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Welcoming Rocket.Chat to Matrix
- ramboldio 4y agoThis is what a aquisition in Open Source land looks like.. :D
- phoe-krk 4y agoGee, I wonder who acquired Fediverse then - everyone's speaking ActivityPub. /s
- 0des 4y agoAs someone curious about this comment, can you articulate it in a way that would work in spoken words? the /s throws it off, like when people speak verbal hashtags, and my brain flies into the wall at velocity trying to break it down.
- opan 4y agoNo one could/did acquire the Fediverse, there's just a protocol in common between pleroma/mastodon/misskey and so on. The thread's topic is likely similar, Matrix being another protocol used by many things.
- phoe-krk 4y agoThe sibling comment described it well. Adding support for an open networking protocol to an existing free software application is, IMO, hardly an acquisition of any sort - not more than e.g. adding support for a new image format to GIMP means that "owners" of the new format now acquire GIMP.
- tabbott 4y agoI don't think this is an acquisition -- Rocket.Chat remains an independent, venture-backed company. Unless I'm missing something hidden here, this announcement is just Rocket.Chat implementing an integration with Matrix, not a change in control of their open source project or associated business.
- Arathorn 4y agoYup, this is not an acquisition of any kind; Rocket.Chat just went and independently added native Matrix interoperability into their core product. It's basically celebrating this PR: https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/pull/23688 https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/pull/23688 :) tabbott: we should so do this with Zulip - I think Matrix almost has all the threading primitives needed to bridge successfully now!
- Rechtsstaat 4y agoI think that is what they mean—the 'acquisition' in Open Source land is just the successful integration of one open platform into the other!
- mistermann 4y agoA new implementation of the same thing, now on a different platform. Is it just me or does it seem like there are certain places where there is little innovation?
- 0des 4y agoWe must return to AIM.
- phoe-krk 4y agoYou can only reinvent text chat in so many ways before you converge to the de-facto standard most people are using nowadays.
- mistermann 4y agoIf the goal is simple text chat (communication that uses text) - but text can be used in a wide variety of ways! If some of the many who have reimplemented the same thing on a new platform instead set out to create something new, maybe something new would appear on the scene.
- phoe-krk 4y ago> If some of the many who have reimplemented the same thing on a new platform instead set out to create something new, maybe something new would appear on the scene. They do, and novelties do appear. But then they usually fail to gain traction because they require users to migrate to them. Hence, interoperability wins in the long run.
- mistermann 4y agoCan you think of any particularly impressive and innovative text-related communication platforms (ruling out impressive ones like Zoom that aren't textually innovative) that have been released in the last 5 years?
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
- pvg 4y agoThe other day, 82 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31535034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31535034
- Arathorn 4y agoThis post is a bit different, given it's actually giving the technical details and linking to the howto etc :)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dudus 4y agoI didn't know Rocket.Chat, but it looks like a decent OpenSource alternative to Slack. The fact they are switching to Matrix seems like a bigger win to Matrix than Rocket.Chat. Rocket.Chat is a real world chat client that seems to have some success and they just decided to delegate an important part of their stack to a third party project. What better validation do you expect than that?
- geekgonecrazy 4y agoIn this case it isn't really "switching" to Matrix. Its more Rocket.Chat is utilizing Matrix to increase chances of interoperabilty. Rocket.Chat still maintains its own full frontend and backend. With its own API's and integrations etc. But gains a new ability to communicate with anyone out there also using the Matrix protocol. Regardless of what Software they are running. So say your company has Rocket.Chat running and then you start working on a project with another company. You can create federated rooms and collaborate. IMO its very much a strategic advantage to have federation support in your tool. I personally view this as an important move for the future of the internet and modern decentralized communication.
- jlkuester7 4y ago%1000 this. I have tried RocketChat before and loved its ease of use and powerful well-polished features! But, I ultimatly was scared off because I did not want to get locked into a walled garden (even if the garden was self-hosted...). Federation is hugely important for communication.
- ducktective 4y agoCan someone explain in layman terms what Rocket.Chat is? Is it a Matrix client like Element? Is it a protocol?
- Macha 4y agoRocket.Chat is basically selfhosted slack. They now have a feature where it can federate with matrix. This means rocketchat users on your rocketchat instance can talk to matrix users on a federated matrix network if you enable it. This means you could use the Rocket.chat server and Rocket.chat UI as an alternative to a homeserver + matrix client. I don't believe this allows using a matrix client to connect to rocket.chat server's directly or vice versa.
- ducktective 4y agoThanks! So they have their own protocol and client. But, they have made a bridge with matrix. They could have just created a matrix client instead of the whole business model...
- SargeZT 4y agoMatrix was still a part of Amdocs and basically not a thing beyond a protocol and a WebRTC demo When RocketChat was created.
- zufallsheld 4y agoWell, matrix is from 2014, rocketchat from 2015. I don't know if matrix was this popular and mature in 2014 to adopt it to build a business around it.
