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GekkePrutser

Ooof I was worried for a moment that this was about the Matrix chat network.

I definitely don't want google messing around with that. It should stay unbiased and decentralised.

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Yes, much better if instead they keep in their own lane and use their own chat networks / protocols.

..right?

Google used to provide an XMPP (IETF Internet Standard for IM) service to all its users once.

Once, when they still thought that competition is a good thing.

Now that they are dominating several areas they think monopoly is great and open interfaces bad.

Facebook messenger is also XMPP!

It's just not federated, just like Gab 2.0 :-)

I wouldn't mind if they federated with Matrix. In fact that would be great. I would mind if they try to control it. Which inevitably happens when a major player invests into a FOSS project on a big scale. They'll start to worm themselves into steering groups and then use that influence to get some return on investment and start steering things towards their goals. In Google's case that would mean lock-in and datamining (and ads but I doubt that would ever fly on Matrix)

And indeed like zaik said below, they used to do XMPP and stopped it. XMPP is pretty good too these days by the way. But I prefer Matrix because of its bridges.

XMPP has many bridges. I'm using my XMPP account to talk without issues with my Telegram, Discord and IRC contacts :)

as long as it would follow the spec instead of EEE

To clarify, do you mean embrace, extend, extinguish?

Ha yes, reminds me of this quote from "100 years of whatever this will be" (recommended read) that trended on HN [1] yesterday:

> Software intercompatibility is trending toward zero. Text chat apps are literally the easiest thing in the world to imagine making compatible - they just send very short strings, very rarely, to very small networks of people! But I use at least 7 separate ones because every vendor wants their own stupid castle and won't share. Don't even get me started about books or video.

[0] https://apenwarr.ca/log/20211201

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29416606

The matrix chat software desperately needs an alternative implementation, I don't think it matters too much who will do it first.

And there are several server implementations: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now#servers

Yeah but none is production ready. I used to host a matrix node with synapse but it's a waste of time because it doesn't scale well and once you realize that there is no way to convert your users over to a better server software.

So now I'm just waiting until Dendrite or Conduit become fully featured to deploy one of them instead. I'm looking at matrix hosting long term, and synapse is not long term.

What kind of workload do you need to scale Synapse too? I mean, matrix.org is running on Synapse...

I'd argue that matrix.org is not the best advertisement for Synapse then, judging by its performance.

I imagine he was using the sqlite backend rather than something bigger. I've had issues with it when connected to larger groups.

No postgres actually.

Matrix.org has terrible performance, it's really a proof that synapse doesn't scale well.

Funnily enough, matrix.org performance has never sucked for me, except maybe a few years ago, and has steadily gotten better since then.

I'm not saying I'd reach matrix.org levels, but I am kinda anal about having something that could reach those levels. So that my users won't experience issues. Because once you pick a matrix server implementation you are pretty much stuck with it. Migration would require a lot of hours of converting users, and might not even be possible depending on how the passwords are encrypted.

I know people who've been hosting the same XMPP server for decades. So this really shows the immaturity of Matrix. I still believe in it but it needs some more time.

I'd say just stick with XMPP and extend the protocol to fit modern needs. If we want an universal chat protocol that's going to last, reinventing the wheel is not going to get us there.

Well Matrix isn't as old as XMPP yet, so no one could have possibly hosted a Matrix server for decades, but I've hosted Synapse for 5 years now and steadily getting more family/friends on that instance.

No problems so far and performance has been steadily getting better. There was a low period when performance was not up to par about two years ago, but ever since that's been fixed, it's been smooth sailing.

Unfortunately none of them have feature parity with Synapse. In fact, many of them are missing critical features.

There is the main python implementation Synapse, there are two Go implementations (Dendrite and the other chinese finance chat implementation) , one very active and one nearly dead Rust implementation, a half baked c++ implementation and some others.

Why do you think Conduit is nearly dead?

Also, what's the other Chinese implementation you're talking about?

Why do you think Conduit was the "nearly dead" one and not the "very active" one? ;)

On first read I just saw "...nearly dead Rust implementation" and didn't notice the previous fragment saying there was another very active one. Just a reading comprehension fail but maybe the sentence structure tripped up others like it did to me.

Like the other comment pointed out, Conduit is the "very active" implementation.

https://github.com/finogeeks/Ligase

This is the Chinese implementation. From the README and website it seems its being heavily used in production but the website is Chinese so I dont know for sure.

Ah, I misread the comment. Thanks.

Synapse (the original python matrix server implementation) gets a bad reputation because it used to be particularly bad - we've done loads of work to improve it though, and these days it's pretty reasonable. https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapses-sca... and https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1434912387933560837 gives some info.

On the other hand, both Dendrite (Go) and Conduit (Rust) are usable on the public network, despite being beta. There are some missing features, but people can and do run them for real, and both projects are super promising - and with more contributors, they'll land even sooner.

Needless to say, this has absolutely zero to do with ITA's Matrix flight search system :P

We have already seen a successful EEE scenario executed by Google when it comes to open IM networks, so - it does matter; and no, thanks.

Same, would be better to specify in title what Matrix they're referring to

All volunteers will have biases. I guarantee you that you have people from corporations you despise working on free software you love.

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