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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

How's this better than Matrix?

(Not a leading question. I haven't used Discord/Matrix/etc. more than a handful of times and don't know what I don't know.)

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What made me choose Revolt over Matrix is the user interface and structure. I vastly prefer the server-with-multiple-chatrooms paradigm that Discord (and by extension Revolt) use, it's a much nicer way to host a hangout with your friends if you have more than a few, so conversations about different things can happen in different places and people can avoid stuff they're not interested in. Matrix kinda has this in that you can group groupchats, but the UI is a lot more awkward. Additionally, Revolt has custom emoji, and you would not believe how reliant you can get on custom emoji if you and your friend group have gotten used to using the samw set for years.

Matrix is a protocol. It doesn't have a UI as such. I guess a more useful question could be "why isn't Revolt using Matrix?"

Yes, that was what came to mind for me. My Element UI has organizations (servers) and rooms and people in them, surely Matrix would support all the features this has as well? Perhaps you used it before this was supported.

Or maybe Matrix has some issue I don't know about, which is a more interesting question. Element seems to have both video and audio chat, but leaves a lot to be desired on the UI side sometimes. I can definitely imagine the more the merrier when it comes to open source UIs for open protocols.

I can say a few things as someone who has been running a matrix server as a slack alternative in a company for a while now. Element does not have an "administration" ui. Synapse has an extensive admin API, but element so far has not created a ui for it. This can make it hard to use for example in a business because a lot of compliance and security related aspects are hard to control and dial in. Another thing is that quite often, users don't familiarize themselves with the encryption model. They create a key but then lose it and all their chat histories with it (especially non technical users). Well, because everything is encrypted, a server admin can't see or recover their messages when that happens. There may be some privacy concerns when federation is turned on, such as user profiles leaking or unwanted users joining rooms they shouldn't be able to in a server. Again, these things are all addressed by Matrix/Element but they are an issue because users don't familiarize themselves with it enough. Element are developing something new called Element Call, which is a Jitsi alternative that uses the Matrix protocol. So far it's in early development and not very usable for self hosted servers yet. There is not a lot of administrative control really. If two users just spam each other in a room it will fill up storage and of course the server admin can't check what these people are writing.

Another thing that can trip people up or make Element hard to use in a company is that the Element clients have certain defaults. For example, the video calls by default use a pre-defined Jitsi instance. Other aspects also use external service by default, even if connected to a self-hosted server. That is pretty much a nightmare if there are compliance/privacy concerns and a company wants to host everything in house.

What's really pleasant is how verbose and easy to understand the matrix protocol is. It's quite easy to create bots, send messages over the API etc. So it can be easily integrated into other business processes.

The client-server API in Matrix doesn't really allow for the nested "server with channels" paradigm that something like Discord follows.

There's the Spaces [0] API but it's not really meant for creating "servers" (servers as Discord labels it, meaning a top-level room or thing that contains children voice or text rooms) and as such there's no easy way to have any type of per-"server" RBAC or other permissions that Discord's model provides because of the Room + Power Level paradigm Matrix follows.

There's also difficulty with enforcing recursive operations, e.g. in Discord you can just kick/ban somebody and they are removed from the top-level (Server) and all child channels- but there is not really a way to perform any such operations with Matrix without a lot of hacking around and writing custom app services.

[0] https://spec.matrix.org/latest/client-server-api/#spaces

This is precisely my issue, yes

Did you try https://github.com/matrix-org/mjolnir ?

Yes I have. Mjolnir is not really suited for the problem I am describing because:

A) you need to create an account for the bot and provide an access token (which is cumbersome to obtain). In Discord that type of moderation of users works ootb.

B) There is no mechanism for role-based permissions. In Discord, you can create a role and assign specific permissions to that role which can control different rooms, etc. in your server. That is not possible in Matrix currently even with Mjolnir or custom app services because of how power level mappings work.

It's a problem I'm interested in solving but it would require MSCs drafted to alter the Matrix spec to create a new permissions model and will have extremely far reaching implications for homeserver implementations.

Perfect, thanks for the pointer!

Matrix has custom emojis and stickers

You're trying to compare a web app to a protocol. Better question would be: Why is this not powered by Matrix?

Does Matrix have the equivalent of voice chat rooms that Discord has? I find as a user of Discord that being able to see who's just hanging out is the killer feature there. (As are things like game streaming and bots, ofc)

yes, albeit in beta in Element: https://element.io/blog/drop-in-drop-out-chats-with-video-ro...

I saw this and got excited but no, this isn't discord voice channels. This is an integrated jitsi meet call. It looks like some sort of prototype has been merged to develop though:

https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/pull/21476

What do you mean it's not discord voice channels? Looking at the screenshot[0] their Jitsi Meet integration is identical, because discord voice channels are essentially voice conference calls.

[0] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/48614497/159062202...

There's still a "join" page every time before you can actually enter a room. And the participants in the room aren't shown as nicely when you're not in it.

Both are very important for replicating Discord's low friction. Opening a full window when it's just a voice channel anyway is also distracting and increases friction.

$5/user/month = no way in hell I can get all my friends on board to use it. Impossible to get network effects going like that, as much as I wanted to try it.

It looks like it's a b2b app anyway

It's $0/user/infinity if you host your own Matrix server[0]. You don't have that option with Discord. Your data will remain with discord servers.

Element is hardly b2b lol.

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[0]: https://matrix.org/

A good starting point if you're tech literate is this:

https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

IIRC it doesn't feature encryption and there's no pairing devices via QR or emotes chain as in Element client. Last time I played around Revolt it was very Discord-alike

Matrix feels a bit monocultural for my taste. Perhaps Revolt can do better, we'll see.

Can you explain what you mean? Is it due to the technology or an accidental adoption pattern that's independent of the technology?

How's this better than IRC?

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