Vector is now called Riot
medium.com
medium.com
It's really good. I recommended it to 7 people and every single one liked it, even got 5 of them to set up their own federated homeservers. We're thinking about moving a ~60-people skype group there as well.
Only issue I had is Synapse hogging the CPU and getting laggy with a large room (#matrix:matrix.org with its 4 thousand members). I'm using scaleway's 3 EUR/month Starter VC1S server for Synapse though. Hopefully it will get even better with time.
Thanks for the support :)
And then of course, there are the matrix bridges to IRC, etc. Admittedly although i have been using vector clients AND have installed my own personal synapse server, i have no experience using/supporting the various matrix bridges, so can't speak to their quality.
That being said, if you've ever been curious about re-doing some aspects of IRC for the better, you might want to take a look at matrix (the protocol), and suggest improvements; we all stand to benefit from your (and the community's) suggestions.
Also, the link to view the main site is tiny and easily forgettable. I think the site could benefit from a stronger CTA that directs you to what I should do.
But no need to signup to play with it :) Full guest access available! Come and chat: https://riot.im/app/#/room/#riot:matrix.org
I started playing around with vector (both web client and mobile app) a couple of months ago, and really like it. I haven't tried the bridge stuff just yet, but am excited to try, especially now that it should be easier. I even installed my own personal server (synapse) for my family - again to kick the tires and test stuff out. Now that you've re-branded and changed the name, you should start thinking of neat taglines...here are few (admittedly silly ones) to get started:
- Riot: Come for the decentralized chat, stay for the community.
- Riot like its a true democracy.
- Riot: Think outside the box, act outside the norm, and chat outside the silos.
- Riot: Chat disruption for the matrix.
This said to me "Riot is just a messaging app" and I bounced. I'd recommend changing that tagline to indicate briefly why a user might use Riot instead of Slack or Whatsapp
If you had just scrolled down a little bit more...
It could benefit from focusing on:
1. Why is this thing for me? 2. What is this thing and how does it address #1?
Both of those, if possible, should be answered in 1-3 short sentences, above the fold.
With that you mean "a worse IRC bridge than Slack"? Every user and dev of IRC clients and servers I’ve talked to in the past weeks has only complained about Matrix’ bridge.
The main difference is that Matrix acts effectively as a bouncer, bouncing all the different clients into IRC, rather than a bridge - unlike Slack's bridge which is just a single bot.
We're aware that we haven't enabled membership list syncing into Matrix yet from IRC (due to performance issues on synapse), but otherwise it should be pretty good.
More fact, less FUD please? :)
The most complaints are about not working private messages to Matrix users (because the bridge doesn’t join people), about the bridge de-syncing from IRC – and you suddenly having every matrix user thrice in the channel, and similar issues.
General stability, ability to chat with Matrix users as if they were there natively, etc.
- Hmm... sounds a lot like Apache (née Google) Wave
- Intro thingy has definite zombo.com vibe
(yes, I do realize that I'm getting old..)
On a more serious note, this could be really good concept if executed well. Time will tell, I hope for the best.
Which definitely doesn’t apply to IRC
> lack of identity
Which the CAP Account extension allows to provide
> strong capabilities for bridging between protocols
And a Matrix-IRC bridge that constantly breaks, doesn’t properly handle private messages, and which badly handles IRC extensions?
CAP Account is just that: an extension. It's not inherent to the protocol, and it shows.
And I didn't say the present bridges were perfect yet. The project is still a ways from completion.
IRC extensions are supported by over 90% of clients already, and provide exactly that.
In contrast to XMPP is IRC actually renewing itself in production.
EDIT: I can’t answer you right now (you are submitting too fast), so here is my answer inline:
> I’ll show the list of extensions both supported by every modern client, and each of the networks you mentioned:
> freenode: sasl, account-notify, identify-msg, multi-prefix, extended-join
> efnet: multi-prefix
> quakenet: none
> Hackint: invite-notify, cap-notify, chghost, echo-message, userhost-in-names, account-notify, server-time, account-tag, multi-prefix, extended-join, away-notify, tls, sasl
> Snoonet: away-notify, sasl, account-notify, invite-notify, userhost-in-names, multi-prefix, extended-join
> Mozilla: sasl, userhost-in-names, multi-prefix
> EsperNet: away-notify, sasl, account-notify, multi-prefix, extended-join, tls
> Also, support for extensions by server: http://ircv3.net/software/servers.html
> And by client: http://ircv3.net/software/clients.html
> Any more questions?
