This is what it has going for it. It is meant to be a drop-in(ish) replacement for freenode. All the same clients, all the same protocols, all the same channels (in theory).
A drop in replacement for a place that was run into the ground by the people who now will run the drop in replacement.
Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.
If the sarcasm is missed, there is nothing at all funny about this abomination. I would much rather trust Andrew Lee than this bunch.
(The bridge is unreliable, but still very handy to stay connected to old friends)
Matrix as a protocol is neither bloated or slow, and ~32.1M folks have managed to use it successfully, directly or indirectly, as a global chat network. Presumably that counts as a 'large network'; it's certainly bigger than Freenode.
Synapse as an implementation has historically been bloated, but it's been steadily improving (and in fact last week's Matrix Live has a fascinating analysis of how the remaining memory usage is being fixed: https://youtu.be/694VuhmVmfo). Meanwhile implementations like Dendrite & Conduit are positively skinny.
No one expects you to read every bio of every comment you read, but conversely we shouldn’t expect him to preface every single one of his comments with “Hey guys, I’m the project lead of Matrix.”
Arathorn is very active in comments, and it’s well known to frequent readers he is the project lead of Matrix.
HN's minimalist post format isn't amenable to adding such disclosures all the time - but making them available in bios is practical.
You may also want to assume deep undisclosed conflicts may exist whenever there's no bio info at all – as with your user page.
Oh, for all the bigco employees to have their affiliations declared for when they're flacking their company interests under a pseudonym! Oh, for net upvotes/downvotes on highly critical/opinated posts to be cross-tabulated by employer conflicts! Unlikely, but things to think about.
But bringing up that you're the project lead of the project your discussing seems like an obvious step.
And, it often has the added benefit of more useful credibility context than just revealing blatant conflicts.
It's impractical to expect a commenter to consider, for every comment, "how much involvement in these particular topics should I declare?". That's especially the case on topics for which the commenter often comments, or multiple comments in related threads in a long discussion - where such a standard would be onerous for both the author, and the readers.
Add major affiliations to the bio, and I'd say you're covered for comments related to those affiliations, as it's then easy to check for anyone observing any partisanship, without encumbering all writing/reading with redundant disclosure-noise.
If you want scrupulous disclosure of relevant affiliations inline in every single comment where they could apply, I think you're in the wrong place.
As you note, it's not a site guideline. As I've noted in a sibling thread, it wouldn't fit the minimalist HN presentation, and would place an onerous burden on both writers & readers.
It'd also especially encumber people with deep personal knoweldge and interest in some topics, if every related post required boilerplate "I'm employed by X"/etc inserts.
But putting it in the bio for the curious/suspicious is a very honorable thing to do!
The guy gives up additional disclosure information and you see that as an opportunity to make smartass comments
Can't XMPP be considered a competitor? If so, that's like saying an oil company exec has no reason to disclose their affiliation when advocating against renewable energy sources.
It's not about whether you are advocating for or against something specifically, it's about whether you have a vested interest in the outcome which could conceivably affect your veracity, or even just your outlook and how you perceive the facts (it doesn't need to be nefarious, nobody can be completely impartial).
To clarify my intent, I'm not sure I think you should have noted your affiliations in this case, but I don't think the reason stated for not doing so is really evidence either way.
The protocol may not be, but in practice, the servers and clients that nearly everyone uses sure as hell are.
I run a synapse server for half a dozen people on a reasonably beefy box and it sure feels that way when I'm using it on a daily basis.
I regret getting people onto Matrix now. I'm keeping it running with the hope that things improve and because I don't want to get people to move to another system which may also have problems.
Should have just stuck with XMPP and my Prosody server, and IRC.
Um.. :D
Based on the phone-home stats in Synapse there's around 300K DAU currently on the network, but this is a major underestimate given other stats which suggest only about 30% of public servers enable phone-home.
I want to test this claim. After an hour of google searching I'm none the wiser:
1. Can I bridge private messages, or just MUCs? I use XMPP only to keep in contact with friends that use XMPP. I would love to integrate them into a single client, but afaict it does not appear possible.
2. Do I have to run my own XMPP bridge, or is there some automatic integration service I'm completely missing? For comparison, the experience of bridging a matrix room to IRC was as easy as clicking "add new bridge" in the Element UI.
Does Matrix support OMEMO for e2e encryption?
(Although the bifrost bridge doesn't currently implement E2EE - and it would have to reencrypt anyway to turn the Matrix event payloads into XMPP stanzas and vice versa)
In which way does the protocol make no sense for chat? IRC is extremely complicated as well and a giant pile of hacks.
Most of the state resolution (eg. the auth chain) involves calculations of which you can cache the result without needing to care about the inputs beyond that - at least, unless you need to recalculate them once later if delayed events come in.
