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I have never seen as much negativity for an open source project on Hacker News as I have seen in every single Matrix thread. It is unbelievable. The only thing

I have never seen as much negativity for an open source project on Hacker News as I have seen in every single Matrix thread. It is unbelievable. The only thing that might come even close is FlatPak. It's been going on for years and years. If anyone doesn't believe me, just click Arathorn's post history and start browsing. I've never understood what Matrix did to deserve this. It's a fantastic project - I've been using it every day since ~2017. It has its problems but it's head and above every other project like it and provides real value. Better still, the Matrix folks seem to really be thinking things through and making, even if not the best (subjective), a well thought out and well explained decision every time they make a decision. I have seen every. single. possible. attack. thrown at Matrix OVER AND OVER again. Every single one. So many quite obviously not in good faith. Matrix is owned by the Jews. Matrix is owned by the CIA. Matrix is owned by Germany. Matrix violates privacy laws. Matrix tricks you into thinking your messages are deleted when they aren't. Matrix (this one's hilarious), BROKE SIGNALS ENCRYPTION (lol). Matrix is scraping all the rooms to sell to Google (lol). XMPP was perfectly fine and we didn't need Matrix. Matrix collects too much metadata. Matrix federates by default. Matrix is too slow (ok fair). Matrix is going to sell out. This has been going on for the 5+ years I've been using Matrix. People have been sounding the alarm for a half decade about how awful and evil Matrix is. Yet it keeps plugging along, solving truly hard problems, getting better and better, and being released openly (I have no idea why, if I were on the Matrix team I'd have ragequit by now). It is absurd the level of criticism that is thrown at a project that has asked no one for anything, and has truly made the world a better place.

kuschku 3y ago
You're right, it's absolutely ridiculous. While there are things worthy of criticism (e.g., the protocol based on HTTP polling isn't exactly realtime, decryption errors are mostly just a UI bug in Element, Element in general having many UI bugs, etc) these aren't even close to worth the outright hate Matrix gets here. HN is usually a hypefest for any new technology, but as soon as the topic turns to Matrix the threads immediately become a Mad Max-style wasteland. It makes no sense whatsoever. Especially this thread – a move to AGPL with a dual-licensed option for corporate customers is absolutely fine, Stallman and the FSF support it, and it's the most sustainable way to run a truly free software project. The only reason I can think of why HN would be so hateful towards a license change is that many people here actually used Matrix to build proprietary products and don't want to contribute to upstream (be it with code or money).
Arathorn 3y ago
It's an interesting pattern to be sure. It's not all negative though (e.g. this thread has a few moments of positivity mixed in with all the folks jumping to the conclusion that we're trying to pull a Hashicorp). I have a few theories as to why it happens: 1. Communication is an intensely personal and social (even intimate) thing, and people get irrationally attached to how they do it - and so end up defending their favourite system, attacking ones which threaten it, or attacking their ex-favourite if they feel let down and/or betrayed. 2. I think this effect gets amplified in a feedback loop if you use the platform to build the platform itself. This is true of course for operating systems, desktop environments, programming languages etc. too - but it seems to be particularly the case for chat systems. Perhaps this is because it's intrinsically accelerated by the higher emotional/dramatic/intense characteristics of realtime chat - it's effectively mixing the intensity realtime interactive social interaction with programming. So if you spend all your life sitting in a chat system talking about and building that chat system, then spirits can run disproportionately high. You see the same levels of jingoism in IRC and XMPP too. 3. Culturally I think Matrix has picked up both good and bad cultural vibes from IRC - and for better or worse, one of the things that defines IRC is a somewhat elitist vibe: it's a fringe subcommunity for folks who are smart and informed enough to navigate the by-geeks-for-geeks interface. As a result, folks get tribal about it - both Matrix (although I pray that we eventually get mainstream), IRC and XMPP. 4. Matrix has been going for over 9 years now, and it's still not as good from a plain UX perspective as a centralised system like WhatsApp (although I'd hope that we've improved a lot recently, especially with Matrix 2.0 and Element X). As a result, there's been a lot of expectation and hype over the years, which hasn't always materialised as rapidly as you'd hope. So there are certainly those who feel let down. 5. Matrix wouldn't exist if previous projects had not hit a plateau and got stuck, and so folks who are still working away on previous projects are understandably irate. 6. I talk too much on HN and it pisses people off. anyway, thanks for the words of support :)
- chaosharmonic 3y ago
  Honestly, given that Matrix is a spec and not just a first-party client, it reminds me a lot more of BitTorrent. BitTorrent the client went full proprietary, but that did nothing to the adoption of BitTorrent the protocol, because open-source implementations are all over the place. That's at least what I hope is the worst case here.

kuschku 3y ago

You're right, it's absolutely ridiculous. While there are things worthy of criticism (e.g., the protocol based on HTTP polling isn't exactly realtime, decryption errors are mostly just a UI bug in Element, Element in general having many UI bugs, etc) these aren't even close to worth the outright hate Matrix gets here. HN is usually a hypefest for any new technology, but as soon as the topic turns to Matrix the threads immediately become a Mad Max-style wasteland. It makes no sense whatsoever. Especially this thread – a move to AGPL with a dual-licensed option for corporate customers is absolutely fine, Stallman and the FSF support it, and it's the most sustainable way to run a truly free software project. The only reason I can think of why HN would be so hateful towards a license change is that many people here actually used Matrix to build proprietary products and don't want to contribute to upstream (be it with code or money).

Arathorn 3y ago

It's an interesting pattern to be sure. It's not all negative though (e.g. this thread has a few moments of positivity mixed in with all the folks jumping to the conclusion that we're trying to pull a Hashicorp). I have a few theories as to why it happens: 1. Communication is an intensely personal and social (even intimate) thing, and people get irrationally attached to how they do it - and so end up defending their favourite system, attacking ones which threaten it, or attacking their ex-favourite if they feel let down and/or betrayed. 2. I think this effect gets amplified in a feedback loop if you use the platform to build the platform itself. This is true of course for operating systems, desktop environments, programming languages etc. too - but it seems to be particularly the case for chat systems. Perhaps this is because it's intrinsically accelerated by the higher emotional/dramatic/intense characteristics of realtime chat - it's effectively mixing the intensity realtime interactive social interaction with programming. So if you spend all your life sitting in a chat system talking about and building that chat system, then spirits can run disproportionately high. You see the same levels of jingoism in IRC and XMPP too. 3. Culturally I think Matrix has picked up both good and bad cultural vibes from IRC - and for better or worse, one of the things that defines IRC is a somewhat elitist vibe: it's a fringe subcommunity for folks who are smart and informed enough to navigate the by-geeks-for-geeks interface. As a result, folks get tribal about it - both Matrix (although I pray that we eventually get mainstream), IRC and XMPP. 4. Matrix has been going for over 9 years now, and it's still not as good from a plain UX perspective as a centralised system like WhatsApp (although I'd hope that we've improved a lot recently, especially with Matrix 2.0 and Element X). As a result, there's been a lot of expectation and hype over the years, which hasn't always materialised as rapidly as you'd hope. So there are certainly those who feel let down. 5. Matrix wouldn't exist if previous projects had not hit a plateau and got stuck, and so folks who are still working away on previous projects are understandably irate. 6. I talk too much on HN and it pisses people off. anyway, thanks for the words of support :)

chaosharmonic 3y ago
Honestly, given that Matrix is a spec and not just a first-party client, it reminds me a lot more of BitTorrent. BitTorrent the client went full proprietary, but that did nothing to the adoption of BitTorrent the protocol, because open-source implementations are all over the place. That's at least what I hope is the worst case here.