Comment by Arathorn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Arathorn | Hacker News Reader

(oops, the blog link melted under all the attention but it's fixed again now).

Just wanted to say that of all the communities on the 'net, HN has been one of the most enthusiastic about the potential of Matrix. Trying to build an entirely open decentralised network that can support better-than-Slack style collaboration is a tonne of work; I'd estimate it's about 6x more work than building the equivalent centralised service. Plus the amount of effort that we've put into decentralised end-to-end encryption (https://matrix.org/git/olm/about etc) is enormous, and now very nearly complete, having got solutions in place for (optionally) sharing message history on demand between devices, handling race conditions during splitbrains, etc.

In short, we've put a lot of work into Matrix and we really want to continue doing so with at least the same level of momentum we've had to date. But as of next week, this is going to require support from the community - both donations and corporate sponsorship, at least in the short/medium term. So if you believe in the promise of decentralisation and restoring power over communication back to the users, your support would be hugely appreciated.

Also, folks may be specifically interested in the 'Reflections' section at the end of the post, which points out that in the near future Matrix is going to be forced to address an even bigger issue than open comms - namely the ability to handle propaganda and let users filter their content (to avoid spam, propaganda, abuse, etc) without being trapped in an invisible filter-bubble or echo-chamber. This stuff is still vapourware right now, but could be literally world-changing if we get it right.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and thanks to those who consider supporting directly.

-- Matthew / Arathorn

As a competitor (or "competitor," I don't think decentralized services actually compete with each other in the traditional sense), I just want to say:

Matrix is an amazing project with an incredibly hard-working team. If you can afford to, please stop what you're doing right now and give them money. Or code. Or both. We can win this thing!

-- Urbit

One of the things that gives us (Matrix) enormous hope for the future is the shift we've seen in the Decentralised Web community over the last few years, where projects who in the past might have competed now support each other.

In the end, there is an incredibly small handful of developers working on decentralised infrastructure, who generally share very similar ideology and goals, pitted against an entire industry which defaults to holding users hostage in silos. We gotta stick together to prevail :)

So, Urbit: huge thanks for the support - we really appreciate it. And good luck on your side too!

I agree - I see this Benjamin Franklin ("if we don't all stand together, we shall all hang separately") attitude everywhere.

But I don't think this new attitude is an accident. It's not just because we're good people, or even good engineers. It's an inevitable consequence of what we're trying to do.

Fundamentally, all decentralized systems are one big federation. If two decentralized systems can't talk to each other, that's because no one needs to connect them yet. There is never a question of whether the connection can be made, as with centralized systems.

In short: for decentralized systems, the n in Metcalfe's law ("the value of a network is proportional to n^2, where n is its user count" - I think it's more like n log n, but whatever) is the number of users not in any decentralized network, but in all decentralized networks. (It also should add any centralized networks that you can gateway to.)

What this means in practice for Urbit and Matrix: if both Urbit and Matrix succeed, a gateway is inevitable. It's inevitable because (a) it will be demanded and (b) no one can prevent it. Then, Urbit will benefit from Matrix's network effect and vice versa.

So economically, we're not competitors. We're colleagues. So building a positive relationship is a professional no-brainer. In the new decentralized world, the only reason to be a jerk to someone else is that you're actually a jerk. You'll see this, but it isn't common -- at all.

(However, our domain is googleable and yours isn't. Owned! We'll just have to link to you :-)

Maybe it's only me, but I'm more comfortable for one time donations comparing to these per week/month/year long time commitment you provided. I guess I can choose per year and then cancel it immediately after the donation, but still, I hope you can provide a one time donation option to us.

(I can totally understand why you prefer these long time commitments.)

tbh we want to support both :) The bitcoin option is one way of doing one-time donations, and apparently liberapay may be considering it too. We'll also set up a Paypal.me shortly too.

Maybe consider a kickstarter as well. Qutebrowser apparently does this once a year so the main dev can work on it full time during the summer break from his university. Seems fairly effective.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/the-compiler/qutebrowse...

qutebrowser author here - I think Kickstarter (or similar crowdfunding platforms) work best when you have a given timeframe (like the 1-2 months I have once a year) and a tangible feature to advertise as part of it. For qutebrowser, that was the new QtWebEngine backend last year (https://igg.me/at/qutebrowser) and a completely new config system this year.

Hey, thanks for your work, but I have one big issue:

You use the term "propaganda" like it's something that can be determined objectively and algorithmically the way that spam can. That's very concerning to me, seeing as mega corps like Facebook and Google are also starting to implement questionable protections against what they consider to be propaganda. And similarly, they also group them together with other issues like terrorism, hate speech, etc. That's exactly why decentralized and uncensored forms of communication are so important right now.

How are you planning to determine what is propaganda? By your own perception? Will you refer to a team of "independent experts" as the arbiters of truth?

I probably mangled this in the blog: the whole point of the decentralised reputation work we are planning in the future is to let users define and curate their own content filtering, deliberately making it entirely subjective and avoiding any objective or moral absolute attempts at filtering.

This is what is so exciting about the decentralised use cases of Matrix: one man's freedom fighter is clearly another man's terrorist, and it is not up to us to be an objective arbiter.

Instead, the plan is to let users themselves define their filters: inheriting reputation data from other people whose opinion they trust, and defining their own rules too. Critically, we want to visualise for users the shape of the filter bubble that they end up defining - so they can see what the rest of the world thinks of the content they read.

This would be something like: "98% of the world thinks this content is factually false, but we're showing it to you because you've strongly aligned yourself with Bob, who thinks it's the best thing ever"... but presented in such a way that it's interesting and fun to the user rather than a boring nag. Obviously the last bit is a client UX problem, but the fact remains that it's critical to build the underlying infrastructure for tracking reputation data in a morally relative and neutral manner.

Hope this makes it clearer. We are absolutely not in the business of defining "propaganda" ourselves. But we let users set themselves up as experts (independent or otherwise) as they desire, and it's then up to users to mix their own blend of reputation data based on who they rate.

Thank you very much for your reply. Highly interesting ideas there! Sounds a little like part of the system Daniel Suarez devised in Daemon and Freedom™ :)

Two principal problems are probably Big Money gaming the system and people not wanting to publicly disclose their views. In the worst case your scheme might end up serving age-old staples of propaganda: Falsely implying a consensus and the establishment of authority (of the most trusted users).

I'll keep a look out for how you try to deal with that in the future.

Interesting - will check out Suarez. You're right that doing this in a privacy protecting manner is going to be Hard: by definition it's asking users to disclose their views - although this doesn't have to be to the general public; it could be an opt in thing: eg "Alice wants to subscribe to your reputation data - Yes/No". Storing the reputation data so that it doesn't become a honeypot of metadata is harder however.

There is absolutely the problem that widely trusted people would use their position to push an agenda, deliberately or unintentionally. This is inevitable, as far as I can see, given we are assuming there are no moral absolutes here. So the best we can do is to ensure that users have visibility on the amount and shape of content being filtered out, access to whichever 'authorities' they chose to trust, and make it easy to view the world from different viewpoints.

Fun problems! I can't wait for Matrix to properly focus on it.

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