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cos

@miah all of them apply to Matrix except running a server on 486. OTOH also regular people can use it.

(I was 25 years on IRC, it's one of the good guys)

9 comments
Hannah

@cos @miah yeah, I think Matrix, while it has its flaws, has the biggest potential to get on par with features enough to attract regular users.

However there is still the metadata leak problem which I think is hard to overcome.

cos

@scatty_hannah @miah well, IRC has even worse metadata leak problem (or it doesn't even try to hide anything, even client IP's are visible for other clients).

More privacy focused alternatives such as pure P2P messengers have their place but they sacrifice lot of features and are very niche.

Hannah

@cos @miah completely agree. IRC is from a time when people didn't even think about that.

And yes, everything has tradeoffs.

Mia Luna Tearmoon

@scatty_hannah @cos @miah I run a Matrix homeserver (dendrite, which is not as resource-hungry as synapse) and there are too many problems with this stuff to count. Starting with unable to decrypt message, continuing on to basically no choice of clients that support all features (only Element does, and it is utter crap), and finishing with multiple protocol issues that are inherent to the standard and lead to room fragmentation etc.

It is quite terrible when compared to XMPP/Jabber. Sure, encryption is nice… when it does not break stuff.

Oh, and with homeservers you really are limited to the official ones if you want up to date feature sets, and even then, synapse (Python) is basically the only well supported one.

It's like how ActivityPub clients are designed for Mastodon first, and choke when your instance's server does not provide Mastodon's extensions.

@scatty_hannah @cos @miah I run a Matrix homeserver (dendrite, which is not as resource-hungry as synapse) and there are too many problems with this stuff to count. Starting with unable to decrypt message, continuing on to basically no choice of clients that support all features (only Element does, and it is utter crap), and finishing with multiple protocol issues that are inherent to the standard and lead to room fragmentation etc.

cos

@mia @scatty_hannah @miah Dendrite is not ready for production use, so you are bound to run into various problems. Synapse is a bit heavier, but can be used for daily use. I hope Dendrite reaches maturity sooner than later, it's good to have alternative server implementations.

Mia Luna Tearmoon

@cos @scatty_hannah @miah my biggest issue with synapse was the usual Python stuff where you cannot just walk into upgrading Python to a new major version without utterly breaking your venvs, plus the whole deal where with one user in 2 conference rooms and 2 private conversations idle synapse managed to constantly hog 4-8% of a core. (Idle dendrite uses 0.2-0.4%.)

cos

@mia @scatty_hannah @miah if you want to run Synapse easily, just run the debian package or a Docker container. No need to worry about such Python stuff.

Mia Luna Tearmoon

@cos @scatty_hannah @miah I am afraid I do not run Linux and my platform is not Docker-compatible…

I know you are not supposed to use most open source software on open source platforms/operating systems that are not Linux, but I have no experience with the latter.

Björn

@cos matrix is like IRCv3 with all the extensions turned on.

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