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Comment by turminal | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

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.

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.

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.

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