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

Re:Enter the Matrix – A technical overview and guide to all ... by babolivier on Monday May 14, 2018 @11:10AM (#17066178)

> Plus, XMPP can be used for great amount of stuff non-IM related, while Matrix seems very focused around its IRC-like use case

I don't really agree here. While Riot is focused on a IM use of Matrix, Matrix itself is open enough to be usable in any use case requiring a payload to travel from A to B. You could think of Matrix use in IoT, social networks, forums, etc. Some people even made a working PoC of a blog using Matrix, and I heard some others are also working on building a system to bypass information censorship using Matrix as its only back-end.

I don't know XMPP enough to state which spec is wider than the other, but what I know is that Matrix isn't limited by what Riot or other Matrix-based IM clients can do.

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Re:Enter the Matrix – A technical overview and guide to all ... by seba_dos1 on Monday May 14, 2018 @11:27AM (#17066291)

Of course you can (ab)use a lot of protocols in various ways, however, XMPP was designed with this extensibility in mind and that's exactly why its basic RFC is so minimal. Heck, even basic instant messaging over XMPP is defined in a separate RFC (RFC 6120 for Core and RFC 6121 for XMPP-IM).

GP already stressed it out:

> Matrix's main data primitive is synchronising conversation history within a room - not message passing.

So Matrix might be well suited for things like blogs, but XMPP will be certainly better for push notifications, for instance. However, you can easily build Matrix-like primitives on top of XMPP, while the other way around will be less flexible.

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Re:Enter the Matrix – A technical overview and guide to all ... by bsummer4 on Thursday May 24, 2018 @05:24AM (#17142374)

But flexibility is the problem with XMPP in the first place. None of the clients and servers have compatible feature sets.

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