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Comment by unknownian | Hacker News Reader

Alright, how is this different from the other attempts at this type of server-based system? And how is this better than Tox, which is P2P?

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I tend to use at least three different devices through out the day: my laptop, my phone and my work computer. I'm constantly switching between them. This coupled with the fact my memory is utterly atrocious means that I really really need to have conversation history synced across all my devices, otherwise I tend to ramble on about the same thing again and again.

Multiple device support is definitely a second class citizen in XMPP, and is just plain Hard (if not impossible) in a P2P world.

I'm confused as to how it's similar to Tox. Matrix seems to be a server with an API that allows you to send and subscribe to messages. This would be useful for a software engineer working with M2M communication. Unless I'm looking at the wrong `Tox`, it seems to be a P2P IM client. These seem like completely separate domains, right?

Matrix is basically an eventually consistent object database with open federation and pubsub. It's optimised for messaging at the moment - you can use it for group chat, or WebRTC signalling, or M2M/IOT stuff, or anywhere else you want to pubsub data and keep a history. The similarity with Tox is that Matrix can implement a chat system that looks like Tox. The architectures are completely different though: Tox is a big distributed hashtable smeared over lots of peers; Matrix is client/server with synchronisation between te servers. (disclaimer: Matrix is my fault)

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