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I'm really curious how this person got codeberg pages working, I still haven't managed to get a codeberg page deployed. I thought it required a 3rd party server

I'm really curious how this person got codeberg pages working, I still haven't managed to get a codeberg page deployed. I thought it required a 3rd party server, like their actions seem to. Also: > It's easy to pick a proprietary network like Telegram or an unsustainable one like Matrix, What's unsustainable about Matrix? I've really enjoyed running our community on Matrix.

progval 3y ago
Matrix.org (and Element) is running out of money and hosts a large number of free users. The rest of the community probably won't be able to handle the influx of users the day the Matrix.org homeserver needs to close.
- komali2 3y ago
  That's the usecase of Matrix As IRC I guess you mean? I've never participated in any matrix.org rooms outside of the matrix / synapse / element support rooms (I believe they're on matrix.org). For our community it's kind of moot if matrix.org closes, the only downside is of course support will drop off precipitously. But other than that, we self host.
  - progval 3y ago
    I don't see what this has to do with IRC. But if all your users use your homeserver, then yes you should be fine.
    - komali2 3y ago
      I mean in the sense that IRC as a community and support hub for certain things like various Linux distros, other Foss projects etc, shifted away from irc to other tools like discourse or matrix. I believe several are hosted on matrix.org.
      - Arathorn 3y ago
        Rooms in Matrix are hosted on every server who participates in them - just because the alias is #somewhere:matrix.org doesn’t mean that if matrix.org goes down the room disappears. However, user accounts aren’t portable yet, sadly. So the problem is more that if matrix.org disappeared then it would impact the user accounts homed on it.
Arathorn 3y ago
It seems like the original post may be just a little biased against Matrix in favour of XMPP ;) Matrix has been going strong for 10 years, and while it's true that the Matrix.org Foundation (and Element) need funding (c.f. https://matrix.org/blog/2024/01/2024-roadmap-and-fundraiser/ https://matrix.org/blog/2024/01/2024-roadmap-and-fundraiser/ and https://matrix.org/blog/2024/04/open-source-publicly-funded-service https://matrix.org/blog/2024/04/open-source-publicly-funded-...) it's clear that elsewhere in the Matrix ecosystem there's loads of $ flying around: https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/09/wordpress-com-owner-automattic-acquires-multi-service-messaging-app-beeper-for-125m/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/09/wordpress-com-owner-automa... etc. So I think it's a little ridiculous to call Matrix "unsustainable" (at least any more than any other FOSS project). > I've really enjoyed running our community on Matrix. I'm glad, thank you for using it.
- komali2 3y ago
  > I'm glad, thank you for using it. Of course! We love how easy it is to get bots up and running, and the ecosystem of bridges made it really easy to incentivize people to onboard, because we can basically offer "for free" the ability for people to answer their instagram messages without opening instagram, etc. Our only issue has been onboarding flow. We get that there's an "identity server" but when we use vector.im and generate invite links from for example Element, they usually get sent into a flow where they, confusingly, are making an account on some big home server instead of ours (I think like matrix.org or something). We were going to deploy our own identity server after someone on iirc matrix community chat somewhere mentioned that the email flow is implemented per identity server, but all the FOSS identity servers we could find were deprecated. Anyway now we just give people tokens that we generate in synapse and screenshot instructions lol. The one thing I miss from slack is being able to just right click a Room, click "invite," enter someone's email address, and it's all handled from there.
- SamWhited 3y ago
  It's not less sustainable than most other FOSS projects, it's just that most other FOSS projects also don't have sustainable funding. If you're just comparing the actual implementations this is true of most XMPP stuff as well. However, that's not what's being talked about here most likely (though it's unclear since when we just say "Matrix" or "XMPP" we're talking about a protocol, not a service, client, server, etc. so who knows). If you compare Matrix the foundation/company, they are VC funded (the foundation is a bit of a sham after community pressure, it's all the same people and accounts controlling it, so it's a step in the right direction but not really well established). The moment that funding dries up, or the Element people (who still mostly control protocol work) decide they want to monetize the users more, the whole thing will fall apart. That's unsustainable. Meanwhile proper standards organizations like the IETF or XSF have been going for way longer than 10 years and have proven track records of sustainable funding and membership. People just like to pretend it's worse somehow because they're not building sexy looking software themselves with millions in VC funding. In reality infrastructure is never sexy, and if it's using unsustainable funding models it will fail. This seems like a good reason to pick something controlled by a real standards body over something that's not if you want a long-term community. (P.S. Since someone once accused me of bias and deliberately not mentioning this even though I'm completely open about it: I have volunteered for the XSF and have done work on both Matrix and XMPP related products and open source projects; I chose to volunteer for the XSF after working on both protocols and evaluating their funding and leadership, so take that for what it's worth)
