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.