Comment by tcfhgj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tcfhgj | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> The issue was so prevalent for years that if it was limited to just a few corner cases, the entire protocol must consist of nothing but corner cases.

for me it wasn't really; occasionally it would hit me, but mostly it worked, and I have been using it for encrypted communication since 2020.

> It frequently occurred on the "happy path": on a single server that they control, between identical official clients, in the simplest of situations. There really is no excuse.

There still can be technical corner cases in the interaction of clients

a talk for details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUSucR2axWI

> I'm sure the designers had the best intentions, but they simply lacked the competence to overcome such a challenge and ensure the protocol was mostly functional right from the outset.

well, even if this was true, they still were brave enough to try and eventually pull it off eventually. Perhaps complain to the competent people who haven't even tried.

> for me it wasn't really; occasionally it would hit me, but mostly it worked, and I have been using it for encrypted communication since 2020.

I think the statistic said that around 10% of users receive at least one "unable to decrypt" message on any given day. That's a lot. Perhaps not for devs who are accustomed to technical frustrations, but for non-technical people, that's far too frequent. Other messaging systems worked much better.

> There still can be technical corner cases in the interaction of clients

> a talk for details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUSucR2axWI

You linked to a German political talk show. If you wanted to show me the talk in which the guy listed reasons such as "network requests can fail and our retry logic is so buggy that it often breaks" and "the application regularly corrupts its internal state, so we have to recover from that, which is not always easily possible", let's just say I wasn't that impressed.

> well, even if this was true, they still were brave enough to try and eventually pull it off eventually. Perhaps complain to the competent people who haven't even tried.

It isn't a problem that the Matrix team are not federated networking experts. At the time, they had already received millions in investment. That's not FAANG money, but it's still enough to contract the right people to help design everything properly.

I'm not mad at them. Matrix was a bold effort that clearly succeeded in its aims. I'm just disappointed that it was so unreliable for such a long time, and still is to some extent.

Correct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHzh2Y7BABQ

> I wasn't that impressed.

If you think, I want to impress you, you are wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com