pgeorgi 3y ago
Matrix only recently started adopting an (as of now) experimental protocol that allows purging older parts of the append-only data set that constitutes a channel.
- Arathorn 3y ago
  What are you thinking of here? Synapse has supported purging room history since 2016: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/911 https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/911, and configurable data retention since 2019: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/5815 https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/5815. Meanwhile, Matrix has never needed the full room history to be synchronised - when a server joins a room, it typically only grabs the last 20 messages (with other history pulled in demand when the client scrolls up). (It does needs to grab all the key-value state about the room, although these days that happens gradually in the background). If you're wondering why Matrix implementations are often greedy on disk space, it's because they typically cache the key-value state aggressively (storing a snapshot of it for the room on a regular basis). However, that's just an implementation quirk; folks could absolutely come up with fancier datastructures to store it more efficiently; it's just not got to the top of anyone's todo list yet - things like performance and UX are considered much more important than disk usage right now.
philsnow 3y ago
That sentence was right after this paragraph: > Talking over phone is the most reliable way to announce the party, send reminders and confirmations, and to coordinate during the party. That way, there's no question of "didn't check my messages/email". Maybe it’s different in India but here in the states, when you tell most people that you’re not coordinating with imessage/sms (or fb messenger or whatsapp), you’ll get blank stares. I’m reminded of this: http://howfuckedismydatabase.com/nosql/fault-tolerance.png http://howfuckedismydatabase.com/nosql/fault-tolerance.png
- contrapunctus 3y ago
  Author here, and it's quite similar in India. Everyone expects me to WhatsApp them the details, and the ubiquity of proprietary platforms is infuriating. Thankfully we've been able to use cell calls and SMS/email until we can onboard them to XMPP. (Many of us in the Delhi OSM community are free software and XMPP advocates.)
  - philsnow 3y ago
    Note, I'm very sympathetic to not wanting to use proprietary platforms in general [0], but I'm not at a point in my life where I can spend any brain glucose at all on it. [0] in particular because of the plight of the umbrella protestors in Hong Kong and the government's infiltration of coordination platforms
zaik 3y ago
It's a custom protocol of a VC funded startup which now seems to be struggling financially. XMPP is the existing internet standard for IM.
contrapunctus 3y ago
> I'm really curious how this person got codeberg pages working, I still haven't managed to get a codeberg page deployed. I thought it required a 3rd party server, like their actions seem to. Hi, author here. It doesn't need a 3rd party server - it's all hosted in Codeberg Git repos. Here's a guide - https://codeberg.page/ https://codeberg.page/ > What's unsustainable about Matrix? I've really enjoyed running our community on Matrix. Many of us in the Delhi OpenStreetMap community are associated with projects like the Free Software Community of India, and run public instances of federated services, including Matrix and XMPP. It has been our experience that XMPP has a dramatically lower server resource footprint than Matrix. We've actually had to close down a public Matrix service because it was economically unsustainable in this sense.
- komali2 3y ago
  Hosting costs makes sense (though last check ours only really pegs out at 4gb, granted that's with about 100 logins). So far as I can tell, xmpp has no concept of threading, is that the case? It's what prevented me from choosing it when I went with matrix for my co-op.
  - SamWhited 3y ago
    XMPP has threading at a protocol level, just like Matrix (and it has since the early days). I'm only aware of one or two apps that implement it though, and I'm not really sure why that is (maybe it's just a lot of old-school developers who like older IM clients? Unclear.). I really like the way the Cheogram app does this (it's XMPP under the hood) and am hopeful that other clients will see the way they've done it and start adopting it.

