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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

I love Matrix but it's really weird that they are spending time building a metaverse when there is still a lot to be desired in the plain instant messaging side. The server is still fairly slow even on their paid hosting plans, and stickers have been left in a half complete state for years now.

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We tried to explain in the main https://thirdroom.io/preview blog that TR is a tiny team of three people who are driven by 3D and probably wouldn’t otherwise be working on Matrix… while the rest of the Matrix core team is way bigger and frantically working away improving the core protocol and reference implementations, which are actually getting way better.

https://matrix.org/blog/2022/08/15/the-matrix-summer-special... is a recent overview of all the perf and reliability work going on there.

Meanwhile, TR is genuinely groundbreaking (i get 120fps fullscreen on my MBP in Chrome, which blows my mind), quite aside from the fact it doesn’t require any infrastructure beyond a normal Matrix homeserver. So please don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!

Somehow there's always this negativity when something's free and open-source - please keep doing what you're doing. I'm a happy Element & Matrix user every day, and this additional R&D effort is very cool too.

Thanks :) To be clear, Third Room really is a groundbreaking thing completely irrespective of Matrix - it ties together glTF, Three.js, bitECS and Rapier to produce an entirely new web-first game engine called Manifold, capable of native grade performance in browser thanks to heavy use of SharedArrayBuffers and Atomics. The fact we then use Matrix for decentralised e2ee networking and storage is just the cherry on top.

Frankly, the metaverse scene desperately needed an entirely open source, open standards based platform, without financial incentives - similar to the open web but for realtime spatial content, and we kinda hope Third Room could be it.

I don't think it's much of a metaverse competitor to be honest. I think they're just really happy with their federated message multi-receiver message exchange protocol and are experimenting with software that go beyond your standard messenger.

There's not a lot features and popularity to be gained over more mature messengers. You need killer features to get out into the market. For Signal that's privacy, for Telegram it's UX, for Line/WhatsApp/WeChat it's omnipresence in certain areas, for iMessage it's preinstalled vendor-lock-in, for SMS it's "works everywhere". Even email can be used as a chat app these days (DeltaChat uses it as a protocol for their messenger, I believe) so what's the point of trying to get into the messenger market?

So far, the places I've seen Matrix get popular are mostly among researchers/tech enthusiast spaces and open source products that needed something that was better than IRC but self-hostable enough. That's not a market with a lot of potential.

I see some real advantages to some of these experiments. Stuffing collaborative document editing into a federated protocol like this is quite interesting, for example, especially combined with some ACLs. It's not something that many other protocols are well suited for and it might just prevent Element from fading away into obscurity like XMPP.

Au contraire I think, where researchers/tech enthusiasts/ source products go, the rest will follow, in time.

It seems to me matrix wants to encompass all forms of communication, vrchat being one of those.

The marketing about it being a "metaverse" seems misplaced even if its technically true or not.

As one of the chairs of the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group and a member of the Metaverse Standards Forum, "metaverse" is a term with a ton of baggage and not one we really like to use internally at Matrix. However, it's also the one people know the most right now :( Multi-user interoperable virtual worlds doesn't quite flow off the tongue and immersive-web or wider-web haven't really caught on outside a developer audience. Maybe cyberspace will make a comeback?

Also, more importantly we don't believe in "a metaverse" in the same way we don't say "an internet". There's only one "metaverse". Open and interoperable should be baked into the definition. Matrix can play one part of it.

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