[HN Gopher] Matrix Community Year in Review 2022
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Matrix Community Year in Review 2022
Author : timokoesters
Score : 73 points
Date : 2023-01-01 08:44 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.neko.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.neko.dev)
| v3ss0n wrote:
| I chose Zulip over matrix. UX in quite bad in matrix element and
| offers no new features compare to others. Zulip topic based
| discussion model is really powerful and it gives a lot of ways to
| manage the team asynchronously. What worse is performance, matrix
| is quite slow compare to Zulip because it's choice of underlying
| framework not asynchronous , where Zulip uses Django 4x and
| tornado framework.
| uselpa wrote:
| But they haven't managed to fix a rather basic feature in their
| iOS client in nearly 6 years now:
| <https://github.com/zulip/zulip-mobile/issues/438>
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| Anyone here know when we can see fruits of EU DMA viz matrix-
| whatsapp communication without having an account in WhatsApp and
| bridging them?
|
| Any public roadmap for that?
| schoolornot wrote:
| Matrix is a fantastic project and I'm glad it hasn't yet been
| encumbered by open core or any other licensing nonsense. It truly
| is one of the best open source initiatives in the space and a
| huge shout out to Matthew for what he's done here. I just wish
| the team leads were more receptive and responsive to certain UX
| issues. I work at a company that pays over a million dollars a
| year for Slack. There is so much money being left on the table.
| It's just nowhere close to being in a state where any company of
| our size can move over to it.
| Arathorn wrote:
| We are trying to be pretty radically responsive to UX issues -
| eg https://element.io/blog/an-unrecognisable-improvement-
| elemen... and now rebuilding the apps on mobile. What are the
| "aaargh" table-flip UX issues which you feel are being ignored?
| justaj wrote:
| In Element Web for example, if I search for my username, all
| I get are the results in which my nickname is mentioned
| instead of also including messages sent by me.
| traspler wrote:
| I really, really want an option to disable read recipes
| display in rooms on Mobile. Just like on Desktop. Same goes
| for all the status messages (like joined/left). In general I
| miss some more customization options on Mobile.
|
| And in general I'd love to get rid of sending read recipes
| but I remember there being a whole discussion around that.
| feanaro wrote:
| Private read receipts are supported in recent Synapse and
| Element versions. You can enable them in the settings,
| though they're missing some quality of life, for instance
| to be able to enable them per room and being able to toggle
| them more quickly.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| "No more tabs" - this looks interesting. Will be very helpful
| cor personal communication. Thanks. I must install it again
| and check where Element is right now.
| sdkgjajggaf wrote:
| Custom emoji. These are actually a critical part of many
| slack workflows and not just for fun.
| lrvick wrote:
| But is it worth a million dollars a year and giving up all
| your internal chat logs to a company that will likely lose
| them when they get hacked.
| ognarb wrote:
| Custom emojis is something that exists since already quite
| some time in the matrix ecosystem, thanks to an unofficial
| im.ponies.user_emotes extension to the spec. Unfortunately,
| element only support displaying these emojis and not
| sending them. But various other clients does support them:
| Nheko, Fluffychat, NeoChat, ...
|
| Disclaimer: I'm one of the maintainer of NeoChat
| DoItToMe81 wrote:
| Schildichat now supports rendering them, but not
| uploading them or reacting with them. It's a step
| forward. It also can embed videos from certain links.
| funOtter wrote:
| Is it possible to create a private Matrix chat room with expiring
| messages (e.g. messages are deleted after 7 days)?
| Arathorn wrote:
| yup. https://matrix-
| org.github.io/synapse/v1.41/message_retention...
| lebaux wrote:
| good concept not done yet
| COGlory wrote:
| >Usually the Matrix organization posts such an update, but I felt
| like this years update was a bit scary and also light on
| community projects.
|
| I noticed that while reading it as well. The call for funding ap
| few weeks ago did not sound nearly as dire. I wonder how things
| are going with that. I had wanted to donate to Matrix a number of
| months ago, but there was no easy, non-Patreon way to do that. I
| guess I assumed that with the new ask for donations and setting
| up DonorBox would have a pretty large response.
|
| It's also strange how quickly this situation developed. I read
| every TWIM (at least I did before RSS broke recently) and follow
| the project and some developers on Mastodon, and don't recall
| hearing anything about financial woes. If anything, it seemed
| like at least New Vector was doing well financially. It isn't
| clear to me whether the financial issues are with Matrix
| directly, or New Vector. I don't think this is mentioned for the
| two developers who were laid off either.
