Comment by Arathorn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Arathorn | Hacker News Reader

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> The general response from the team was: "Pay money or shut up and accept what we give you".

I think you may be unfairly paraphrasing "we don't have enough funding to be able to work on both Element & Element X, or Synapse & Dendrite, or to have landed Threads/Spaces in Element X yet, or <insert complaint here>".

> The number of gigantic changes in direction this project has had in the past couple of years is enough to sink any project. Jitsi to Webrtc, complete change in auth system, Element to Element X.

It feels ironic that our attempts to improve the project are characterised as "gigantic changes in direction which are enough to sink any project".

* Jitsi is unencrypted by default, and doesn't synchronise identity, access control, or cryptographic identity with Matrix, and uses XMPP (Prosody) for signalling. Moving to MatrixRTC (i.e. WebRTC signalled over Matrix) gives proper end-to-end-encryption with verified identity and access control managed by Matrix. Surely this is a good thing?

* "Complete change in the auth system" is a massive improvement, in that one of the main drivers for doing it was to now be able to use any OIDC identity provider to add 2FA/MFA/Passkeys or whatever fancy auth you like (despite the OP's assertion otherwise).

* "Element to Element X. There's two clients. One that's fast, and one that's full featured". Well, that's true, but most people seem to feel Element X's improvements outweigh the fact it doesn't have threads/spaces yet (although they are both in dev currently).

> but my experience with these guys is that they're incredibly arrogant.

For what it's worth, I think i've made some spectacular mistakes in running Matrix, as well as bunch of good stuff). This came up in the TWIM offtopic room a few weeks ago at https://matrix.to/#/!xALORqBdeiSfgdrmUb:bpulse.org/$4bGbRTxN.... I've reproduced it (lightly updated) at https://gist.github.com/ara4n/8422ae8eae68a8993a5e831691b441... for ease of reference. I'll let you decide whether that sounds like arrogance or a BDFL who's too smart for his own good.

> P.S I suspect the organization is being led by Architecture Astronauts

On the Element side: does https://youtu.be/IwZ4rE_Pt64 feel like an org led by architecture astronauts?

> I think you may be unfairly paraphrasing "we don't have enough funding to be able to work on both Element & Element X, or Synapse & Dendrite, or to have landed Threads/Spaces in Element X yet, or <insert complaint here>".

I asked in the chat what's the plan for people who are running on old servers when it comes to migrating to MAS. The general response was "Welp, should've gotten a support contract." Or maybe it was migrating from Element to Element X. I can't remember.

> It feels ironic that our attempts to improve the project are characterised as "gigantic changes in direction which are enough to sink any project".

The real irony is mentioning working on both Element and Element X, Synapse and Dendrite, and not see how much work that's already been done is being completely thrown away. This is not even including all the weird 3D stuff that was once a thing. Even the all the rebranding is kind of like 'wtf is happening over there'

> Jitsi is unencrypted by default.

Then why implement it? Or you could have contributed to it/fixed it instead of building something from scratch using technologies like SFU which no has has heard of before.

> There's two clients. One that's fast, and one that's full featured". Well, that's true, but most people seem to feel Element X's improvements outweigh the fact it doesn't have threads/spaces yet (although they are both in dev currently).

Since when have threads and spaces been in development? Probably almost a year now. And this is not even including the bug/unimplemented feature where in the android app where clicking a message notification just takes you to the bottom of the room instead of the message itself. And what about clicking to join rooms? Matrix.to? Come on, bro.

> For what it's worth, I think i've made some spectacular mistakes in running Matrix,

I wasn't talking just about you, your arrogance is kind of endearing in the right light. The community itself is so hostile to any criticism it feels like talking to toddlers.

> as well as bunch of good stuff

Matrix is great. Just not ready. The communication about how it's so great and ready is probably a big reason of why people are turned off. If Matrix was still labeled beta (and people weren't afraid of New Vector one day moving development behind closed doors) I can almost guarantee the community would be so much more vibrant. The threat of New Vector going fully proprietary is the main reason we decided not to move forward with contributing to the ecosystem. (we're still looking for our messaging home).

> On the Element side: does https://youtu.be/IwZ4rE_Pt64 feel like an org led by architecture astronauts?

I remember when this video first came out. I think it was around the time of MatrixConf. Element X is not ready, and starting the video by calling it "Not just the best Matrix messaging app, but the best messaging app available" is (with all due respect) delusional, or marketing-led dishonesty.

I say all the above with love. I'm someone who has developed an admin panel for our internal proof-of-concept other than the one provided by New Vector or the other half-baked open-source one (I forget what it's called). So I've really dived deep into the ecosystem. But it's not there, yet.

I can see the vision you have for Matrix. The global federated network of eventually-consistent event servers. I love it and I hope it succeeds. But when commercial interests play a role and New Vector has some sort of conflict of interest between spreading Matrix as far as possible, and making it profitable, it's hard to buy in to that utopian vision. Be Linux, not Red Hat. You can't be both, that's where the conflict of interest comes in. Yeah Matrix is an independent foundation etc. etc. but if Synapse dies, the entire ecosystem dies.

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