Their FAQ on “Why no federation?” is relevant: https://developers.revolt.chat/faq/federation
> Matrix is incredibly buggy at times and it’s left a sour taste in my mouth.
Speaking as project lead for Matrix... I can see where this is coming from. Were we doing Matrix from scratch again, we'd have a smaller scope and polish each feature more before releasing and moving onto the next thing. However, we're very aware of this, and these days do almost nothing else other than polishing the current codebase - for instance, Synapse's RAM usage has dropped enormously (https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1434912387933560837) - all the main serverside bottlenecks have been removed; we're working on speeding up joins enormously; Element's performance is improving massively; we're working a complete rethink of the client-server sync protocol to ensure that only the bare minimum data is ever synced to clients by default. The only new feature work we have on the horizon is exiting Spaces (groups of rooms) from beta, and adding Threading. Otherwise, it's "just" a matter of fixing remaining E2EE bugs; reworking E2EE onboarding UX, and lots and lots of polish.
Critically, *NONE* of these bugs are due to federation or decentralisation. Ironically, the federation bit of Matrix is one of the most robust bits these days - after we spent ages polishing it in 2018-2019 to fix bugs in the merge resolution code. So I think the...
> Federation and Discord-style protocols are inherently incompatible
...assertion in the revolt FAQ is completely false, and Matrix already disproves it. Residual bugs in Matrix implementations are more thanks to the complexity of federation/decentralisation/encryption sucking a lot of energy away from the more business-as-usual things which you'd focus on if building a Revolt/Rocket/Mattermost style thing.
Anyway: Revolt looks cool, and we wish them the best, and hope that they will indeed bridge into Matrix in future, which is honestly quite a good compromise - https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/07/gitter-now-speaks-matrix#... is the guide to follow to rapidly plug an existing chat system into Matrix, much as we did with Gitter :)
Keep polishing it and silence the haters
Seriously, for anyone else reading, this attempt to provide federated privacy of communication is the kind of thing Saint iGNUcious himself might bless (I don't know if he does but am hopeful).
I had a chat with a friend recently and he said in response to my declination to use Signal:
"(I appreciate the commitment to decentralisation, but the battle of messaging apps ended up elsewhere). You're still fighting for the emperor in the jungle but the forces in the war changed years ago :)"
Decentralisation is the very purpose of the Internet, and federation is how it will work.
We just need to help you solve all the user experience problems, and they are very soluble.
Keep up the great work!
Really? I wonder how Rocket.Chat federation overcame this "inherent incompatibility"
https://docs.rocket.chat/guides/administration/administratio...
Most of their features is just PR. For example they do advertise E2E while it has the same amount of warnings and not even a doc page https://docs.rocket.chat/guides/administration/administratio...
Matrix is the practical solution, and Arathorn's sibling comment gracefully addressed my real criticism. Federation is absolutely possible on these applications, although tricky.
Well, yes, it is honest, but it also is disturbing - which other well-known network principles were unknown to them?
[0] Most likely this is referencing the term and the structural pattern; as you correctly pointed out, the concept is quite widespread.