Comment by lolmatrixx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolmatrixx | Hacker News Reader

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> The Matrix ecosystem is the only thing I can think of, that could eventually replace IRC. (There might be others, I am just not familiar with them)

There is no ecosystem, despite public documentation of the "protocol," Synapse is the actual standard when it comes to Matrix, so it's your only homeserver choice. Element is the only client. These are both produced by a for profit company. They're no different than Rocket Chat or Mattermost but with way less honest marketing towards hackers. Also, the federation is fake (stops working when matrix.org goes down) and the identity to Matrix ID mapping is centralized at vector.im -- if you want a silo you can host your own identity mapping server, but then you can't be found on the wider network.

Matrix is a joke. It's a series of grant deliverables flying in formation and pretending to be a protocol.

Oh and the CEO is wildly unprofessional, he's on here all the time as Arathorn in any thread about Matrix, spreading FUD about other networks and selling lies about his to gullible nerds

Matrix sucks. Modern XMPP is literally better in every way, and also still sucks. But at least federation is real, in XMPP.

Sigh, none of that is true.

Dendrite is another homeserver that is good enough to run as a daily driver, and there's a community developed Rust one, Conduit, that's making steady progress.

There are plenty of alternative clients - FluffyChat, NeoChat, Fractal, etc. Making a basic client is pretty easy (I've written several), and my friends and I have been making a more fully-featured one in our spare time.

Federation is not fake, I was there on my own homeserver when matrix.org went down and had fun happily continuing to chat through the biggest test of matrix's federation resiliency.

Every time I've seen Arathorn interact in threads, he has been very professional and patient, even when others spread FUD (cough, cough). He certainly doesn't spread lies or FUD about anyone else.

Modern XMPP is not better in every way - Matrix is an eventually-consistent distributed event graph, which makes it better at handling big federation testing events like the matrix.org downtime.

Also, considering the dismissive tone of your post and your choice of handle/username, it seems you are here (just?) to grind your axe, and not for genuine and honest discussion.

There are at least 10 different clients, and I'm only referring to those that are listed on the Matrix website.

> federation is fake (stops working when matrix.org goes down)

Can you elaborate on this, or link to some relevant resources?

Matrix requires registration with some server. These servers are federated, but the biggest and most commonly used one is matrix.org. So if that's down, most users lose access.

But that's not fake federation, that's just federation and the reality that most people that can't be bothered to set up their own federated server? You can say that a fully distributed chat system would be better at this (like SSB [1]), but that's a totally different beast from a federated system.

Matrix's federation is no worse than any other popular federated system I've used (eg. email and xmpp). I'm not saying it shouldn't be better (I dislike the matrix.org centralization, too), but that's not something inherent to Matrix, and I think it's not honest to bring it up as 'fake federation' in this context.

Additionally, Matrix is significantly better at this in one way than the alternatives: even if matrix.org goes down, all rooms can continue working, even ones with a :matrix.org label. The same can't be said about XMPP MUC, IIUC.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt

I don't disagree with that, I'm not the OP who called it fake federation.

I do think that federated systems tend to become centralized, because the federating links tend to be unreliable. I think people confuse federation and decentralization, when they're very different things.

Less than a third loose access through their current server. They can sign up on a different server and have access again.

There are multiple Matrix clients in common use. It is odd that you think Element is the only client.

It's a brand-new user named "lolmatrixx". Don't waste your time.

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