4 ms·

>trading off for speed If speed is a concern, why did you all stick with Synapse (essentially single-threaded due to the GIL) over moving to Dendrite? As far a

>trading off for speed If speed is a concern, why did you all stick with Synapse (essentially single-threaded due to the GIL) over moving to Dendrite? As far as I can tell, Dendrite is, for all intents and purposes, abandoned.

Arathorn 9mo ago
Because we didn't have enough people or cash to do a good job of simultaneously writing two servers, and as Synapse had gone into production across *.gouv.fr and other critical deployments, we instead frantically backported Dendrite's main novelties to Synapse - adding instead worker processes to Synapse so it could easily scale beyond the GIL: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapse-s-scalability/ https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapse-s-sc... The hope was always that we would then get back to Dendrite and be able to invest in it and migrate over, but the cash situation got worse in 2022 due to Matrix being more and more successful (causing the available $ in the industry to be flow to integrators rather than the upstream project), and instead we had to essentially park Dendrite dev in 2023 other than for critical fixes. Meanwhile, to try to fix the $ situation, we added Rust workers to Synapse as "Synapse Pro" to give customers a reason to actually route money to us as the upstream project, and nowadays Element is actually on a more economically sustainable path. However, at this point the likelihood is that rather than progressing Dendrite we'll instead look to add more Rust to Synapse and fix its resource usage. That said, others are of course very welcome to continue progressing Dendrite forwards, and I personally find it super depressing that we failed to progress both servers at the same time.
- The_President 9mo ago
  Matrix team is doing a solid job of running - Keep it up and keep eating the Slack/Teams marketshare up with competitive features and pricing. Additional business considerations like HQ location costs, tax liabilities, and talent pool availability on paper also affect what you have to work with. London tax, talent, and labor pay versus Austin for example. Also I got your name wrong last time - I apologize for that.
- majoe 9mo ago
  > nowadays Element is actually on a more economically sustainable path Good to hear. Keep up the good work.
- juliangoldsmith 9mo ago
  It sounds like you were stuck between a rock and a hard place there. Hope the Rust integration goes well.
- xethos 9mo ago
  > the likelihood is that rather than progressing Dendrite we'll instead look to add more Rust to Synapse I thought the goal of Dendrite was decentralization done right? Namely, the ability to run a homeserver from the very phone one is using the client on?
  - Arathorn 9mo ago
    Dendrite did subsequently switch to powering the P2P Matrix work… which also got paused in 2023. We’re currently resurrecting it, but it’s not clear whether Dendrite will be the clientside server impl.
- DANmode 9mo ago
  Been loving your well-placed comments for 5 years. Keep up the great work - your team should be giving you a raise; you’re a great reflection on them.
- catgirlinspace 9mo ago
  What’s the best way to fund development of this stuff? I’m aware of donating to the matrix.org foundation, but as far as I can tell none of that goes towards funding server and client implementations since those are Element instead of the foundation.

Arathorn 9mo ago

Because we didn't have enough people or cash to do a good job of simultaneously writing two servers, and as Synapse had gone into production across *.gouv.fr and other critical deployments, we instead frantically backported Dendrite's main novelties to Synapse - adding instead worker processes to Synapse so it could easily scale beyond the GIL: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapse-s-scalability/ https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapse-s-sc... The hope was always that we would then get back to Dendrite and be able to invest in it and migrate over, but the cash situation got worse in 2022 due to Matrix being more and more successful (causing the available $ in the industry to be flow to integrators rather than the upstream project), and instead we had to essentially park Dendrite dev in 2023 other than for critical fixes. Meanwhile, to try to fix the $ situation, we added Rust workers to Synapse as "Synapse Pro" to give customers a reason to actually route money to us as the upstream project, and nowadays Element is actually on a more economically sustainable path. However, at this point the likelihood is that rather than progressing Dendrite we'll instead look to add more Rust to Synapse and fix its resource usage. That said, others are of course very welcome to continue progressing Dendrite forwards, and I personally find it super depressing that we failed to progress both servers at the same time.

The_President 9mo ago
Matrix team is doing a solid job of running - Keep it up and keep eating the Slack/Teams marketshare up with competitive features and pricing. Additional business considerations like HQ location costs, tax liabilities, and talent pool availability on paper also affect what you have to work with. London tax, talent, and labor pay versus Austin for example. Also I got your name wrong last time - I apologize for that.
majoe 9mo ago
> nowadays Element is actually on a more economically sustainable path Good to hear. Keep up the good work.
juliangoldsmith 9mo ago
It sounds like you were stuck between a rock and a hard place there. Hope the Rust integration goes well.
xethos 9mo ago
> the likelihood is that rather than progressing Dendrite we'll instead look to add more Rust to Synapse I thought the goal of Dendrite was decentralization done right? Namely, the ability to run a homeserver from the very phone one is using the client on?
- Arathorn 9mo ago
  Dendrite did subsequently switch to powering the P2P Matrix work… which also got paused in 2023. We’re currently resurrecting it, but it’s not clear whether Dendrite will be the clientside server impl.
DANmode 9mo ago
Been loving your well-placed comments for 5 years. Keep up the great work - your team should be giving you a raise; you’re a great reflection on them.
catgirlinspace 9mo ago
What’s the best way to fund development of this stuff? I’m aware of donating to the matrix.org foundation, but as far as I can tell none of that goes towards funding server and client implementations since those are Element instead of the foundation.