Hacker News Reader

Comment by akho | Hacker News Reader

Matrix is in the same place wrt feature mismatches. It's a quality of the problem, not of the solution. I actually think XMPP does a better, more structured job here.

View on HN

XMPP leans heavily on capability negotiation and service discovery which makes it straightforward to degrade gracefully when feature mismatches occur. Matrix is significantly lacking in this regard.

Unfortunately, some of the features that can degrade are things like "the chat is actually secure."

I strongly prefer that with XMPP I can disable the encryption when it breaks to tell my friend I'm trapped under a boulder and bleeding out. With Matrix our chat is encrypted, I can't turn it off ever, if it stops working I can't communicate, my only option is to make a new room with encryption disabled and invite my friend hoping he sees the invite and accepts in time.

It's funny because I remember having an issue where my friend was sending me messages, and he couldn't read my messages, and my mobile client (Siskin) didn't let me turn off encryption for outgoing messages.

Recommendation: if you're trained under a boulder, use the device you're running an XMPP chat client on to call 911.

I want to see this movie

Edit: now I can't stop thinking about correlation vs causation - you being under the boulder bleeding out at the same time XMPP encryption suddenly stops working.

Physical hardware certificate thinggy which got crushed?

That's how RCS's Universal Profile is too though as far as I understand with the new encryption standards.

Id rather someone be able to reach out to me with a note the chat is insecure, rather than be unreachable at all

> Matrix is in the same place wrt feature mismatches.

not it isn't - still today there's no choice between incompatible room types or incompatible encryption algorithms and whatever else.

Calls are implemented differently across clients, threads only sometimes work. And, apparently from your comment, there's only ever going to be one encryption algorithm, because cryptography is a solved problem now?..

Don't Element Continuwuity, Synapse, Sable, FluffyChat and more all implement Matrix RTC, because this is most likely the future of video calls in Matrix (while not even officially part of the spec at this point)?

> And, apparently from your comment, there's only ever going to be one encryption algorithm, because cryptography is a solved problem now?..

That's not from my comment. If there will be another one it likely will be integrated into THE specification such that it will NOT divide the ecosystem into "I prefer MEGOLM" and "I prefer to implement new thing".

I don't have a horse in this race, but "incompatible room types" is precisely an issue i encountered on a selfhosted server. Agreed, that was for S2S federation and not C2S, but that was an issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com