7 ms·

great post from the libera staff, respecting the matrix folks while dealing with all of that must have felt disheartening. matrix has other driving forces and

• fisian 2y ago
  I'm not that active on matrix (mostly just passively listening on a few topics that interest me). However, regarding your last point there seems to be an active focus on improving element and their recent post about elementX [1]. I agree with your other points though, there are a lot of experiments that often lead to nowhere (e.g. P2P is basically abandoned AFAIK). [1]: https://element.io/blog/element-x-ignition/ https://element.io/blog/element-x-ignition/
  • mgrandl 2y ago
    ElementX on iOS feels really good these days. On the desktop though, I feel nothing really scratches the Discord itch.
    • SSLy 2y ago
      well, Slack is best UX but welp.
    • jeroenhd 2y ago
      It's still has a bit of a work-in-progress feeling, but for desktop usage Cinny has proven to be quite a good Discord-like interface for Matrix. I'm not using it right now because I switched my server to authenticated media and Cinny doesn't seem to have that implemented (yet), but that's mostly because I'm ahead of the curve on that change.
      • kfiven 2y ago
        Cinny does support authenticated media as per https://github.com/cinnyapp/cinny/releases https://github.com/cinnyapp/cinny/releases
• eredengrin 2y ago
  I wouldn't go so far as to say the ux utterly sucks but it's certainly not something I've been able to recommend to most family and friends yet (I can't be too hard on matrix since I have to use Teams sometimes which is simply worse in pretty much every category I can think of, which is sad since the microsoft product teams replaced, skype for business, was itself light years behind teams). It's a bit unfortunate to see matrix still not there yet, but on the other hand I'm still hopeful for the future. I think ElementX is the result of realizing that an excellent chat experience is what is needed. I also think the matrix foundation governing board elections [0] show that the community agrees that a rock solid chat experience is what is needed. At least for the individual members category, none of the candidates who were elected had a platform statement advocating for more work on the experimental matrix features. Sumner (who I think had the highest support by a good margin, although I can't find the exact numbers right now) specifically stated that experimental matrix features should not receive further investment until the baseline features are acceptable. I realize that getting funding is a beast of its own and that is probably why some of the experimental things took focus at times so I can't fault that, but I really do want matrix to be something I can eventually recommend to all my family and friends instead of whatsapp or discord. I think it is slowly heading that way.. [0] https://matrix.org/blog/2024/06/election-results/ https://matrix.org/blog/2024/06/election-results/ [1] https://matrix.org/foundation/governing-board-elections/#nominees https://matrix.org/foundation/governing-board-elections/#nom...
  • nunobrito 2y ago
    A single guy produced in a single year something more private and with a UI that doesn't suck: SimpleX. This Matrix case in my opinion is either lack of talent or intentional. One should never discard the second option when considering how governments tend to interfer in such tools and Matrix is quite sus on the funding side. In 5 years we've seen little to no remarkable progress. I'm not recommending this platform any further to anyone, other options have delivered what this one had been promissing for years. Time to move on.
    • tourmalinetaco 2y ago
      Absolutely intentional. Various members of the Element community had been fighting tooth and nail for better emote support, and many implementations have been developed and tested, and even for the ones that followed the Matrix-backed MSCs and passed the necessary tests every single one was outright denied and more recently told that Element makes major money off of government interests so why listen to the desires of the people, even if they do all the work necessary for free anyway?
• lloydatkinson 2y ago
  Where does someone begin with Matrix? The homepage mentions servers but how do you choose one? Is it like the ferdiverse with its hundreds of mastodon servers?
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • fisian 2y ago
    Yes, it's like the fediverse. The "main" server by the developers is matrix.org (similar to mastodon.social), but there are others too. You can also host your own server from different providers as described in this post: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/hosting/ https://matrix.org/ecosystem/hosting/
    • lloydatkinson 2y ago
      Wow, what is this complete garbage? People use this? https://imgur.com/a/iNj9HH1 https://imgur.com/a/iNj9HH1
      • immibis 2y ago
        Seems like you joined a spam channel. Congrats. They exist on IRC too.
        • lloydatkinson 2y ago
          It was literally in the top five search results for “programming” in the “public channels” page. With this little care or moderation I will stick to Discord.
          • Arathorn 2y ago
            you do understand this is a global public network right? are you going to stop using the Web because a search engine links you to a spammy website?
• Arathorn 2y ago
  The reason it feels like Element hasn’t moved for years is because we have been focused on fixing the mobile apps and crypto: https://element.io/blog/we-have-lift-off-element-x-call-and-server-suite-are-ready/ https://element.io/blog/we-have-lift-off-element-x-call-and-... The web app has been evolving too, but less dramatically - we need to enable instant sync there. In terms of custom emoji and selfserve moderation: both are the direct casualties of having to focus exclusively on servicing the government customers who actually pay for Element development. Since the end of 2022 we have had to completely change focus to first generating $ in order to be sustainable, and that meant parking everything but Element X, Web, Call and Synapse. The Libera mess is also effectively a symptom of that. P2P, Dendrite, Thirdroom etc have all been shelved for over a year. (Weird to see so many year-stale comments on a year-stale blog post).
