From my perspective, the biggest differentiator is that Matrix allows users to remove the centralized coordinator from their chat provider. That is, I can run my own Matrix server, where my users can chat with each other, without any interaction with Element.io or other operator. All other major providers (Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc) all rely on a single operator to coordinate the system.
Of course, it's still useful to be able to chat with people without accounts on your private server, which is why the federation is still important. You can link up with broader networks, but you're not reliant on them.
Why this might matter is because if e.g. the UK government compels WhatsApp to implement a backdoor, as an end user I would never know. But, as someone operating entirely outside of the UK, they have no standing to compel me as a private person to implement a backdoor in my own deployment (or at the worst, at least I would know if it occurred).
Think of it as the chat analog to running your own mail server. Does everyone need to run your own mailserver? No. But if we'd started with a siloed system in email, we'd probably still be sending emails only to people with our same TLDs to this day.
AIUI (from talking to people who had to implement XMPP), the problem isn't that "XMPP is XML", the problem is that XMPP is XML done badly. An XMPP connection is essentially a giant XML document that's never closed, which most XML libraries tend to handle very poorly, so you often end up writing your own XML library to handle XMPP. With all of the pain that entails.
Yup. You can write xmpp parsers with thin wrappers around a push based sax parser. It is not hard, people are just not familiar with sax.
Sure, sax parsers have their limitations, but there are sax parsers that avoid the callback trouble by doing a tree-style fold over the XML structure instead of the linear fold over the XML stream. Not for the server, since it is not super efficient, but writing a client like that is easy peasy.
I found XMPP an absolute delight to work with and built all kinds of command-and-control messaging utils with it that allowed me the flexibility to use it as a chat service and RPC broker all at the same time, with bots as APIs. It was nuts but brilliant. Bring it back, I say.
Coincidentally I just got an XMPP server going and have a bunch of people happily chatting on it. Yeah it has its issues, but it's an open, well-defined protocol evolved over a long period of time. It won't disappear if its singular maintainer disappears (referring to both Signal and Matrix here).
yes and XMPP is actually a messaging protocol. Matrix is an eventually consistent database with a crappy messaging app implemented on top, and because of the insane architecture they are justifying decisions like message ordering that is non-deterministic[0] -- for multi user chat!
What could possibly go wrong if users in a multi user chat see messages in different orders? This decision is a perfect example of how smart systems engineers can be so completely divorced from the real problem (human communication) that they make completely asinine choices justified by implementation details no user cares about.
Matrix needs to die so it can stop sucking the air out of this space. The funding problems are also completely predictable but that's an opinion for another time.
Even the E2EE implementation is garbage. To this day fifty percent of the conversation in every E2EE group chat I'm in is "Hey XYZ I can't see your messages because they fail to decrypt" because they still have bugs in how clients distribute their keys to other clients. Imagine the state of a chat platform literally failing at chat.
Or look at how until a few months ago, the media store of every homeserver served media on the internet without any authentication. Someone just had to post CP in a popular room and they'd get hundreds of servers rehosting it for free. (Recently they finally added the ability to require authentication for the media store, although they didn't add support for it to their web client, only their new Android one.)
> (Recently they finally added the ability to require authentication for the media store, although they didn't add support for it to their web client, only their new Android one.)
> Without advocacy, conferences, documentation and tutorials, Matrix would become a niche protocol used by a few enthusiasts for side projects, whilst big proprietary and siloed networks continue to hold the world’s communications.
Advocacy and conferences aren't going to move the needle on mainstream adoption; those methods almost by definition are targeting the enthusiast crowd. In my view, the only factor that matters to attracting users is UI/UX. Streamlining the user's experience will do more for user adoption than any number of bridges.
It's possible that growing the community is the primary goal of Element.io rather than the Matrix Foundation, but in that case, it seems that there is a tension between the goals of the foundation vs Element. I'd like to understand the breakdown between the responsibilities of the foundation vs Element more clearly.
Element is a for-profit company, originally set up to hire the Matrix Core team and is the primary driver for many projects in the Matrix eco-system. Element cannot be successful without a thriving Matrix eco-system.
In the early days the line between Element and Matrix was rather blurred, which is why we set up the Foundation as a separate entity in 2018 to ensure that whatever happened to Element, Matrix could continue as an independent entity.
Except that the Matrix Foundation has already given up control of the reference implementation and protocol architectural choices back to Riot.im/Element.io corporation. This happened a year or two ago.
It was blurred for a handful of years. Now it is clearly in control of Element.io corporation again.
I entirely agree. The advocacy they should be doing is making it as attractive as possible to develop new clients (with good UX) so that finally one with a good UX will come out.
