I still don't understand why Matrix exists. It feels like a solution looking for a problem to solve. I must be missing something? Can someone explain the gap it closes?
Of course, it's still useful to be able to chat with people without accounts on your private server, which is why the federation is still important. You can link up with broader networks, but you're not reliant on them.
Why this might matter is because if e.g. the UK government compels WhatsApp to implement a backdoor, as an end user I would never know. But, as someone operating entirely outside of the UK, they have no standing to compel me as a private person to implement a backdoor in my own deployment (or at the worst, at least I would know if it occurred).
Think of it as the chat analog to running your own mail server. Does everyone need to run your own mailserver? No. But if we'd started with a siloed system in email, we'd probably still be sending emails only to people with our same TLDs to this day.
XML means xmpp is awful apparently. I feel pretty alone in having a bad experience with matrix, but a good one with xmpp+omemo.
At least the SAX parsers I've used allowed to get partial "subnode DOMs", which makes it quite easy to use in practice.
That said I've only parsed ~1GB XML files (no embedded binaries), not sure if that counts as large enough.
Sure, sax parsers have their limitations, but there are sax parsers that avoid the callback trouble by doing a tree-style fold over the XML structure instead of the linear fold over the XML stream. Not for the server, since it is not super efficient, but writing a client like that is easy peasy.
What could possibly go wrong if users in a multi user chat see messages in different orders? This decision is a perfect example of how smart systems engineers can be so completely divorced from the real problem (human communication) that they make completely asinine choices justified by implementation details no user cares about.
Matrix needs to die so it can stop sucking the air out of this space. The funding problems are also completely predictable but that's an opinion for another time.
0 https://artificialworlds.net/blog/2024/12/04/message-order-i...
Or look at how until a few months ago, the media store of every homeserver served media on the internet without any authentication. Someone just had to post CP in a popular room and they'd get hundreds of servers rehosting it for free. (Recently they finally added the ability to require authentication for the media store, although they didn't add support for it to their web client, only their new Android one.)
This is not true. If it were true, it would imply you can't view any newly uploaded media from the web client. Here is the web implementation of MSC3916: https://github.com/element-hq/element-web/pull/27326
Though in short, as a large public institution, being able to self-host a secure and decentralised communications network is highly preferable to needing to rely on a centralised service administered by a company in a foreign jurisdiction.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLl5dnxRMP1hX5u7TZ1FNa...
The nearest competitor is Signal but that's neither really open (it's source-available, maybe technically open source but it's clear that you aren't supposed to try to interop with the official network with non-offical clients) nor does it really seem to be made to support large group chats and a desktop-first experience.
The best way to respond is to look over your comment to see if it broke the site guidelines in any way (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). If you notice something, you can correct it in future comments; if you don't, chalk it up to the internet being weird; and either way, don't sweat the downvotes.
Also, if the downvote was weird, someone else will usually come along and add a corrective upvote (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).