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I don't like this. I only have a handful of family users but I could still benefit from the additional vulnerability proofing of Rust. It's not just about the s

I don't like this. I only have a handful of family users but I could still benefit from the additional vulnerability proofing of Rust. It's not just about the scaling. My data security matters too. I have not exposed it to the internet for a while now because I already had my doubts. Also, as 0xC0ncord mentioned large federated rooms caused too much load so I wanted to move to standalone anyway. For that too I could have benefited from this. This really sounds like "haha you community members are stuck with a sucky version of our software and you're never getting the good one!". It's not exactly making me feel valued as a community member. And we shouldn't forget this is what put matrix on the map. This feels very bait-and-switch'ey. Also pointing out the flaws in one's own software doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. I think it would have been a sounder approach to paywall real enterprise features rather than the core product. Such as SSO, auditing, legal holds, that stuff. Basically all the stuff that Microsoft Teams has in Purview. The community won't miss any of that stuff. Ps I thought dendrite was supposed to be the next big thing? It feels like element is often jumping on new things like big rewrites such as element X instead of improving the existing products.

kumiokun 2y ago
Yeah, as a past contributor and long-running homeserver admin I feel pretty rugpulled here. This violates the expectations set in past communications. Synapse was something very different to Element. (This would at least for me have had a very different taste and reception if the private for-profit alternative would have been done under a different branding than "Synapse Pro" and not hijacking matrix.org community channels to promote it. They don't seem to be able to keep their hats and chairs properly separated)
- eredengrin 2y ago
  > I feel pretty rugpulled here How? Synapse is still being developed, this is just a commercial addon for huge customers. > and not hijacking matrix.org community channels to promote it. They don't seem to be able to keep their hats and chairs properly separated matrix.org has never excluded mentioning commercial entities, past blogs have frequently included information about etke or beeper for example.
0xC0ncord 2y ago
Dendrite was officially cancelled late last year. The repo was archived. https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite
- bean-weevil 2y ago
  It continues to be developed by matrix https://github.com/element-hq/dendrite https://github.com/element-hq/dendrite
  - benatkin 2y ago
    Yes, as open source but under a different license. Now, I don't dislike the AGPL, but think a healthy FLOSS community has a variety of licenses. However, freedom 0 is important. https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-doesnt-anyone-give-a-crap-about-freedom-zero/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-doesnt-anyone-give-a-crap-... I feel like not all software under the same copyleft license is the same. Mastodon is under the AGPL, and I think people are comfortable treating it as a component alongside differently licensed projects, on a subdomain, such as https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon and many others where people use Mastodon for their ActivityPub feed on a subdomain of their own domain. From what I've seen of Element I think they'd throw a fit if people used Element's AGPL projects in the same way, especially if it was made convenient by a cloud provider, while still keeping it separate (such as in a different container).
    - camgunz 2y ago
      Do you have examples?
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Oh thanks I missed that. I thought it was still stuck in its forever 'nearing feature complete' status :) Edit: oh ok it's still alive but just not very active. That's ok. I think synapse is fine as long as the long-standing issues would be fixed. Like big federated rooms.
- Arathorn 2y ago
smashedtoatoms 2y ago
"It's not exactly making me feel valued as a community member" Neither is not getting paid for work/services. If one works hard on things and can't pay their bills, that's unsustainable. Why is developer time worth nothing to other developers? If you can write it and host it, do it. If you can't, and the folks that can charge for it, hand over your credit card so they can continue to do it. Or watch it die when they have to abandon it to make a living writing code for someone that will pay for it I guess. No one owes us their time and effort for nothing.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  I do support many FOSS projects. Obviously I can't provide the kind of funding that element is looking for. And that's really where it rubs, none of us in the community can. It's their choice to position this as a massive enterprise level solution.
  - portaouflop 2y ago
    It looks like they have a 5 and 10€/user/month tier. While that is not insignificant it also isnt that much if you really care about it. It does not seem to me like the only choice is either FOSS or massive enterprise 5-figures/year here - what am I missing?
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      Can you actually buy that for a handful of seats? All the benefits they're touting apply only to massive installations. So it sounds to me that they wouldn't be interested in selling this to home users. They'll probably refer you to element one or the community version. But I have not asked, that's true.
