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Comment by claudius | Hacker News Reader

> It relies on existing mail standards

This is a feature, not a bug. Nobody actually wants to rely on a single entity (for or non-profit) for their communication. Nobody wants to be stuck in crappy Electron and mobile clients.

I had some hope that Matrix may be able to alleviate those concerns and provide a modern, federated chat solutions. Unfortunately their quality of implementation seems to be rather low with slow, laggy and resource-hungry clients and ridiculously resource-hungry servers and their current setup still apparently include a single "identity server".

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> This is a feature, not a bug. Nobody actually wants to rely on a single entity (for or non-profit) for their communication. Nobody wants to be stuck in crappy Electron and mobile clients.

And nobody facing a nation state adversary wants to give their chat client their phone number. I really couldn't agree with you more on the nature of the problem and the status of the available solutions. It's really unfortunate that Matrix is as unfinished as it is. At least cross signing [1] is nearly done, which should eliminate the major issue making it unusable for anyone who's not technically competent and very dedicated.

[1] https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/9631

I think that one of the really bad problems with gpg and openssl is that for a long time there was effectively only one implementation.

So the key thing for matrix is to create a healthy ecosystem that has multiple implementations of the protocol and make sure that the protocol can actually evolve.

Note that the 'identity server' is an optional component. As long as you stick to matrix native user IDs, there is no need to use one.

Have you used Riot on mobile recently? Sure it's not perfect, but it consistently outperforms FB Messenger on my very poor phone.

No, mostly because the Matrix homeserver still needs ridiculous amounts of memory. Apparently 1GB if you want to join one of the more crowded channels – what for could a chat server actually use 1GB of memory?! That's a billion characters you can store in there, even at hundreds of messages per second (which I suppose would make the channel unusable anyways?) you don't get to a billion characters very quickly.

> Nobody actually wants to rely on a single entity (for or non-profit) for their communication

You don't have to do that. Protocols like tox for example are distributed and use DHT in order to find peers.

Most people really don't care. They use Whatsapp because that's where their friends are and they will move to whatever their friends start using next.

'People' is a poorly defined notion here, and cannot be really used for any sane conclusions. Users have different practical, and security needs, therefore different priorities which define their behavior. PGP (and its alternatives) is to Whatsapp (and its alternatives) as apples to oranges.

Okay, the vast majority of the general population, the billions of people using apps like Whatsapp.

Note that the comment I replied to started from the rather categorical "nobody".

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