|
| Overall, the tone and urgency of the 2022 update struck me very
| off guard - not what I was expecting.
| Matumio wrote:
| Maybe I'm out of the loop, but is there anything wrong with
| donating to https://liberapay.com/matrixdotorg/ ? I'm assuming
| the connected github account (and twitter) mean that it is, at
| the very least, genuine, but I can't find a link to it
| elsewhere. Edit: Sorry, not sure where I was looking. There is
| a prominent link to liberapay on matrix.org.
|
| Liberapay may not be as easy as Pateron, but especially with
| Patreon's UX getting worse over time, the major difference for
| me is now that you usually pay/renew each donation yearly.
| Arathorn wrote:
| The situation has been brewing throughout the last year, but as
| the post tried to explain, we've seen a pattern where Matrix
| has become much more popular... but massive deployments choose
| to DIY or work with local vendors rather than work with the
| core team.
|
| This is a major shift from the past; perversely it turns out
| that the reward for the core team for having improved synapse's
| scalability and performance and generally improved Matrix is to
| undermine our primary route of funding.
|
| The initial "funding Matrix via the Matrix.org Foundation"
| blogpost got very little feedback (other than complaints from
| the community that it was biased against indie contributors
| participating in the foundation, which was not remotely the
| intention). Meanwhile it's become increasingly apparent that
| while it's viable for a 3rd party matrix vendor to build a
| sustainable business on top of Matrix... it's not so viable if
| you are also shouldering the costs of almost all the underlying
| core Matrix dev. Hence trying to explain to folks unambiguously
| that we need a sustainable way to support the Foundation, and
| sending up distress flares in the xmas blog post.
|
| I am very bemused that some of the reaction has been resentment
| about the blog post being "scary" and "unsettling". I'm afraid
| that we default to transparency, and while this may seem
| abrupt, this is because we've shifted our assumption that large
| govt-scale deployments will support the core team by default
| (unless we explain very unambiguously how important it is.)
| Sorry if this upset anyone's christmas, but imagine how the
| core team feels (not to mention those whose jobs were
| impacted).
| lousken wrote:
| I feel like the Element client is somehow lost in a sense. As
| far as my understanding goes, they are doing their third
| rewrite of mobile apps for whatever reason (that has to be
| wasting a lot of developer time). And secondly they seem to be
| kinda stuck in terms of its vision.
|
| If they market towards companies - the search is still very
| bad, doesn't give any options (like search within a timeframe,
| search types of attachments etc... compare that to discord or
| slack e.g.), it's completly missing on mobile.. and generally
| sucks at showing attachments - seeing something from 3 months
| ago is incredibly annoying if you have hundreds of attachments,
| sometimes due to a bug even impossible. Hopefully slide sync
| and other stuff will adress all this filtering, searching and
| moving around a timeline quickly (going back a week ago? good
| luck). Also the amount of bugs as of late is quite worrying -
| after a year or two I am having issues with encryption all over
| the place, the notifications were buggy (maybe the version
| that's not showing up for me in the playstore already fixes
| that)... so I feel like the resources should be focused towards
| polishing and not rewriting everything again.
|
| And if gamers and home users are their niche and want to target
| those users - discord users were asking for custom emotes for
| years now and while a solution for stickers exist, it's not for
| emotes.
|
| Also I don't understand why pouring resources into its own
| videostreaming when jitsi seemed like a very good option
| already - again in my opinion should've been a low priority and
| scheduled for much later in the pipeline.
|
| Again I truly hope Matrix succeeds, but making a better
| experience, useability and polished product should be the focus
| now. While third party clients may have other features, it's
| Element that will be used the most by people, at the start at
| least.
| Arathorn wrote:
| > As far as my understanding goes, they are doing their third
| rewrite of mobile apps for whatever reason
|
| It's the first rewrite of the iOS app, which was 8 years old.
| And it unifies the android and iOS codebases at last, to stop
| having to implement everything twice on mobile.
|
| > (that has to be wasting a lot of developer time).
|
| no, it is already spectacularly reducing dev time; basically
| halving it.
|
| You can (re)read the explanation at
| https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-
| update...
|
| > And secondly they seem to be kinda stuck in terms of its
| vision.
|
| The vision is pretty simple: radically fix perf, fix bugs by
| converging SDK, then add new features like encrypted search.
