Matrix.org service offline: corrupted database | Hacker News Reader

Matrix.org service offline: corrupted database

status.matrix.org

60 pointsjoecool102914 comments

Matrix is an interesting technology I would love to use on a daily basis. Then I start Element and it feels slow, sluggish, terrible overall.

I turn it off and use Discord again. I know they are fundamentally distinct, but I am not willing to trade in ease of use (which is really REALLY awful) for privacy, and certainly not trading anything for having a distributed system.

You can't even do direct file transfer. There's a feature request open for YEARS... Yet nobody bothers to push it through.

It’s a shame. There was a brief moment where there was lots of velocity on the “MSC”s as they call them - protocol features. The reference server implementations would be updated quickly, and Element would follow suit. It was exciting to follow and I would look forward to the new features hitting the clients every month or so.

I feel like that’s completely stopped.

For example, I’m still waiting for reasonable documentation to be published about how to deploy and use Element Call, which has apparently been generally available for over a year.

They had to fire a lot of devs and now they are busy re-building a new Element X client for mobile that has a 10th of the features of the older one. If you want to look for mismanagement this is a good case study.

Thanks for all the positive vibes & hugops folks :D

Fwiw, the DB isn't corrupted - the database 2ndary dropped its RAID array on having new disks added (the hw raid controller incorrectly added them into the array, breaking it)... and a few hours later we lost the primary db too. The outage is caused by the time taken to restore & rebuild a 55T db from nightly snapshot.

In terms of lack of documentation for running Element Call: i published a tutorial & video run-through myself back in November: https://element.io/blog/experimenting-with-matrix-2-0-using-... and https://github.com/element-hq/element-docker-demo and https://youtu.be/6iMi5BiQcoI. Or you could just run it via Element Server Suite: https://element.io/server-suite/community

In terms of "Element X has a 10th of the functionality of classic Element" - with respect, this is bullshit. The only features folks complain about missing are Threads & Spaces, both of which are have implementations behind feature flags and will land shortly. In all other respects Element X is a wild improvement over classic Element.

Fwiw, there's another HN thread on this over at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45107696

> hw raid controller

... oof.

Yep, that was my reaction too.

>the database 2ndary dropped its RAID array on having new disks added (the hw raid controller incorrectly added them into the array, breaking it)

You really, truly should look at ZFS.

Keep up the good work! There are satisfied but silent, Matrix users too.

> They had to fire a lot of devs

What happened and why? Any pointers to read more on this?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lkCKhP1jxdk&t=741 is firsthand info

The idea of a federated messenger is great, but there's no good implementation. Matrix only ever looked good because its only competition is XMPP, which is good but ancient compared to what we expect from messaging apps today (e.g. Discord + Signal).

I had the same experience with matrix.org, then I set up my own homeserver and it it became a LOT more snappy. Its not perfect, but its been an adequate replacement for me and my few friends who are interested in self-hosting our own services.

Can we have a federated service that's resilient against outages such as this, where Element would automatically use another server with my same account?

Perhaps the network of servers could even have some redundancy for the last two weeks history of chat messages, minus images.

Matrix's federation already does result in redundancy of the entire chat history; users not on @matrix.org can currently communicate between each other just fine even on :matrix.org rooms despite matrix.org being down.

It's entirely just user accounts that are tied to a homeserver currently. There's a proposal to make it possible for clients to fully manage their account identity (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/408...) but that doesn't look particularly active.

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