      - portaouflop 2y ago
        Yea I am also not that familiar with the different editions that are available and the whole ecosystem is confusing to me with matrix/element/dendrite/synapse etc. I feel like though they would have some accessible paid plan for “smaller” users that want to support the development of the project long term - I believe this is the most sustainable way to build complex “big” FOSS projects - apart from having someone sacrifice themselves for the greater good I guess
Arathorn 2y ago
The way I’m thinking of it is that Synapse (not to mention Dendrite) has been badly starved of development over the last few years due to the freerider problem nuking the $ available to support our dev as the upstream. By making only optimisations that primarily support massive servers proprietary (for now), the $ from Synapse Pro can hopefully then directly fund the features and maintenance of core FOSS Synapse, including core optimisation work which benefits everyone. Concrete examples include: * State Res v3, which hopefully should have algorithmic improvements to perf * State storage, addressing the long standing diskspace consumption problem for state snapshots * Finishing faster room joins so they are actually fast * Shared retry hints on federation, to stop wasting time trying to talk to dead servers * Better than full mesh federation, so small servers can participate in big rooms without melting. EDIT: to spell it out, as it’s been misunderstood: Fixing these issues will likely happen directly in FOSS Synapse (assuming there’s any $ to work on them at all). Meanwhile, FOSS Synapse already has Rust as Python codepaths and has done for years, and that will only increase over time. Only stuff for making workers scale to handle hundreds of thousand concurrent users will remain proprietary for now. Dendrite was meant to be the next big thing, but we (obviously) didn’t have enough $ to work on both it and Synapse. So we focused exclusively on Synapse as of end of Dec 2023, and Dendrite is currently progressing on a best-effort (ie not funded work) basis. > It feels like element is often jumping on new things like big rewrites such as element X instead of improving the existing products. Well, Dendrite was a big rewrite like that. Which is why we’ve ended up improving Synapse instead (both FOSS and the new rust workers).
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Many of the issues you mention though are real dealbreakers for those trying to use this as a private user. It's really a big adoption barrier not being able to join big rooms without the server 'melting'. Those rooms are big because they have a lot to offer. Those of us promoting matrix as a next gen truly free and federated platform have always expected these to be fixed. It's just not really fit for purpose without those fixes. It doesn't inspire confidence that we have to wait for this to 'trickle down' to the free version. And ok yeah I think it's a good idea to kill concurrent product development that does the same thing. As long as it makes the remaining product better. So there's also a Rust version of FOSS Synapse? I wasn't aware of that. Even the official blog post speaks only of python for the community version. > By making optimisations that primarily support massive servers proprietary (for now), the $ can hopefully then fund features and maintenance of core FOSS Synapse Your own blog post about the pro version (and the one about forking synapse) basically said that you wouldn't be working on the community version at all anymore? Unless I misunderstood. But my takeaway from this is 'it's a dead duck, it's time to pay up'. Which is a bit worrying as this is the kind of price only viable for large corporations.
koito17 2y ago
> I only have a handful of family users but I could still benefit from the additional vulnerability proofing of Rust Conduit[1] seems to predate Synapse Pro and I've ran it for a short while. It consumes about 32 MiB of RAM for a server with at most a dozen registered users. However, Conduit, like Dendrite, has fallen behind on implementing the latest revisions of the Matrix API. Thus I cannot fully recommend deploying Conduit unless you are aware of exactly which clients and rooms your users expect to interact with. [1] https://conduit.rs/ https://conduit.rs/
- NewJazz 2y ago
  Is there a client/version compatibility matrix or something. That missing MEP problem sounds tricky... Won't clients/peers check to make sure the server supports the MEP before making use ofnit?
  - ezst 2y ago
    I'm sure the irony isn't lost on Matrix Devs who were so hasty to diminish and criticize previous art. Perhaps they could soon develop an extensible version of the Matrix protocol and spec, and call it something like eXtensible Matrix Protocol for People, or XMPP in short form. Oh, wait.
graemep 2y ago
> I only have a handful of family users but I could still benefit from the additional vulnerability proofing of Rust Is the Rust version reducing vulnerabilities? It looks like the main reason for the Rust version is reduced CPU use, and Python does not suffer from the memory safety issues that C and C++ have.
- Arathorn 2y ago
  Only in as much as it’s slightly harder to write buggy Rust than buggy Python thanks to Rust’s better type safety and concurrency safety features, and there’s less unsafe native code in Rust libs typically. However FOSS Synapse already uses Rust in a bunch of places for hot paths, and will continue to do so. It’s just reducing CPU and elastic scaling for hordes of workers that Syn Pro addresses.

