Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

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> I still don't understand why Matrix was made when XMPP is already a thing

Have you tried... thinking about it a bit more? I could come up with roughly 20 different reasons without trying very hard. For someone involved in XMPP, that is one hell of a thing to say.

Seriously, calling out XKCD927 on a massive project like Matrix is extremely disrespectful to its contributors.

Tell me, what could Matrix have done to save XMPP? Publish a hundred different XEPs nobody would ever bother to implement? Make broken clients/servers that don't follow the spec just to try fix a protocol that lost? Magically fix everything and tell people "No really guys, XMPP is better now I swear!"?

They went and tried a new approach and they're doing really well with it... have some respect for that.

I actually think it's very good thing that people are asking that question (why not fix XMPP)!! We know from Bob Metcalfe's Law, that starting new networks has a very high cost, either in adoption/migration, lost investments in past standards, duplication of efforts when multiple need to be supported, or when they fail to gain critical mass. There's a limited pool of attention and resources and it's right for people to be instinctively cautious and have the discussions.

For me, the more I learn about Matrix, the more persuaded I am that it really does have merit. If I were a Matrix developer, I wouldn't feel disrespected. I'd be super glad that people are asking questions and genuinely seeking to test that the idea is right. From their dialogue with the community that I've seen so far, the developers are doing great and seem to thoroughly appreciate there's been a lot of false starts by various groups over the years.

TLDR;) - It may be obvious to you, but it's GOOD people are having the conversation. Questions and even dissent should be embraced. It's not about disrespect, it's about testing & validating new ideas.

I should add, that the ability to bridge networks, means that XMPP, IRC and others won't/don't need to be cut off from Matrix either. That's kind of the point and interop is one of the big features it will have going.

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