Comment by jamesbelchamber | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamesbelchamber | Hacker News Reader

jamesbelchamber

> The only thing that I don't really understand is the decision on data replication. If a user on server A joins a room on server B, recent room data is copied from server B to server A and then kept in sync on both servers.

The idea here is that rooms are abstracted from servers and sort-of exist ephemerally. This has the advantage/disadvantage of making it hard for the underlying infrastructure to exert control over the hosted communities, and seems to have become a distinguishing feature of federation.

My experience of Matrix as a possible replacement for Discord has led me to believe it's mostly a disadvantage since it leads to gross misalignments between the communities in top and the infrastructure providers underneath. I consider e.g. Discourse to be much healthier (although I would like to see an app for Discourse so that my Discourse communities behave more like Discord/Slack servers) and it's frustrating to me that there hasn't been a clear "Discourse for chat" emerge to replace Discord.

> it leads to gross misalignments between the communities in top and the infrastructure providers underneath

Yeah, this is a great way to put it. We see this a lot with the mod experience. So much of the mod tooling is "run this bot on your server" or "configure synapse like this". But those kinds of things are inaccessible to people who aren't able to run any server of any kind. Of course someone else can run the mod bot for them, but then you still have the same problem where it introduces a layer of friction between the person who needs to perform mod actions and the person who controls the mechanism for doing so.

Until there's a robust and full-featured mod toolkit built in at the protocol/client level, it's a dicey situation for people who want to use Matrix to host a community. The insidious part is that everything may seem fine until suddenly your room is flooded with images of gore or worse.

(By the way, we still miss you in the Python room on Matrix! :-)

You could also try Movim. You could have a decentralized XMPP server with a client that support group calls as well as having posts like a forum folks can comment on.

There are a bunch of options out there (though I've never seen Movim - thanks, I'll check it out) but most communities seem either to be on Discord or Matrix (with a few still hanging on to IRC and a few others on Slack) - Discord being by far the best UX of the lot.

> The idea here is that rooms are abstracted from servers and sort-of exist ephemerally

No, that's not even remotely true. In fact the opposite is true. The domain name of the server used to create the room is perpetually and permanently embedded in the room name and can't be changed, ever.

I think their point is that the room doesn't depend on that server's continued availability.

That doesn't have any practical effect, though. It's just part of the name and the room can still be used even if that server disappears forever.

No, not at all. Posession of a CA-signed TLS certificate for that domain, and the corresponding private key, is basically the root of trust for room operations.

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