Ultimately, the performance problems that Synapse has are problems with Synapse's implementation choices (especially around the database schema), not with the protocol nor with the state resolution algorithm.
That doesn't seem like a fundamental issue though.
I think an open source project is more scalable and reusable than a proprietary one, but if the goal is long term communication among diverse users, then using a protocol is good.
Ouch. Did you read https://matrix.org/foundation or https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc177...?
I'd agree that skepticism was warranted if we hadn't split out the Foundation and the protocol was de facto controlled by Element. But instead we made damn sure to create the Foundation independently and frankly protect it from being sabotaged by Element or any other commercial entity building on Matrix. To suggest otherwise is pretty insulting to the other Guardians/Directors whose only role is literally to oversee and ensure that the protocol isn't sabotaged by commercial entities.
This is very different from Microsoft's model.
IETF is one of the best standardizing organizations out there, I'll certainly give you that. They have fairly transparent process, and a really good track record when it comes to creating robust protocols.
Thing is, I don't see why Matrix.org would have any more or less "cachet" than WHATWG, or Khronos Group. In the end, the identity of the standardizing org doesn't really matter too much. What matters is that the incentives of the standardizing org are aligned with those of the community.
It honestly feels pretty likely that this is just a maturity thing - as more products are built around Matrix, the Spec Core team will likely become more diverse.
This is just false. Speaking as co-founder and project lead for Matrix, it's been the same team all along since we began in 2013. We were incubated until 2017 in a company which never tried to monetize the protocol, and then we span out to set up Element (formerly New Vector) where we keep the lights on by selling Matrix hosting and support/consulting.
At the same time we set up The Matrix.org Foundation as a non-profit neutral standards body, with an independent board where the original founders are deliberately in the minority - and when we set it up, half of the spec core team were independent of Element too. (This changed as folks on the team opted to join Element so they could work on Matrix fulltime).
Rather than spreading FUD about Matrix, why not collaborate and work together? Or at least spend the energy on improving XMPP rather than negging us...
Is there a place with this history or the governance structure that people can link to the next time this comes up?
You're trying to moderate discussion that you don't like, because it's not about IRC. Matrix is relevant in a discussion about IRC because it's a valid alternative. You can't police natural and useful discussion you don't like.
All that being said, you're right, I shouldn't get drawn in every time this person (whom I've just realized is the same person who goes by another name elsewhere) jumps in on every chat across the internet trying to advertise their product. My own fault for getting drawn in and using language like "hissy fit" that is, as you said, unreasonable. I'm sorry about that.
We're all only human.
Thank you for working on XMPP
Speaking in a strictly personal capacity, I don't think that point can be taken for granted. The W3C's missteps with HTML5, and WHATWG's success, is a particularly notable failing of a dedicated standards body. The Rust programming language is also developed and codified outside of a traditional standards organization.
There's a reason why eg. the WHATWG exists, basically.
Also, rapid development has its own set of problems as we've seen with XMPP (where no two clients support the same set of features because new ones are being developed to keep up with various proprietary things all the time).
Anyways, point is, don't reinvent the wheel, I'm sure one of the standard bodies could have been a good fit if we needed this at all, but Matrix definitely isn't a good fit for this Freenode replacement and this is one of the reasons why (the other is that Freenode works just fine and the point is that this is a drop in replacement).
Who decides when a standards body is real?
Single standard organizations created by the dev group are just naturally biased certain ways.
I don’t think there’s a single perfect body, but it’s definitely curious to me why someone would start a stand-alone foundation rather than use w3c, ietf, or others that seem to work pretty well.
I also judge the number of different clients and servers implementing the spec for whether it’s real or just a controlled intermediary. Sun/Oracle seemed pretty bad about this back in the day with JSR stuff although I haven’t paid attention in 10 years.
Projects can make their own choices and set up foundations if they are willing to fund and monetize, etc. But that stuff isn’t as robust as IRC or protocols that have independent standards bodies.
Seems like there are lots of different clients [0] and a couple of different servers [1].
The idea of a single dev team being VC funded means that there’s a drive to monetize. That’s bad pressure on a protocol and one that doesn’t exist for IRC and other protocols. There’s multiple members in the matrix foundation and that helps but there’s just not much diversity of interests.
Again, not the end of the world, and the project seems to me to be going to great lengths to collaborate. But I feel the same way as if Microsoft started up an independent foundation to drive development of the Skype protocol. Good on them, but it’s not as robust as an independent protocol.
[0] https://matrix.org/clients/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol)
I think IETF is a good example of how anyone can propose standards on a plethora of topics. When they were very young it was hard to trust but now they are decades old with hundreds of standards demonstrating how easy it is to propose and work on new standards. Maybe even the “gold standard” of standards bodies.
IMO it doesn't need to be "better", there are different requirements and preferences among users and between Matrix, IRC and Jabber, each of those ecosystems got their own set of issues.