Enter the Matrix – A technical overview and guide to all things Matrix

Re:Enter the Matrix – A technical overview and guide to all ... by dnel on Monday May 14, 2018 @10:28AM (#17065811)

I doubt any platform uses vanilla XMPP, that wouldn't be sane, but like using XML, XMPP is a relic of its era. Whose to say what super-critical "how can you not have this as standard!?!" feature won't come up in the next 5 years that Matrix devs hadn't even known of in 2018. That doesn't mean we should flip over the table and start again every now and again and hope the users will follow, this is why extensibility is an important part of the recipe and make ways to ensure the standards of the day are always implemented before being considered ready for prime time.

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Re:Enter the Matrix – A technical overview and guide to all ... by heavenlyhash on Monday May 14, 2018 @10:37AM (#17065885)

IDs, though.

Like, in the abstract, I agree with you completely.

But IDs.

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Re:Enter the Matrix – A technical overview and guide to all ... by rakoo on Monday May 14, 2018 @12:09PM (#17066666)

I don't know, IRC in its current form doesn't have any message-ids and yet seems to be working fine.

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Re:Enter the Matrix – A technical overview and guide to all ... by heavenlyhash on Monday May 14, 2018 @12:23PM (#17066780)

It also does not and never did support consistent history or multi-device.

And it never will, because having some way to identify a message is a prerequisite for even phrasing the question "does device_foo have message_x synced yet?"

Bouncers don't count. They reintroduce centralization as a way to solve the problem. It's a solution, of a sort, but it's a fairly poor one if your original aim was decentralization.

And "working fine" is also frankly a bit of a stretch, isn't it? I can't count how many times I've seen a "netsplit" in freenode or the other IRC networks. That means messages aren't delivered. It's so common we have a word for it: "netsplit".

I shouldn't dunk on IRC too much, because at least it's honest about itself for being simple, and there's a virtue in that. But if we were to construct a statement like "IRC manages reliable message delivery without any concept of message IDs", then that would be false (or technically, vacuous), because it doesn't manage reliable message delivery.

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