Rocket.chat leverages the Matrix protocol for interoperable communications
rocket.chat
rocket.chat
We've had this since 1988. Its name is IRC. Anyone could communicate on a protocol shared by any kind of app you wanted (not that I'm arguing that IRC is the gold standard of chat protocols necessarily - Matrix seems an improvement to me - but it was an open chat protocol before most of what we now think of as the internet existed). The fact commercial chat apps aren't interoperable is a decision they made to screw the user for corporate interests (i.e. force everyone who wants in on the network onto their app that they can track and advertise on), not because cross-app communication is a new or novel concept.
But yes, I believe this is the way to go. Unfortunately it will never be the way the mainstream goes because the ad money from the walled-garden apps funds their own marketing campaign to keep them in the forefront of users' minds, but both ecosystems will probably exist side by side in perpetuity (at least until the walled-garden lobbyists convince the government that open apps have to be outlawed because of children or terrorism or something).
IRC spent most of the last decade rolling out the V3 spec which came with hard hitting features like logging in to accounts (SASL), away notifications, showing the time a message was sent rather than the time it was received by your client.
Still working on signing up for a new account on the todo list.
The glacial pace of open standards like IRC is the reason proprietary tools which can just get things done took over.
For years syntax highlighting hasn't shown on discord mobile, but does on discord via browser.
If they have a supported up-to-date browser, yeah...
>There is no querying available features for the other side
Right. If your browser isn't on the short list, it just isn't supported. Want to access discord from a tty over ssh? Go fuck yourself, not supported. Want to access it through your custom text-to-speech system? Go fuck yourself, not supported.
Are you seriously mad that a company selling a commercial product doesn't support tty support for their browser app?
I think you're underestimating how lucrative spyware is.
Remember, Google is basically funded entirely by spyware and 'spyservices'. Data is the new gold. Unfortunately it's your data and someone else's gold :(
I don't think Discord should exist, and the fact that it's a commercial product shaped by the economic self-interest of one company is the reason it's so bad.
You talk about it like the commercial motives actually justify the negative properties. "Someone's making money! How can you object??"
This is were Element excels: they managed to get investors on board, allowing them to get hundreds people paid to work on Matrix, allowing Matrix to move fast. (Too fast if you ask me, as other clients and servers struggle to keep up with the flagship implementations; but that's another discussion.)
> Still working on signing up for a new account on the todo list.
We even have a draft spec with three implementations, now! :) https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/account-registration.html
What hindered previous attempts for years was trying to cover every use case, which suffered from feature creep before even getting implementations.
The ability to turn that crap off is entirely why I'd want a different client.
And it's not really like you can have your feature available everywhere on day 1 really, even on a proprietary client. People often lag behind updating their apps on their devices.
I managed a fleet of 60k mobiles of which 40k byod (personally owned). and we often ran into issues with people not updating even included apps like chrome for years and we'd have to email them and even ban them when a serious vulnerability was found in the wild.
And mobile platforms auto update now so while it’s possible there could be an old version out, not much effort is put in to making it work. Telegram shows a basic text showing the message is not supported on your version and prompts you to update.
Even the stuff that is hardly a feature but more a UX prompt is important. Discord voice channels are not that much functionally different to traditional group calls, but that way they get used is dramatically different because the UX is.
Imagine if someone bridged discord to some other IM app and when someone joins a voice channel, it starts a group call on the other app which opens a ringer on that persons phone. The compatibility is close enough right, but that minor difference is enough to make users very upset.
Even if they don't technically end up using them or really need them, it clearly helps get people using the platform.
I use Telegram because of the stickers and generally great UI experience on both mobile and desktop. Even though I know Signal or Matrix are a better choice from a privacy/security standpoint.
In fact, almost every non-IRC chat app around starts out as some variant of "trying to improve on drawback X of IRC." For a long time, IRC was the default choice and you only did something different if you wanted to fix one of the problems with IRC.
I hope matrix can become this new default.
All the compatibility shims and bridges between platforms have been largely disappointing. You reduce the experience to a lowest common denominator of features which is the worst of all worlds. The Matrix paid subscription bridges are the best implementation of this I have ever used but I still frequently check Telegram after sending from matrix because I don't have faith that my message was accurately represented on the other side. Plain text largely works fine but you have no idea if a link embed worked, if your sticker shows up properly. Even for an image, when you send in matrix, it often shows as an uncompressed image on Telegram which is sometimes what you want but usually not. But since matrix has no concept of compressed vs uncompressed images you don't get the UI to select like you do on the real Telegram client.
I don’t have trust in the matrix bridge to accurately represent my messages so I don’t like to use it because several times I have sent something and it has not come out right on the other side.
It’s like the emoji fragmentation issue on a much bigger scale. Chat is very complex and social/communication cues are very susceptible to being affected. I once sent someone a YouTube video with a timestamp and found out that ms teams did not load the video at the timestamp if clicking the thumbnail. I now kill the embed when sending a timestamped video because this caused a lot of confusion for the other person. Stuff like this happens much more for bridged communication where you don’t even have access to the UI to see how it worked or disable embeds
Matrix itself does not cooperate with others. They could have avoided XMPP bridging by building on top of XMPP instead of creating their own protocol.
> If the same amount of effort went into improving XMPP as goes into complaining about Matrix, then XMPP would be in a much better state.
It goes both ways. I don't know about XMPP, but IRC would be in a better state if people who complain about IRC would spend as much effort checking out newer IRC software (which already exists!) instead of using legacy stuff, then throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
(I think nearly every database should probably be SQLite.)
Amplify: I’ve worked with Amplify but it’s not production ready, they change and break things and you have to intimately know cloudformation. Developers used to wait for me to fix the problems. It was taking a lot of time from me to keep things reproducible across all dev environments. You don’t have time for this stuff when you run a startup and you have to prove business is viable.
Now that we have Matrix, I'm not sure where it's place is but I'm sure some orgs are fine using it for internal communications without having to pay Slack for your history/premium features?
I've heard so many people rave about Zulip but it doesn't do e2ee nor have federation, which these days makes it a non-starter for me.
The downside is that it is, and always has been, incredibly buggy and prone to total failures.
This is only for federation apparently.
Like, if someone sees a business opportunity for selling proprietary modules, to the point of hiring people, making a team, and creating an oss project to support it all, then without those commercial parts the open pieces of that project wouldn't even have been written to begin with, right?
What are you on about? How is sspl closed source???
And I paid $24.99 for my first copy of Linux.
I grabbed this resource from Beeper's landing page: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
Is that what you're using?
EDIT: Oops, i should have also clarified that the free account does *NOT* seem to include bridges...but the paid accounts do for an additional nominal cost (honestly seems a fair price): https://element.io/personal-plans
They should fix that workflow.