progval 3y ago

Matrix.org (and Element) is running out of money and hosts a large number of free users. The rest of the community probably won't be able to handle the influx of users the day the Matrix.org homeserver needs to close.

komali2 3y ago
That's the usecase of Matrix As IRC I guess you mean? I've never participated in any matrix.org rooms outside of the matrix / synapse / element support rooms (I believe they're on matrix.org). For our community it's kind of moot if matrix.org closes, the only downside is of course support will drop off precipitously. But other than that, we self host.
- progval 3y ago
  I don't see what this has to do with IRC. But if all your users use your homeserver, then yes you should be fine.
  - komali2 3y ago
    I mean in the sense that IRC as a community and support hub for certain things like various Linux distros, other Foss projects etc, shifted away from irc to other tools like discourse or matrix. I believe several are hosted on matrix.org.
    - Arathorn 3y ago
      Rooms in Matrix are hosted on every server who participates in them - just because the alias is #somewhere:matrix.org doesn’t mean that if matrix.org goes down the room disappears. However, user accounts aren’t portable yet, sadly. So the problem is more that if matrix.org disappeared then it would impact the user accounts homed on it.

Arathorn 3y ago

It seems like the original post may be just a little biased against Matrix in favour of XMPP ;) Matrix has been going strong for 10 years, and while it's true that the Matrix.org Foundation (and Element) need funding (c.f. https://matrix.org/blog/2024/01/2024-roadmap-and-fundraiser/ https://matrix.org/blog/2024/01/2024-roadmap-and-fundraiser/ and https://matrix.org/blog/2024/04/open-source-publicly-funded-service https://matrix.org/blog/2024/04/open-source-publicly-funded-...) it's clear that elsewhere in the Matrix ecosystem there's loads of $ flying around: https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/09/wordpress-com-owner-automattic-acquires-multi-service-messaging-app-beeper-for-125m/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/09/wordpress-com-owner-automa... etc. So I think it's a little ridiculous to call Matrix "unsustainable" (at least any more than any other FOSS project). > I've really enjoyed running our community on Matrix. I'm glad, thank you for using it.

komali2 3y ago
> I'm glad, thank you for using it. Of course! We love how easy it is to get bots up and running, and the ecosystem of bridges made it really easy to incentivize people to onboard, because we can basically offer "for free" the ability for people to answer their instagram messages without opening instagram, etc. Our only issue has been onboarding flow. We get that there's an "identity server" but when we use vector.im and generate invite links from for example Element, they usually get sent into a flow where they, confusingly, are making an account on some big home server instead of ours (I think like matrix.org or something). We were going to deploy our own identity server after someone on iirc matrix community chat somewhere mentioned that the email flow is implemented per identity server, but all the FOSS identity servers we could find were deprecated. Anyway now we just give people tokens that we generate in synapse and screenshot instructions lol. The one thing I miss from slack is being able to just right click a Room, click "invite," enter someone's email address, and it's all handled from there.
SamWhited 3y ago
It's not less sustainable than most other FOSS projects, it's just that most other FOSS projects also don't have sustainable funding. If you're just comparing the actual implementations this is true of most XMPP stuff as well. However, that's not what's being talked about here most likely (though it's unclear since when we just say "Matrix" or "XMPP" we're talking about a protocol, not a service, client, server, etc. so who knows). If you compare Matrix the foundation/company, they are VC funded (the foundation is a bit of a sham after community pressure, it's all the same people and accounts controlling it, so it's a step in the right direction but not really well established). The moment that funding dries up, or the Element people (who still mostly control protocol work) decide they want to monetize the users more, the whole thing will fall apart. That's unsustainable. Meanwhile proper standards organizations like the IETF or XSF have been going for way longer than 10 years and have proven track records of sustainable funding and membership. People just like to pretend it's worse somehow because they're not building sexy looking software themselves with millions in VC funding. In reality infrastructure is never sexy, and if it's using unsustainable funding models it will fail. This seems like a good reason to pick something controlled by a real standards body over something that's not if you want a long-term community. (P.S. Since someone once accused me of bias and deliberately not mentioning this even though I'm completely open about it: I have volunteered for the XSF and have done work on both Matrix and XMPP related products and open source projects; I chose to volunteer for the XSF after working on both protocols and evaluating their funding and leadership, so take that for what it's worth)

