Hacker News Reader

Comment by Arathorn | Hacker News Reader

This is a massive post (I didn’t have time to write a short one so I wrote a long one), but there’s some vital stuff buried in it for those interested in Matrix, including:

* Details for testing the redesign of Riot (https://riot.im/experimental)

* A teaser of fan-out routing

* The potential roadmap options for 2019

* The endgame for E2E encryption, Matrix 1.0 and a whole lot more.

Any questions welcome :)

View on HN

Are you planning to reduce the number of brand names that you operate ?

Vector.im vs Riot.im vs Modular.im ? The FAQ of modular.im asks you to accept a TOS from riot.im . The website demo is on riot.im, but the hosted product is modular.im .

And when you write in to modular.im support, you get a reply from an @matrix.org person. Jobs are applied for on vector.im ...however riot.im twitter page says "formerly vector.im". Modular.im (your hosted slack alternative) page has NO feature list. People are expected to go to riot.im to understand features and play with the demo. In fact your hosted product modular.im has no links to even download the mobile/desktop clients.

People get surprised when I tell them about riot/matrix having a hosted slack alternative that is significantly cheaper and is open-source+E2E. I believe one of the reasons is that have 4 websites rather than one.

Not sure why this situation exists. It doesn't help when making a case for it in the community or company. Gitlab does this well. Please fix.

I don't think you should be uncomfortable with the idea of mixing your open-source products with closed source code (for e.g. modular.im migration tools are closed source) - confusion is the bigger problem.

You made the right choice in focusing on Synapse and letting Dendrite stall. You can build one reference implementation well and let others do as they please. You should do the same on the desktop client.

Gitlab is a single company who makes a single product. Matrix is a protocol with a whole ecosystem. You simply can’t compare them like for like - a better comparison would be Matrix and Git... where nobody is surprised that a multitude of different companies exist within the Git ecosystem (Gitlab, Github, Gitkraken, etc) - some of which are multiple products with different names built by the same company (Github and VS Code for instance), and some of which have a different corporate name.

For Matrix, the naming is actually pretty simple:

Matrix is a protocol curated by the Matrix.org Foundation.

Riot is a matrix client (which is just one of many in the Matrix ecosystem, hence not calling it “Matrix client” for the same reason that Firefox isn’t called “Web browser”.

Modular is a matrix hosting service, which can support any Matrix client, and isn’t tied specifically to Riot, and should be one of many in future, hence not calling it “Matrix Hosting Services”, just as AWS don’t call themselves “Web Services”.

As it happens, Riot and Modular are made by a startup called New Vector, which also hires most of the core Matrix team. We don’t expect anyone to know the name New Vector though, any more that we expect people to know that Slack’s legal entity was called Tiny Speck for years. It generally only comes up when hiring.

So: yes, it’s surprising that there are 4 brands flying around here - and many many more if you consider the wider Matrix ecosystem of clients and servers etc. But it is completely inevitable. This is the primary difference between Matrix and (say) Rocket.Chat or Mattermost or Slack or Discord. The power and flexibility of an open ecosystem comes at the expense of needing to give the different parts different names, just like the Web does.

If you look at Gitlab, the intent is similar to yours and is no different. Just that the brand is managed much better.

For example, Runner is an open source project that is used to run CI jobs. https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/ . Omnibus is packaging tool (https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/README.html) and Gitlab is the git tool itself. If you peek at the top right corner of the documentation site, you will see these three big headings.

Here are your gitlab clients - https://about.gitlab.com/partners/ (including all the native apps)

Gitlab CE is the open source software. This is similar to you having riot. Gitlab.com is the hosting service - similar to you having modular. There is no difference in intent or licensing... im talking about brand. For the end-user, the benefit in incalculable - one website (and Google search keyword) to find out all the options and all the information. I send people to Gitlab.com if they want to run it themselves OR if they want to buy the hosting service. In fact, Gitlab had org vs com domains for open source vs paid software .. when they then merged (https://about.gitlab.com/2014/03/07/moved-to-dot-com/)

There is no reason for you to identify Vector.im as separate from Riot.im as separate from Modular.im . For me as an end-user, it doesnt matter - Riot.im could have a link to download and a link to host and a link for about us.

It is not about inevitability - you are outwardly branding stuff separately that is not needed and can be unified under a single umbrella to reduce confusion.

The intent is different. Gitlab wants to distribute and sell one unified thing, Matrix wants it to be clear the pieces are just that: pieces you can interchange with others. It's not important to how Gitlab represents itself to the outside that you maybe could replace Omnibus or the Runner with other software, for Matrix it's important.

There is only one piece of software that is componentized and named here - riot.im which is a client. Your argument is a straw man argument because I don't see websites for Synapse or Dendrite..which is their core server. That is still part of matrix.org .

Vector is the name of their company and modular is the name of their hosting service. So the argument about representation doesn't stand. The brand theory still holds.

Just going through your FAQ...

>"Why are you called Matrix?"

---

>"We are called Matrix because we provide a structure in which all communication can be matrixed together."

>"No, it’s nothing to do with the film (although you could go and build virtual worlds on top of Matrix if you wanted :)"

Am kind of surprised there is no mention of William Gibson there.

Honestly Neuromancer didn’t factor explicitly in picking the name, other than through ambient connotations. Or for that matter Doctor Who, which used the name to describe the Timelord’s computing system on Gallifrey :)

I had forgotten the Dr Who reference, though I only dip into Dr Who now and again. I had always assumed that the title of the film 'The Matrix' was in homage to Neuromancer. I had never considered that Gibson might be doing a homage to Dr Who.

Are there any plans for adding new transport protocols (for c2s and s2s communication other than HTTP)?

I didn't see Fractal being mentioned. IIRX they have received some founding from Puri.sm recently. Sorry if I messed it as I didn't read the entire article.

The article just discusses what the core team has been up to - it deliberately skips the wider community (for better or worse).

The youtube video at the end shows an alternative C2S and S2S transport being used - similar to the one described at https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/matrix/. Atm it's experimental and only works in closed networks and isn't yet released, but the plan is to add it as an official alt transport once we've got it working nicely in open networks. It's about 30-50x more bandwidth efficient than the default HTTP/1.1+TLS+JSON transport.

I'm glad to see there is finally a binary C2S transport in the works.

For some reason changing color theme isn't working in the experimental client (Firefox 65.0b6 / Linux).

that’s because the redesigned skin doesn’t (yet) implement tinting - it simply doesn’t have the same opinionated accent colour (default green) of legacy Riot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com