I think the punchline on the FAQ entry is:

> Matrix is incredibly buggy at times and it’s left a sour taste in my mouth.

Speaking as project lead for Matrix... I can see where this is coming from. Were we doing Matrix from scratch again, we'd have a smaller scope and polish each feature more before releasing and moving onto the next thing. However, we're very aware of this, and these days do almost nothing else other than polishing the current codebase - for instance, Synapse's RAM usage has dropped enormously (https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1434912387933560837) - all the main serverside bottlenecks have been removed; we're working on speeding up joins enormously; Element's performance is improving massively; we're working a complete rethink of the client-server sync protocol to ensure that only the bare minimum data is ever synced to clients by default. The only new feature work we have on the horizon is exiting Spaces (groups of rooms) from beta, and adding Threading. Otherwise, it's "just" a matter of fixing remaining E2EE bugs; reworking E2EE onboarding UX, and lots and lots of polish.

Critically, *NONE* of these bugs are due to federation or decentralisation. Ironically, the federation bit of Matrix is one of the most robust bits these days - after we spent ages polishing it in 2018-2019 to fix bugs in the merge resolution code. So I think the...

> Federation and Discord-style protocols are inherently incompatible

...assertion in the revolt FAQ is completely false, and Matrix already disproves it. Residual bugs in Matrix implementations are more thanks to the complexity of federation/decentralisation/encryption sucking a lot of energy away from the more business-as-usual things which you'd focus on if building a Revolt/Rocket/Mattermost style thing.

Anyway: Revolt looks cool, and we wish them the best, and hope that they will indeed bridge into Matrix in future, which is honestly quite a good compromise - https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/07/gitter-now-speaks-matrix#... is the guide to follow to rapidly plug an existing chat system into Matrix, much as we did with Gitter :)

Element keeps getting notably better :D

Keep polishing it and silence the haters

Thank you :) and yup, this is our masterplan :D

You're doing some of the most important work on the Internet right now, and I for one am profoundly grateful.

Seriously, for anyone else reading, this attempt to provide federated privacy of communication is the kind of thing Saint iGNUcious himself might bless (I don't know if he does but am hopeful).

I had a chat with a friend recently and he said in response to my declination to use Signal:

"(I appreciate the commitment to decentralisation, but the battle of messaging apps ended up elsewhere). You're still fighting for the emperor in the jungle but the forces in the war changed years ago :)"

Decentralisation is the very purpose of the Internet, and federation is how it will work.

We just need to help you solve all the user experience problems, and they are very soluble.

Keep up the great work!

"Federation and Discord-style protocols are inherently incompatible"

Really? I wonder how Rocket.Chat federation overcame this "inherent incompatibility"

https://docs.rocket.chat/guides/administration/administratio...

Just look at the screenshot on the RocketChat page. "Use on a production system is not recommended at this time" And looking at how buggy RocketChat is without federation I trust them not to use it.

Most of their features is just PR. For example they do advertise E2E while it has the same amount of warnings and not even a doc page https://docs.rocket.chat/guides/administration/administratio...

I wasn't defending Rocket.Chat's implementation. I haven't tried it myself.

Matrix is the practical solution, and Arathorn's sibling comment gracefully addressed my real criticism. Federation is absolutely possible on these applications, although tricky.

> "In terms of the situation, we started the project when none of us even knew what federation was, so it was never even considered from the start."

Well, yes, it is honest, but it also is disturbing - which other well-known network principles were unknown to them?

Is it really "disturbing" if it's maintained by mostly college students? If this was done by industry veterans I could understand your stance, but the way things are this feels uncalled for.

I mean it is a little absurd, when everyone on the planet is using email, which is federated...

Also absurd that so many of us use SSDs but still don't know what quantum tunneling is...

Everyone on the planet is using IPv4 and the internet, yet the understanding ends at 'what is a LAN and what is a port' for a shocking portion of developers. Not knowing about federation[0] doesn't seem so bad.

[0] Most likely this is referencing the term and the structural pattern; as you correctly pointed out, the concept is quite widespread.

i've even heard that some people use some kind of federated packet-switching network these days to communicate. it'll never catch on :)