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Comment by c487bd62 | Hacker News Reader

Honest question. What's stopping Matrix from being adopted by, say, Google or Facebook, and then pulling a XMPPEEE? Imagine Matrix gets really popular, more even than Discord. So they offer their own "version" but add features like free 250GB on Google Drive or things like that. After they get everybody on board they do what they do best and cease control of it.

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We're obviously very aware of this risk, and one approach is to try (as the Foundation) to steer uptake as best we can to ensure that no single 800lb gorilla ends up adopting Matrix and smothering it with love(?), even if they have the best intentions. So if Google did suddenly start using Matrix, we'd do everything we possibly can to ensure that at least one of Microsoft/Facebook/Amazon/Apple/Samsung/etc jumped on board too, to try to balance things out and ensure that the value of participating in open network outweighed the risk of proprietary extensions leaking in.

But in the end, the onus is on us to make sure there's enough stuff of value in the wider open network that the idea of someone using the protocol to try to create a walled garden is laughable and clearly missing the point - much like running a private email network is somewhat missing the point, or for that matter a walled garden like the web content on old-school AOL.

Hopefully we're on the right track to ensure there's enough stuff of value on the public Matrix network to make participation in it a no-brainer.

Very interesting. I wonder if there's a killer feature that would appear when you follow that line of thought. So even if adoption looks like 60~70% users and 30~40% enterprise, if you're indispensable to either of them, it would still prevent a take over because of the network effect. And the fact that you have an API that developers can trust would solidify the position even more. If that feature ever surfaces I hope it doesn't involve blockchain or machine learning.

Well, the feature might just be one of ubiquitous interoperability, much as email provides today. Particularly in an enterprise context: if you want to do some kind of realtime collaboration with someone, you might just reach them directly via Matrix rather than sending them an Email with a link to Slack/Zoom/whatever.

It'd certainly be more compelling if it was an actual feature though. Joking aside, federated machine learning could be an interesting approach, if the value that Matrix provided included a decentralised search engine which could help you sift through all the available content to find the chatrooms and communities you're interested in (and hide the ones you're not...)

XMPP was not really extended by Google in any way that mattered. Their federation hardly even worked even in the beginning.

XMPP has hardly been extinguished. There are something like 8 server implementations and zillions of client implementations. With OMEMO and Let's Encrypt it has has actually undergone a sort of resurgence lately. There are 100+ public XMPP servers out there. Matrix could only hope to be so extinguished...

So I am not really sure how you could EEE Matrix even if you wanted to do so for some reason. Something like this is hard to extinguish. If the network of servers was functional before it would still be functional after some entity pulled their server. Decentralization is sort of the point here.

My experience with Matrix compared to XMPP, is that Matrix is way ahead in usabiliy. I wanted to get people to use XMPP for years, but I always found too much lacking.

Matrix is not there yet, cross device signing has to land. But the way it is moving is way more promising than XMPP.

(I also remember that federating with Google was always painful)

> I am not really sure how you could EEE Matrix even if you wanted to do so for some reason. Something like this is hard to extinguish. If the network of servers was functional before it would still be functional after some entity pulled their server. Decentralization is sort of the point here.

Yes, though I would say that decentralised MXIDs (and generally being able to transfer users) is an incredibly important part of this. Otherwise users will have immense inertia stopping them from migrating from a big homeserver that is being used to EEE the system. Luckily that is something that's being worked on.

Matrix is an inherently decentralized system. You can run your own fully featured instance on your own property. If the company behind Matrix is acquired, the foundation being announced here today stands in the way of the intellectual property becoming a toxic liability to your own use. This is very good news today.

Furthermore, the openness of the protocol allows free software projects to emerge and exist independent of the matrix company and even the foundation. Such projects can be developed by your contributions and the FOSS community's support until the end of time. One of those projects, for example, is one I started [disclosure] called the Matrix Construct server: https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct and your support of this project is necessary to that end.

The same was true for XMPP until Google EEE'd it. What stops Matrix from being EEE'd?

One problem I see with XMPP is that there is a lot on isolated use and not a lot of public use.

If a lot of companies would provide XMPP as a way to contact them, then what Google did would be as silly as taking email private.

Instead, most people are completely used to isolated messaging systems.

So I guss for Matrix, the challenge is to make sure that the dominant use of Matrix remains public. To some extent Matrix is ahead due to the bridging with large IRC networks.

But there are also quite a number of people trying to set up non-federated Matrix servers.

Matrix is not as popular as email, again, what prevents Google from taking Matrix and EEE'ing it to death?

As a concerete example; imagine next month Google announces their own Matrix instance. All gmail users are automatically signed in. The instance works with other Matrix instances. A year after that, Google stops federating anything but bare text to other servers, claiming protocol limitations. They continue to make interaction worse for non-google users until the non-google users have no choice but to join google or loose their social network.

Suppose that lots of companies have a public Matrix room where customers and potential customers can ask questions.

Now lots of people start using one particular Matrix instance for that kind of communication.

Now the popular instance stops federating and people can't reach the companies they want to talk to anymore.

The way Google took over was by offering a better user interface than other public XMPP services.

If Google is obviously worse than other Matrix instances, then people will quickly drop them.

What if google offers a better interface than most matrix instances? Given, Riot isn't exactly a high bar to meet so it should be possible with minimal resources.

That's indeed a risk.

Though XMPP had to deal with a number of paradigm shifts: images, markup, audio and video calls, persistant history, disconnected operation, security, threading, multi device operation. And I probably forgot a few.

Today messaging is much more established. So the matrix team has many more examples of features that are in common use and how other people designed user interfaces.

So it may be harder for Google to win through engineering. They may just break other matrix clients on android.

We should launch more alternative servers and avoid central big servers as much as possible. There's no reason to buy Matrix if they don't have a lot of users.

Honestly I think that we need implementations with smaller RAM requirements. Last time I've heard that it's recommended to have 2 GB RAM for Matrix. That's a lot. I can run VPN, SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, Tor servers along with operating system in a 256 MB VPS. I can imagine that a lot of folks are employing similar low-power VPS for personal needs. Now if they want to launch Matrix, they have to significantly upgrade their VPS. I see no reason why personal home server with few users should require more than a couple of megabytes. I hope that alternative implementations like Dendrite will be better in that aspect.

These "what if" questions will always be relevant because of the nature of big (and small) tech companies. Creating a monopoly, data mining, and controlling the flow of information are simply irresistible - if not necessary - for tech companies like Google or Facebook. The only real solution is to have educated users that care about their privacy and security. In that case, if Google turns a free, open source protocol into a surveillance machine, the only solution is to step away from it and not use it. We cannot stop big tech companies from creating user-friendly, tempting malware.

>The only real solution is to have educated users that care about their privacy and security.

I don't believe that will ever be possible. Winning with technology seems like the only way to do it. Google wants even IMAP.

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