kumiokun 2y ago

Yeah, as a past contributor and long-running homeserver admin I feel pretty rugpulled here. This violates the expectations set in past communications. Synapse was something very different to Element. (This would at least for me have had a very different taste and reception if the private for-profit alternative would have been done under a different branding than "Synapse Pro" and not hijacking matrix.org community channels to promote it. They don't seem to be able to keep their hats and chairs properly separated)

eredengrin 2y ago
> I feel pretty rugpulled here How? Synapse is still being developed, this is just a commercial addon for huge customers. > and not hijacking matrix.org community channels to promote it. They don't seem to be able to keep their hats and chairs properly separated matrix.org has never excluded mentioning commercial entities, past blogs have frequently included information about etke or beeper for example.

0xC0ncord 2y ago

Dendrite was officially cancelled late last year. The repo was archived. https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite

bean-weevil 2y ago
It continues to be developed by matrix https://github.com/element-hq/dendrite https://github.com/element-hq/dendrite
- benatkin 2y ago
  Yes, as open source but under a different license. Now, I don't dislike the AGPL, but think a healthy FLOSS community has a variety of licenses. However, freedom 0 is important. https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-doesnt-anyone-give-a-crap-about-freedom-zero/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-doesnt-anyone-give-a-crap-... I feel like not all software under the same copyleft license is the same. Mastodon is under the AGPL, and I think people are comfortable treating it as a component alongside differently licensed projects, on a subdomain, such as https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon and many others where people use Mastodon for their ActivityPub feed on a subdomain of their own domain. From what I've seen of Element I think they'd throw a fit if people used Element's AGPL projects in the same way, especially if it was made convenient by a cloud provider, while still keeping it separate (such as in a different container).
  - camgunz 2y ago
    Do you have examples?
wkat4242 2y ago
Oh thanks I missed that. I thought it was still stuck in its forever 'nearing feature complete' status :) Edit: oh ok it's still alive but just not very active. That's ok. I think synapse is fine as long as the long-standing issues would be fixed. Like big federated rooms.
Arathorn 2y ago

smashedtoatoms 2y ago

"It's not exactly making me feel valued as a community member" Neither is not getting paid for work/services. If one works hard on things and can't pay their bills, that's unsustainable. Why is developer time worth nothing to other developers? If you can write it and host it, do it. If you can't, and the folks that can charge for it, hand over your credit card so they can continue to do it. Or watch it die when they have to abandon it to make a living writing code for someone that will pay for it I guess. No one owes us their time and effort for nothing.

wkat4242 2y ago
I do support many FOSS projects. Obviously I can't provide the kind of funding that element is looking for. And that's really where it rubs, none of us in the community can. It's their choice to position this as a massive enterprise level solution.
- portaouflop 2y ago
  It looks like they have a 5 and 10€/user/month tier. While that is not insignificant it also isnt that much if you really care about it. It does not seem to me like the only choice is either FOSS or massive enterprise 5-figures/year here - what am I missing?
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Can you actually buy that for a handful of seats? All the benefits they're touting apply only to massive installations. So it sounds to me that they wouldn't be interested in selling this to home users. They'll probably refer you to element one or the community version. But I have not asked, that's true.
    - portaouflop 2y ago
      Yea I am also not that familiar with the different editions that are available and the whole ecosystem is confusing to me with matrix/element/dendrite/synapse etc. I feel like though they would have some accessible paid plan for “smaller” users that want to support the development of the project long term - I believe this is the most sustainable way to build complex “big” FOSS projects - apart from having someone sacrifice themselves for the greater good I guess

