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Comment by chromedev | Hacker News Reader

Do they even have production-ready server software yet? Synapse is not great, and they say Dendrite isn't ready for production.

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Matrix backs the IM needs of the entire French government [1] and more recently signed the largest single instant messaging deal ever to help German schools manage remote education[2], it is also used in mission critical situations such as emergency services response.

I think it is fair to say that Synapse is more than production ready. Admittedly it can be hard to admin out of the box for smaller scale instances and we intend to improve on that experience over the coming months. Alternatively, hosting options are available[3].

After a hiatus, Dendrite is under active development and making rapid progress. It is an alpha release at the moment and not yet ready for production settings, but a beta release is coming soon.

[1] https://matrix.org/blog/2018/04/26/matrix-and-riot-confirmed... [2] https://sifted.eu/articles/element-germany-deal/ [3] https://matrix.org/hosting/

Please, Synapse isn’t production ready, at all. See this issue for example: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/3364, reported back in 2018, labelled highest priority since then and still not fixed. This is indeed a huge problem, because if you don’t have shit tons of money to put in your database server’s storage you’ll quickly get stuck. Some workarounds mentioned are non-safe hacks and shouldn’t be necessary for a production ready messaging server.

Ive been running synapse for atlest 3 years for very active group of about 40 on tiny 1gig ram server and its been great. The main issue is if you start to federate with main matrix instance which is gigantic and can slow things down.

But i dont need to federate and use it more as Slack and it just keeps getting better.

This bug is not generally a significant cause of disk space utilisation, unless you’re running a server the size of matrix.org (which is the only reason it’s marked P1).

I strongly suspect you’re thinking of a separate issue: the need to automatically expire old history and reclaim disk space in general, which was fixed a while back, as per https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/docs/messa...

I seriously have no idea what's your problem with synapse. I've been running my own homeserver for over a year now and synapse is a perfect piece of software. I installed it without any hassle and it's been running without a single issue since then. I install new versions on the same day they are released without skipping a heartbeat: that's how good it is.

I used to have more complaints about matrix clients, especially on Android, but things got much better recently.

Recent benchmark showed Dendrite (go) is slower than Synapse (Python) but I'd guess it's from all the context switching with the multi process design of Dendrite

This has kept me from coming back to Matrix. Running your own homeserver can be pretty atrocious.

Their hosting is $10/month and totally worth it.

As a bonus, it helps to support the devs too.

They already got investments from large governments and Automattic. I don't believe they are in dire need of financial support.

I totally agree that more people should look into managed hosting, though.

The economics of this are curious actually. Element has had investments from Automattic, VCs and Status.im (no governments, ftr). However, the only reason people invest is in the expectation that Element can be a sustainable healthy business - which it does so by providing Matrix SaaS hosting, and support/consulting for big on premise deployments.

In other words, it’s critical that folks use the managed hosting in order to be sustainable, otherwise we’re just burning fossil fuel, as it were.

I misspoke. I wanted to say that the money from the governments are part of the revenue as "support/consulting for big on-premise deployments". Sorry about that.

In any case, I would be surprised that Element relies on getting significant part of their revenue from the SaaS. Isn't p2p-matrix going to cannibalize that market? I could swear that the strategy for you would be to chase the enterprise/government market and let p2p-matrix as an alternative for network effects and/or those who don't want to pay and prefer to manage things themselves.

np - just wanted to clear up the confusion if folks might think Element might be part-owned by nation states, which it isn’t.

So we expect revenue from SaaS, where plain TCO says it’s cheaper to get us to host your data than pay in-house people to sysadmin it for you. It’s still your DNS and your keys, and we provide db snapshots if you want, so it really is just outsourced hosting. There is definitely a market for this, as well as separately providing support for massive on premise deployments.

P2P then drives both by network effects. It effectively becomes the default free-for-all platform - but anyone who actually wants a serious home for their data (e.g. any business) will want to find a server, whether that’s selfhost or SaaS.

Ok, cool. Follow-up questions: I honestly believed that your SaaS offering was just a middle-market play and that you expected to be filled by a cottage industry of sorts. Don't you have any concerns about other business undercutting you? In a way what I am doing with communick competes already with your hosting (or I can dream about it) and I won't have the overhead of funding development. What if AWS/GCS/Azure decides to offer Matrix as well?

We don’t expect to be the only SaaS players - but we still think it’s a good market. The more hosting solutions the better - we believe there’s enough customers for everyone to go around :) We‘ve started maintaining a list in matrix.org - and if the big boys started offering Matrix hosting too; it sounds like a good problem to have! (Plus the sort of people interested in Matrix are probably not that interested in buying it from GAFAM ;)

Currently, I send (the batched equivalent of) $10/month on Libera Pay and run my own homeserver - is there a meaningful difference between this and using the paid/sponsorship hosting?

I'm especially curious about the effects individually and in aggregate; I.E. if everyone did what I do.

Both are super useful.

Donations go to the Matrix.org Foundation and help pay for core team dev, but also are really useful for pointing bigger donors at to say “look, we get $4K/month on Patreon + Liberapay etc; this shows we are a good project to back; how about you match it?”

Buying hosting from Element however also funnels back to fund core Matrix dev - because almost all of Element’s work is donated (unilaterally, in an asset lock) to the Matrix.org Foundation. In other words, anything an Element employee commits into https://github.com/matrix-org automatically becomes the copyright assigned to the Foundation. This also has the separate multiplying factor that the more evidence there is to run a sustainable SaaS business on Matrix, the easier it is for Element to raise funds and keep going - and thus continue to support the core Matrix dev.

Sorry it’s so complicated, but funding FOSS is fiddly (as Mozilla demonstrates...)

P.S. thank you for donating!!

Is your perception of a company’s ‘need’ of financial support a good way to decide wether or not to support them? Probably not. If you believe in what they are doing and get value from it, they earned it and deserve it.

No. But the whole idea of my support behind Matrix is that it allows for federation and distribution of power among different companies and entities.

If the development of Matrix is somewhat secured and if Matthew and the team has already been compensated for their work, I'd rather support other players than concentrating it further on Matthew's hands.

Development of core Matrix is somewhat secured via funding from Element and donations, but Element is not yet profitable/sustainable as a company. Until it is, I wouldn’t be doing my job if i didn’t encourage folks to support core Matrix dev by using Element services.

That said, folks should absolutely donate to non-core-team Matrix projects like Conduit or Nheko or Dimension etc too, to support the hetrogenity of the ecosystem and keep it healthy and balanced. And once Element is sustainable (and by extension the Matrix.org Foundation funding is stable), the balance should shift even further towards ensuring the rest of the ecosystem is successful.

These days Synapse is out of beta and quite performant and stable, fwiw. Certainly in the past it could be a pita though.

The lack of other "serious" servers is also scaring me. XMPP can have its share of problems but this is one area which is pretty decent. Plenty of "battle tested" servers.

It’s because Dendrite is alpha and has had zero optimisation work yet - eg there is absolutely no caching yet.

(Dendrite is also not inherently multiprocess - you can run it either in monolith or polylith mode).

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