I mean, I've tried to use Matrix many times overy many years. I do care about more than JUST the UX but it has been SO consistently bad that I just can't. Something has gotta change, preferably before Discord completely implodes.
Video calls work on schildichat on android but I use straight element now and I'd have to check.
We are all aware that matrix needs a TURN/STUN server to do audio and video calls, right? I think users might be able to specify their own turn server, but if your homeserver can't punch NAT you're not making video calls, period.
I don't know of any non-centralized functional service offhand that can do peer to peer video or voice without an intermediary 100% of the time. That crap died in the 90s.
I partially agree, and I'm generally in favor of doing our part to help dang and keep the level of conversation high. With that being said, I read the parent post slightly differently.
I took their post as an implicit request that commenters share their own experiences and how they receive value from these services. A bit like the nuance between the statements "This is pointless" vs "I don't see the point", where the latter has something of an implicit (yet).
From my reading (IANAL), there are three types of occupational fraud: asset misappropriation, corruption, and financial statement fraud. Since job posting are interpreted as a positive signal but are not (it seems) typically and explicitly included in formal financial statements, this wouldn't rise to the level of criminal fraud.
> There are obviously still people working in German law enforcement today, who think that harassing a node-operator NGO would somehow lead to the de-anonymization of individual tor users.
This is not why.
> As a consequence, I am personally no longer willing to provide my personal address&office-space as registered address for our non-profit/NGO as long as we risk more raids by running exit nodes.
This is why. It's basically a textbook example of a chilling effect.
It only takes one person in LE to request to investigate this IP, and a single judge that isn't entirely convinced that it will be worthless to try to sign it off.
If parts of the state wanted to harass operators systematically or organize to discourage TOR, they could do much worse.
and the judge and the state attorney involved are controlled by the state's justice department which is run by politicians. yes, in germany the judiciary system is not politically independent ...
This is a "modest proposal" for sure. No legitimate thrust toward domestication would cherry pick such an esoteric example as "threading wires in automobile manufacturing facilities".
Take the (very real) fox domestication as a counterexample -- the topline takeaway is about how cute and cuddly they became. A smart and cuddly pet would be a believable pitch, but a helpful, even productive "human assistant" is far less so.
With that said, there are raccoon breeders out there (according to Google), so this proposal might be 25-50 years too early, eventually ending up like chinchillas or other small, exotic mammals.
It's absolutely 1000% satire, and yet I can see someone like Elon loving this idea:
>Labor: Their manual dexterity could be utilized in commercial labor contexts. In the early 20th century, an enterprising businessman even trained raccoons to perform chimney sweeps (Washington Post, 1906).
Bruh let's just let animals live in their natural environment without subjecting them to the torment-nexus that would be the raccoon-factory
Where animals have been domesticated and trained to do economically productive tasks, we've stopped the practice under the guise of preventing animal cruelty. using elephants or monkeys to do work evokes strong emotions in a ways that making humans doing the same job doesn't, so we've decided treating people that way is okay but not animals.
> Where animals have been domesticated and trained to do economically productive tasks, we've stopped the practice under the guise of preventing animal cruelty.
Mostly, we've stopped the practice by replacing it by more efficient, non-animal technology. There's probably a few cases where animal cruelty laws put the final nail in the coffin of practices that were rendered marginal by technological progress, but animal cruelty laws certainly are not the principal means by which use of animals as productive capital has been eliminated. It was tractors, not animal cruelty laws, that mostly stopped animals from being the used to plow fields, etc.
Historically, Google has served as the fallback for pretty poor performance from Siri on knowledge tasks, which to this day often falls back to web search results.
But, if Bing (especially circa 2016) were that search provider, it would lead to confusion all the way down. It's bad enough not to receive an answer from your first attempt, but it's much worse not to be able to receive an answer at all.
The payments were certainly a sweetener to discourage exploring (or incubating) alternatives, but I agree with the article that I don't think they could have dumped or replaced Google at that time, even without the payments.
Given a broader shift from search engines to "knowledge engines" or however they're branded these days (which, in fairness, probably drew some inspiration from Google's Knowledge Graph), I think that Apple's options are wider these days.
Taking money out of the equation (or making the offer equal between Microsoft and Google), could Bing have improved to meet the quality of Google if it had all iOS users using it and providing usage data to improve the experience? How long would that take?
I would assume the answer to the first question is yes, and the answer to the second question is too long for Apple's liking.
This correlation is often referred to as the 'hygiene hypothesis' by researchers. The underlying cause is still being understood; you can find an article comparing two theories here [0].
[Edit: Interesting that there are multiple effects, e.g. the sibling comment, that refer to similar but distinct phenomena!]