pgeorgi 3y ago

Matrix only recently started adopting an (as of now) experimental protocol that allows purging older parts of the append-only data set that constitutes a channel.

Arathorn 3y ago
What are you thinking of here? Synapse has supported purging room history since 2016: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/911 https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/911, and configurable data retention since 2019: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/5815 https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/5815. Meanwhile, Matrix has never needed the full room history to be synchronised - when a server joins a room, it typically only grabs the last 20 messages (with other history pulled in demand when the client scrolls up). (It does needs to grab all the key-value state about the room, although these days that happens gradually in the background). If you're wondering why Matrix implementations are often greedy on disk space, it's because they typically cache the key-value state aggressively (storing a snapshot of it for the room on a regular basis). However, that's just an implementation quirk; folks could absolutely come up with fancier datastructures to store it more efficiently; it's just not got to the top of anyone's todo list yet - things like performance and UX are considered much more important than disk usage right now.

philsnow 3y ago

That sentence was right after this paragraph: > Talking over phone is the most reliable way to announce the party, send reminders and confirmations, and to coordinate during the party. That way, there's no question of "didn't check my messages/email". Maybe it’s different in India but here in the states, when you tell most people that you’re not coordinating with imessage/sms (or fb messenger or whatsapp), you’ll get blank stares. I’m reminded of this: http://howfuckedismydatabase.com/nosql/fault-tolerance.png http://howfuckedismydatabase.com/nosql/fault-tolerance.png

contrapunctus 3y ago
Author here, and it's quite similar in India. Everyone expects me to WhatsApp them the details, and the ubiquity of proprietary platforms is infuriating. Thankfully we've been able to use cell calls and SMS/email until we can onboard them to XMPP. (Many of us in the Delhi OSM community are free software and XMPP advocates.)
- philsnow 3y ago
  Note, I'm very sympathetic to not wanting to use proprietary platforms in general [0], but I'm not at a point in my life where I can spend any brain glucose at all on it. [0] in particular because of the plight of the umbrella protestors in Hong Kong and the government's infiltration of coordination platforms

zaik 3y ago

It's a custom protocol of a VC funded startup which now seems to be struggling financially. XMPP is the existing internet standard for IM.

contrapunctus 3y ago

> I'm really curious how this person got codeberg pages working, I still haven't managed to get a codeberg page deployed. I thought it required a 3rd party server, like their actions seem to. Hi, author here. It doesn't need a 3rd party server - it's all hosted in Codeberg Git repos. Here's a guide - https://codeberg.page/ https://codeberg.page/ > What's unsustainable about Matrix? I've really enjoyed running our community on Matrix. Many of us in the Delhi OpenStreetMap community are associated with projects like the Free Software Community of India, and run public instances of federated services, including Matrix and XMPP. It has been our experience that XMPP has a dramatically lower server resource footprint than Matrix. We've actually had to close down a public Matrix service because it was economically unsustainable in this sense.

komali2 3y ago
Hosting costs makes sense (though last check ours only really pegs out at 4gb, granted that's with about 100 logins). So far as I can tell, xmpp has no concept of threading, is that the case? It's what prevented me from choosing it when I went with matrix for my co-op.
- SamWhited 3y ago
  XMPP has threading at a protocol level, just like Matrix (and it has since the early days). I'm only aware of one or two apps that implement it though, and I'm not really sure why that is (maybe it's just a lot of old-school developers who like older IM clients? Unclear.). I really like the way the Cheogram app does this (it's XMPP under the hood) and am hopeful that other clients will see the way they've done it and start adopting it.