| Native VoIP is critical, given Jitsi's encryption is beta and
| doesn't interop with Matrix's, nor is it decentralised, and
| we'd rather invest time otherwise spent maintaining large-
| scale Jitsi deployments making Matrix support VoIP out of the
| box.
|
| In terms of the recent Android notification bugs: yes, they
| should be fixed in 1.5.16, released 2 days ago. And they are
| _precisely_ the sort of bugs we are addressing by unifying
| the mobile apps onto a single well-tested SDK.
| pkulak wrote:
| > encrypted search
|
| Whoa... how is that gonna work?
| Arathorn wrote:
| https://github.com/matrix-org/seshat - we've had it for
| years on desktop; just need to hook it up on mobile. it's
| currently blocked behind unifying sdks, so we don't have
| to do it twice in iOS & Android.
| lousken wrote:
| > It's the first rewrite of the iOS app, which was 8 years
| old. And it unifies the android and iOS codebases at last,
| to stop having to implement everything twice on mobile.
|
| Not really sure about iOS, but I was thinking of android -
| there was the old element(riot), the current
| version(riotx?) and now the proof of concept.
|
| > You can (re)read the explanation at
| https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-
| update...
|
| Sorry but I am still very confused about the naming, what
| is Element X, what is Element R. I am assuming Element web
| and mobile are the current stable versions but what's the
| difference between R and X is still not clear to me.
|
| > The vision is pretty simple: radically fix perf
|
| How? Are you going to keep developing both synapse and
| dendrite or are you planning to sunset synapse eventually
| and only develop dendrite? How close is dendrite to being
| stable and any plans for making migration guides between
| the two?
| Alexqw85 wrote:
| The status of Dendrite and its position vs Synapse is
| covered a bit in the Holiday Update:
| https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-
| update...
|
| The relevant section:
|
| > The interesting plot twist is that Dendrite development
| has ended up increasingly focusing on embedded matrix
| server use cases - particularly to power Peer-to-Peer
| Matrix, where clients require a server to be embedded
| within them. So while Synapse has ended up increasingly
| focusing on large-scale deployments, Dendrite has ended
| up pursuing smaller instances (which is ironic, given
| originally it was meant to be the other way round!).
| Arathorn wrote:
| Yes, it's the 3rd new version of the android app, which
| is necessary to converge the ios and android apps
| together... to fix precisely the sort of stupid bugs
| which you were highlighting originally.
|
| Element X is the new app, which implements the new faster
| sync and is built for performance from the outset.
|
| Element R is an upgrade to the existing separate apps,
| which converges just the encryption on the new rust
| implementation, to minimise future encryption bugs by
| sharing the same code over all 3 platforms.
|
| In terms of fixing perf, the solution is to switch to the
| new sync API (which will be supported on both synapse and
| dendrite) and use the new client codebase. Synapse and
| Dendrite are relatively similar in performance in
| comparison. Synapse dev will continue; Dendrite dev will
| continue focusing on embedded servers. Dendrite is very
| close to being stable, and yes there will be migration
| guides.
| Mortiffer wrote:
| I loved reading this, thanks for the collection.
|
| The funding trouble is somewhat surprising. Has anyone gone
| through and done a deep dive comparison of other open source
| projects that are doing fine.
|
| Mastodon, doing fine on donations because the product small and
| well defined ?
|
| IPFS, from the start they planned to make money with fileCoin and
| IPFS is a supporting service they develop because it is useful
| for fileCoin?
|
| Elasticsearch, well defined product with traditional enterprise
| feature split and users who are very accustomed to paying for
| this kind of a product ?
|
| MongoDB, well defined product and much more restrictive license ?
|
| Supabase, much less to develop because they are mostly gluing
| existing code together. But they are bringing out some great new
| things and the glue has value . And again its a database so
| people are accustomed to paying ?
|
| gitlab, nginx...
|
| There are actually countless open source companies doing well
| when they are in a category of product that people are accustomed
| to paying for.
|
| How far away would matrix be from becoming something like Cloud
| Native Computing Foundation or Linux Foundation. I suppose larger
| tech companies need to start making money with Matrix not
| Goverments or smaller anti capitalism groups.
| [deleted]
| Yoric wrote:
| > Elasticsearch, well defined product with traditional
| enterprise feature split and users who are very accustomed to
| paying for this kind of a product ?
|
| If my memory serves, Elasticsearch suffered a lot from Amazon
| offering their product for free without contributing in any
| manner. That's not very far from what is happening to Matrix.
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(page generated 2023-01-01 23:01 UTC)