  • 3np 2y ago
    > P2P, Dendrite, Thirdroom etc have all been shelved for over a year. (Weird to see so many year-stale comments on a year-stale blog post). P2P and Thirdrooom aren't really news but Dendrite itself? :/ That's significant and not at all the expectations set by current state of docs. https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite I thought it was just a slump and have been holding out on some pending changes. Sad.
    • Arathorn 2y ago
      well, hopefully it is just a slump, and as you may have seen we’ve been doing releases on a best effort basis. it isn’t the first time dendrite has had a hiatus. we did try to spell out the situation here: https://matrix.org/blog/2023/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update-2023#in-other-news https://matrix.org/blog/2023/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update...
• 3np 2y ago
  > or writing an experimental p2p homeserver I wish. I think this hasn't been the case for at least a year or two.
  • Arathorn 2y ago
    i swear people will keep complaining that we tried to do p2p and thirdroom decades after the projects were shelved.
• sellmesoap 2y ago
  I'm sure the government financial support comes tied to a need for that securitygasm after all!
• akimbostrawman 2y ago
  >no securitygasm cryptography I very much disagree. E2EE with FOSS and decentralization is THE reason to use it over discord or other "more simple and fun" messanger.
  • em-bee 2y ago
    if it would only work. but it doesn't. occasionally messages can not be decrypted. it happens randomly, and there is no clue why. had to give up using matrix with one friend because it just happened to often. the key management is also way to complex. there should be one key that protects everything. that can be a key that unlocks other keys, but all this complexity should be invisible to the user.
    • akimbostrawman 2y ago
      Messages that can't be decrypted have been a big problem however from personal experience and matrix themselves saying it should be fixed with recent Element X version this should be a thing from the past. >there should be one key that protects everything That is more or less the case with the recovery key. https://element.io/help#encryption16 https://element.io/help#encryption16
      • Arathorn 2y ago
        we spent all year fixing these and at least in Element X and other rust-sdk-crypto based apps like Element Web they should now be fixed.
• hhh 2y ago
  > nobody is buying drugs on matrix. this isn’t signal or whatsapp, this is discord for tech dorks. Yes they are, and they have since the beginning.
• nurumaik 2y ago
  >nobody is buying drugs on matrix That's proper level of security, when people don't even suspect someone using messenger to buy drugs
• immibis 2y ago
  People don't want "a distributed platform that isn't irc", but a platform they like. IRC fails primarily due to requiring a persistent TCP connection, and secondarily due to not supporting image sharing, and tertiarily, due to not supporting emoji reactions. Requiring a persistent TCP connection is simply a complete dealbreaker on the mobile phone platforms which make up, like, 90% of computers in existence. Fixing that would go a very long way, but it requires a lot more server-side storage since messages must be stored on the server until a client reconnects. Data privacy requirements go along with server-side storage. If messages are stored for a few minutes that's probably okay, but that's too short to implement the feature. If they're stored for weeks, and especially if images are stored, then for legal reasons there must be a way to moderate them. On another front, at least the server only needs to store one copy of the message for as long as the slowest client might need it; it might as well just store the entire channel history for a fixed time. These considerations lead to a design like Slack/Discord/Mattermost/etc, and trying to make it decentralized leads to a design like Matrix. You may think of IRC bouncers which don't have these issues, but notice the responsibility structure of an IRC bouncer is completely different. With a bouncer, the responsibility for storing the message lies with the reader, not with the network, so completely different considerations apply. Sharing images and videos is just useful sometimes, even though 90% of the time it only serves to increase spam. And I don't get why users are extremely horny for emoji reactions, but they are. A platform can exist just fine without either of them - every social platform develops a unique personality in response to the constraints and nudges the platform imposes on users - HN doesn't have images, videos or emojis and that's a good thing for HN. It's the persistent connection thing that's the real killer, because it means the platform is simply unusable 90% of the time. A version of IRC tailored to slower connections might look identical to (the non-binary segment of) Usenet. However, even Usenet has light moderation, that differs per server, to avoid being clogged with spam and binaries.
  • em-bee 2y ago
    sharing images and other media is vital in most groups where i participate. we don't just socialize. it's not like HN. we actually work on stuff. and very often images are needed to convey certain information. though even social channels work better with images. my family channel would be very limited without images. most of what we talk about is things we see, and can share images about. emoji reactions are another matter. but given that it is possible to just use unicode emojis, i think that reactions reduce clutter.
• fullspectrumdev 2y ago
  The cryptography and security aspect is actually one of Matrix’s good selling points for many companies looking to adopt it…