Also, why is that some poor girl or guy can't use HN to link to a product without ten million of these:
"This is neat, but have you heard of my best friends app that does this already!?? links to Github"
including http://riot.com/ - http://riot.io/ - http://riot.org/
Going out of beta we had to decide on something which was really carrying what the app is, we loved Vector but it has always been a code-name and a nice pun on Matrix :)
Riot is more representative of what the app can do and its ambitions! Break the barriers between apps, give the control back to the user to choose their client, if they want to encrypt, host themselves, tune the notifs, the fact it's open, built on the open ecosystem of Matrix and thus benefiting of all the integrations and bridges built for Matrix.... Sounds pretty revolutionary to me ;)
Worth noting that only the name changed: the app and the team and the openness are still the same (modulo new features)!
But at the end of the day, it's just a name, so I'm not too upset about it.
I don't get why you would rename Vector, feels like everyone recommending 'Vector' to friends and family has wasted their time.
it doesn't feel to me as a stronger brand later (both are fairly random words for many people if you don't look at an explanation)
violent connotation (CNN headline: "protesters organised using the encrypted Riot app").
potential confusion in tech-y circles with Riot the gaming company (which could totally be in the market to offer a messenger, given that they run one of the biggest online games), for Vector I didn't have any other project in mind.
In the end it's just a name and it won't make or break the app for me, but I personally don't see the benefit of the new one.
edit: ok it seems it's in BETA and only on the web app for now. Great guys, keep it going and thanks !
Others are in development at http://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html#servers but they are all alpha at the moment.
Have you considered revising it, or something?
The Matrix developers have responded to this, explaining how Matrix is different from XMPP, and why they chose to write their own protocol.
https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#what-is-the-differen...
As parent said, XMPP covers all of these cases with plugins. The FAQ you link says, over and over again, "the base setup doesn't cover these features, but plugins do," and doesn't explain away writing improved plugins or XMPP spec extensions. All I see is "buttt it'ss haaaaarrdddd".
> Rather than fighting over which open interoperable communication standard works the best, we should just collaborate and bridge everything together.
Absolutely dripping with irony.
Matrix actually has a good point about the spec extensions though: if your spec is that minimal, nobody is going to be able to agree on what feature set to support. As a Schemer, I can attest to that.
>Absolutely dripping with irony.
As is your comment. Matrix made a different set of design tradeoffs, and is a legitimate protocol in its own right. And yet every time it pops up on HN, people complain about how we should all just use XMPP.
Screw that. XMPP isn't perfect, and there is room for a chat protocol that solves these problems in a different way.
If that were true, nobody would agree on which Matrix features to support either. What difference would it make if Matrix just-so-happened to be defined as "XMPP, plus the following extensions..."?
> As a Schemer, I can attest to that.
It's one thing to say "the Scheme spec is too minimal; I'm going to make Racket a hard dependency", it's quite another to say "the Scheme spec is too minimal; I'm going to invent my own Python derivative"
>If that were true, nobody would agree on which Matrix features to support either. What difference would it make if Matrix just-so-happened to be defined as "XMPP, plus the following extensions..."?
because some of Matrix's design decisions are fundamentally different from those of XMPP. also, the reason why everybody agrees about Matrix features is that they have no choice: there's a far larger base standard than there is for XMPP.
XMPP is a pretty terrible user experience, tbh, and its developer experience isn't a whole lot better.
They might as well list 'Can't talk via Skype' as a problem with XMPP, since it's just as true and Matrix is just as incapable of solving it.
As for 'requires plugins/extensions', if you think that's a problem then there's an easy fix: define a new protocol as "XMPP + the following extensions...". That requires some effort, e.g. to get servers and clients to support this new protocol, but unlike a "clean break" it wouldn't require much technical or social work.
I especially enjoyed the "no open source implementation exists" reasoning; no open source implementation of Matrix used to exist, but that didn't stop the developers ;)
Matrix also builds on existing standards with decent libraries available for things like voice/video chat, and is web- and mobile-first. There's integration of arbitrary client-defined "push services" built into the protocol, which Riot uses to push events from a Matrix server through Google and Apple's cloud device messaging services to save battery, all without the Matrix server having to know the details of how those push systems work. Also, I can do web-based single sign-on through my CAS server, and all the variations of Riot handle it perfectly.
An end-to-end solution for interop between the two ought to be insanely high on the priority list. By this I mean it should be braindead obvious if I want to try one of them how to chat with a user of the other. Obviously this is bigger than just the protocol but so what, it's the problem that needs to be solved.
I can't even imagine how working together would not be top of everyone's mind in this space, since chat is all about network effects. The incentives to cooperate are huge.