- woojoo666 4y agoAt the end of the article they posted an update: > Aaron from Rocket.Chat just published an excellent guide & video tour for how to actually set up your Rocket.Chat instance with Dendrite Dendrite is a Matrix homeserver[1] so it looks like you can mix and match [1]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now#servers https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now#servers
- godelski 4y agoHN frequently seems obsessed with Matrix. So I want to ask, where do you all hang out and how do you use it? I think Matrix is cool, I just am not sure how people are actually using it. Please don't tell me to look at the channels list there's a lot of porn and most channels I have joined are dead.
- a1371 4y agoI don't use it often but I'm a big fan. I think just like how you don't look up whether someone is using outlook or gmail when you want to email them, IM and video calls should not be bound to clients. It's stupid that I need MS Teams to talk to someone, when all my stuff are on another platform. Matrix is fixing that.
- jlkuester7 4y agoI use it as a one-stop-shop for messaging. I setup a Synapse server ~5 years ago and since then have convinced many of my close family and friends to join my server (or another). Now many of the folks I want to chat with are regular users of Matrix. For some of my stone-age friends that are still on WhatsApp, I run a bridge [1] so that I don't need to look beyond my Matrix client to see WhatsApp messages. For other random SMS messages, I use the dated SmsMatrix [2] to push text messages so I can see/reply from Matrix. Beyond that, I also use Matrix to connect to several open source communities (e.g. Mailu.io [3]). 1. https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp 2. https://github.com/tijder/SmsMatrix https://github.com/tijder/SmsMatrix 3. https://matrix.to/#/!RJFCFtixHgPhzacdhW:tedomum.net?via=ghostdub.de&via=matrix.org&via=tedomum.net https://matrix.to/#/!RJFCFtixHgPhzacdhW:tedomum.net?via=ghos...
- godelski 4y agoThis seems like the best answer, but I already did that switch with most people and Signal (took years to grow that network). But I do like the idea of bridges for WA and SMS (I know there is a Signal bridge too)
- f38zf5vdt 4y agoIt's a battle-tested open source Discord/Slack/etc replacement with sound 1-on-1/group chat E2EE encryption. It's like Facebook Messenger:Signal as Slack:Matrix, and it's easy to use software even for people not familiar with dealing with the ins and outs of complicated cryptosystems. Unlike Signal it has always been completely open source.
- f38zf5vdt 4y agoRocket.Chat uses their own E2EE scheme [1] which is different and arguably less secure than the one in Matrix [2]. As I understand it, this is simply a bridge and will defeat the purpose of the advanced E2EE algorithm in Matrix. I recall looking at Rocket.Chat when setting up chat servers for my corporation and dropping it over their poor and slow to adopt E2EE implementations. [1] https://docs.rocket.chat/guides/security/end-to-end-encryption-algorithms https://docs.rocket.chat/guides/security/end-to-end-encrypti... [2] https://gitlab.matrix.org/matrix-org/olm https://gitlab.matrix.org/matrix-org/olm
- zaik 4y agoThat's also the reason you cannot securely message Matrix users if you already have a XMPP address.
- Arathorn 4y agoEven if Rocket.Chat used the same E2EE scheme as Matrix, you would still have to re-encrypt, given the application-layer protocols are not the same. RC's messages are a blob of JSON which looks nothing like Matrix's JSON events. To preserve E2EE throughout you'd have to speak precisely the same protocol - e.g. Matrix+Megolm or XMPP+OMEMO or whatever, or effectively run a multihead stack (one which can speak both Matrix & Rocket.Chat), which isn't exactly elegant. This is the disadvantage of bridges, alas: if you want E2EE, you need to be on the same protocol throughout.
- CameronNemo 4y agoYou can run bridges on the client, but that is not well supported right now.
- Arathorn 4y agoTrue, although this is one step away from being a multihead messenger, effectively. It's just that the protocol-specific modules are daemons using a standard API rather than in-process. For instance, I can't think of a way that one would run an Element Web<->Rocket.Chat bridge clientside, as web browsers can't use local web services, short of a service worker... but by the time you're running a dedicated service-worker for a webapp which lets it talk to another webapp, it's basically become a multihead msgr.
- tasubotadas 4y agoLooks great. Never heard before about rocket chat. Has anybody tried getting video calls working on it?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- etc-hosts 4y agoI tried to run rocket chat behind nginx, Android mobile clients updated correctly for a few minutes after original sync, and then it would break and remain broken unless I restarted rocket chat. Desktop web clients worked always. It's probably a websockets issue. I tried running behind haproxy and traefik, same problem. I tried following some advice I got from a maintainer in their forums, same problem. I went back to Mattermost. Is a shame, rocket chat UI seems nicer to me than mattermost
- geekgonecrazy 4y agoSounds exactly like a websocket issue. Typically a matter of making sure you have the right options on the proxy block. Here is a recent example for nginx that handles websockets: https://github.com/geekgonecrazy/rocketchat-matrix-federation-example/blob/main/nginx-config#L53 https://github.com/geekgonecrazy/rocketchat-matrix-federatio...
- Freie_Messenger 4y agoLet's hope Rocket.Chat don't limit federation but use/allow open federation to all Matrix servers and also use and enable the XMPP bridge too. This will give both protocols a boost. Btw: Will they drop the "old" federation? https://www.freie-messenger.de/en/sys_team/#rocket-chat https://www.freie-messenger.de/en/sys_team/#rocket-chat