Arathorn 2y ago

The way I’m thinking of it is that Synapse (not to mention Dendrite) has been badly starved of development over the last few years due to the freerider problem nuking the $ available to support our dev as the upstream. By making only optimisations that primarily support massive servers proprietary (for now), the $ from Synapse Pro can hopefully then directly fund the features and maintenance of core FOSS Synapse, including core optimisation work which benefits everyone. Concrete examples include: * State Res v3, which hopefully should have algorithmic improvements to perf * State storage, addressing the long standing diskspace consumption problem for state snapshots * Finishing faster room joins so they are actually fast * Shared retry hints on federation, to stop wasting time trying to talk to dead servers * Better than full mesh federation, so small servers can participate in big rooms without melting. EDIT: to spell it out, as it’s been misunderstood: Fixing these issues will likely happen directly in FOSS Synapse (assuming there’s any $ to work on them at all). Meanwhile, FOSS Synapse already has Rust as Python codepaths and has done for years, and that will only increase over time. Only stuff for making workers scale to handle hundreds of thousand concurrent users will remain proprietary for now. Dendrite was meant to be the next big thing, but we (obviously) didn’t have enough $ to work on both it and Synapse. So we focused exclusively on Synapse as of end of Dec 2023, and Dendrite is currently progressing on a best-effort (ie not funded work) basis. > It feels like element is often jumping on new things like big rewrites such as element X instead of improving the existing products. Well, Dendrite was a big rewrite like that. Which is why we’ve ended up improving Synapse instead (both FOSS and the new rust workers).

wkat4242 2y ago
Many of the issues you mention though are real dealbreakers for those trying to use this as a private user. It's really a big adoption barrier not being able to join big rooms without the server 'melting'. Those rooms are big because they have a lot to offer. Those of us promoting matrix as a next gen truly free and federated platform have always expected these to be fixed. It's just not really fit for purpose without those fixes. It doesn't inspire confidence that we have to wait for this to 'trickle down' to the free version. And ok yeah I think it's a good idea to kill concurrent product development that does the same thing. As long as it makes the remaining product better. So there's also a Rust version of FOSS Synapse? I wasn't aware of that. Even the official blog post speaks only of python for the community version. > By making optimisations that primarily support massive servers proprietary (for now), the $ can hopefully then fund features and maintenance of core FOSS Synapse Your own blog post about the pro version (and the one about forking synapse) basically said that you wouldn't be working on the community version at all anymore? Unless I misunderstood. But my takeaway from this is 'it's a dead duck, it's time to pay up'. Which is a bit worrying as this is the kind of price only viable for large corporations.

koito17 2y ago

> I only have a handful of family users but I could still benefit from the additional vulnerability proofing of Rust Conduit[1] seems to predate Synapse Pro and I've ran it for a short while. It consumes about 32 MiB of RAM for a server with at most a dozen registered users. However, Conduit, like Dendrite, has fallen behind on implementing the latest revisions of the Matrix API. Thus I cannot fully recommend deploying Conduit unless you are aware of exactly which clients and rooms your users expect to interact with. [1] https://conduit.rs/ https://conduit.rs/

NewJazz 2y ago
Is there a client/version compatibility matrix or something. That missing MEP problem sounds tricky... Won't clients/peers check to make sure the server supports the MEP before making use ofnit?
- ezst 2y ago
  I'm sure the irony isn't lost on Matrix Devs who were so hasty to diminish and criticize previous art. Perhaps they could soon develop an extensible version of the Matrix protocol and spec, and call it something like eXtensible Matrix Protocol for People, or XMPP in short form. Oh, wait.

graemep 2y ago

> I only have a handful of family users but I could still benefit from the additional vulnerability proofing of Rust Is the Rust version reducing vulnerabilities? It looks like the main reason for the Rust version is reduced CPU use, and Python does not suffer from the memory safety issues that C and C++ have.

Arathorn 2y ago
Only in as much as it’s slightly harder to write buggy Rust than buggy Python thanks to Rust’s better type safety and concurrency safety features, and there’s less unsafe native code in Rust libs typically. However FOSS Synapse already uses Rust in a bunch of places for hot paths, and will continue to do so. It’s just reducing CPU and elastic scaling for hordes of workers that Syn Pro addresses.