Since every matrix server requires you create its own user id, I never understood the benefit of being federated.

HN needs a federation megathread. It gets widely debated every other week lol. Anytime Mastodon, Email, Matrix, or XMPP get brought up, the old culture war gets revived.

You don’t need to sign up to multiple servers, if you can use the ID you already have to talk with everyone on other servers. Just like with E-Mail or XMPP.

..."if you can" use the single ID attached to only one server which, if unavailable, takes your identity with it.

Even with /.well-known/matrix or SRV entries?

Apparently there's an idea for a feature to enable users to transfer their account and data from one federation node to another. Pretty sure it's in the "just an idea" phase, so don't hold your breath.

Would be nice to transfer identity to a new domain but leave the server the same, like we typically do with email.

Not understanding your claim...

How can I "transfer identity" to a new domain in email?

I can't move [email protected] to @outlook.com, nor can I move [email protected] to [email protected] .

Well, with email you can a) forward from one address to another b) set up an auto-reply (I've moved), c) copy your message history via imap/maildir/mbox-files. Ditto for address book(s).

it works the same way email does.

you can use a mozilla.com user id to talk to someone with a matrix.org user id, or a kde.org user id

all servers are equal participants in rooms, so a room doesn't live on a specific server aside from servers being able to create friendly names pointing to them, but nothing stops #foo:kde.org from pointing to the exact same room as #bar:mozilla.org -- both servers are participating equally and have their own shortcut name to the room

I can federate message across hosts, fine, but I can't move my username to another host, so it doesn't work like email, because with email the namespace is defined at the DNS level, and I just forward requests to whatever email host I want to use.

Being able to leave one server and join another while maintaining an identity (say, a public key for instance) is on Matrix's to do list, they haven't decided how to do it yet afaik.

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/blob/keg... is how we’re doing it, and it’s being implemented currently in Dendrite.

With webfinger, you should be able to do exactly that. Migration of accounts is not in E-Mail, but while email has mx servers, Matrix (and most nu-fed stuff, not sure about XMPP) should have webfinger support for that.

> it works the same way email does.

No.

Matrix is like chatting via GIT (distributed databases) and tends to be a great team messenger like Mattermost or Zulip - XMPP is structurally like email ...

-> see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36939676

You are talking about two different things. Parent was explaining what federation was. Both XMPP and Matrix are federated, just like e-mail.

And I'd say that Matrix is closer to e-mail and XMPP than you seem to assume. Once the database is synchronized, it works pretty much the same way. Only if a missing message is detected in the graph, then a server makes another request for the messages it missed (backfill).

Moreover, Matrix and Git are quite different, since you want to be pedantic. Both the synchronization protocol, and conflict resolution are handled differently (Git does very little, Matrix is more like a CRDT in that respect).