep things reproducible across all dev environments. You don’t have time for this stuff when you run a startup and you have to prove business is viable.
- haolez 4y ago
  Have you faced serious scalability issues with it? In my shallow research, a lot of devs complain about Meteor's performance, but it might be misuse or a misunderstanding of how the platform works.
  - e9 4y ago
    There are number of areas where scalability issues can come up. Most of them are usually due to not well optimized database queries. There was time when real-time data subscriptions were too slow for me with Mongo but now you can seamlessly add Redis for that and bottleneck goes away. Any particular area you are concerned about?
    - haolez 4y ago
      No! It's just a little worrying jumping in Meteor on 2022, but I might make it regardless. Thanks!

jokowueu 4y ago

I just wish if the rocket chat app wasn't so ugly

cuillevel3 4y ago

> announced it is building its new federation capabilities on the Matrix protocol to allow its users to communicate with users on other platforms. This is only for federation apparently.

abashore 4y ago

Offtopic: is there an on-prem alternative for Discord? Is there not a demand for SSO enabled, self hosted, open source communications app with persistent voice chat channels with pushtotalk?

phpisatrash 4y ago

Really interesting. I do believe that this is the way to go. We already have a lot of communication platforms and apps that unfortunally can't communicate among them. I hope this should be the kickstart for a change in how communication apps are built, because communication doesn't means being able to communicate only with people who use the same app i use.

ezconnect 4y ago
We already had this when XMPP was king. I was only using Pidgin and chatting with my friends and colleague on different networks.
indigochill 4y ago
> I hope this should be the kickstart for a change in how communication apps are built We've had this since 1988. Its name is IRC. Anyone could communicate on a protocol shared by any kind of app you wanted (not that I'm arguing that IRC is the gold standard of chat protocols necessarily - Matrix seems an improvement to me - but it was an open chat protocol before most of what we now think of as the internet existed). The fact commercial chat apps aren't interoperable is a decision they made to screw the user for corporate interests (i.e. force everyone who wants in on the network onto their app that they can track and advertise on), not because cross-app communication is a new or novel concept. But yes, I believe this is the way to go. Unfortunately it will never be the way the mainstream goes because the ad money from the walled-garden apps funds their own marketing campaign to keep them in the forefront of users' minds, but both ecosystems will probably exist side by side in perpetuity (at least until the walled-garden lobbyists convince the government that open apps have to be outlawed because of children or terrorism or something).
- kqr 4y ago
  There are plenty of commercial chat apps (particularly ones embedded in other applications) that use IRC under the hood. You don't always know that this has happened, though. In fact, almost every non-IRC chat app around starts out as some variant of "trying to improve on drawback X of IRC." For a long time, IRC was the default choice and you only did something different if you wanted to fix one of the problems with IRC. I hope matrix can become this new default.

na85 4y ago

So, a Beeper competitor?

ibeckermayer 4y ago
Not really, they’re just speaking matrix natively. In theory this will help Beeper, since they won’t have to maintain a Rocket.chat bridge. In practice, I’ve tried to sign up to Beeper multiple times, but they never get back to me.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Same here. Just ended up rolling my own solution from the great open source out there.
  - ibeckermayer 4y ago
    Good call, I'm working on that project this weekend for myself. I grabbed this resource from Beeper's landing page: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy Is that what you're using?
    - hammyhavoc 4y ago
      No, but that's interesting. I manually setup Docker containers for Mautrix bridges alongside my Docker container for Synapse. Thinking I might switch to this though for less maintenance, that's a very nice find!
      - your_challenger 4y ago
        The ansible workbook is great (I use it for my matrix homeserver). I've bridged multiple chat apps into matrix and things just work. But Beeper is a better client for this usecase. It has better UX for a all-in-one chat app - single button to turn bridges ON and OFF, a great client with filters, search (in all chats), etc. So unless you want run your own servers, beeper is a better choice (ems[1] is also an option) [1] https://element.io/matrix-services https://element.io/matrix-services

josephcsible 4y ago

I just wish that Rocket.Chat were actually fully open source, instead of open core that hides features like SSO, read receipts, and canned responses in closed-source modules.

j1elo 4y ago
Or you can see it the other way around: if it wasn't for the money those closed-source modules make for them (presumably?), there might be no Rocket.Chat at all, open source or not.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  "might" is kind of a weasel word. And don't forget Zulip exists.
  - j1elo 4y ago
    I just don't know if that's what sustains the people working on the oss parts of the project, so it was all a big supposition on my side. Like, if someone sees a business opportunity for selling proprietary modules, to the point of hiring people, making a team, and creating an oss project to support it all, then without those commercial parts the open pieces of that project wouldn't even have been written to begin with, right?
- my69thaccount 4y ago
  I'm not going to use rocket while it's proprietary so it's effectively the same as if it didn't exist.
ocdtrekkie 4y ago
Since the OSI rejects any license which makes it possible to monetize open source software, open core is one of the only ways to successfully do so.
- netr0ute 4y ago
  What about the GPL?

rr808 4y ago

I dont know much about rocket.chat, why would you use it over Matrix/Element in the first place?

DoItToMe81 4y ago
It has administration features accessible in the UI that no Matrix client does. The capability to edit other people's posts as an administrator without having to go into the database is very useful for when somebody can't update something important, like an announcement. Generally, it's far more customizable out of the box, without having to rewrite parts of it, and many features taken for granted in it are not supported by any Matrix client so far. The downside is that it is, and always has been, incredibly buggy and prone to total failures.
Saris 4y ago
It's made more for company/enterprise use, instead of public communities like Matrix is geared towards.
orthoxerox 4y ago
A few years ago when we needed an on-prem chat tool (around the time Atlassian killed HipChat), rocket.chat had the benefit of being easy to set up. For Matrix you needed a Synapse (Dendrite wasn't ready back then) backend, a Vector frontend, some arcane backend for authentication, and you had to connect everything together by hand, while rocket.chat had a docker-compose file you could add Keycloak to and spin everything up with a single command.
kixiQu 4y ago
I think it was around first -- my university CS department used to have one (cheers to whomever at WSUV made that a thing).
otachack 4y ago
I think Rocket Chat started development after the Slack craze and tried to fill the niche of being an open source version of the latter. Since I last used it, it seems like a good alternative for on-premise, open source Slack-like, still. Now that we have Matrix, I'm not sure where it's place is but I'm sure some orgs are fine using it for internal communications without having to pay Slack for your history/premium features?

Mortiffer 4y ago

Cool and now let EU regulation learn from this that you can have interoperability with encryption

Mortiffer 4y ago
Also i think big chat apps will be surprised how few of their users switch. I still see open source projects regularly moving from rocket.chat to discord for the UI.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  It just doesn't have the important features (impromptu voice chats, mainly). Same deal with Element. Maybe soon™, but until then I don't find it fit for all-round collaboration.

DoItToMe81 4y ago

That's pretty cool, but I wish they'd deal with all of their other problems first. I ran Rocket.Chat for over a year and I encountered more errors than any other program I've hosted. It culminated in one problem causing a database corruption, which was the final straw.

RL_Quine 4y ago
Sounds like not much has changed since we used it in 2018.