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Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

Would someone kindly explain what Riot and Matrix are, who is behind them, etc.?

It's great to see them implementing this. If you're company is not, please get busy - IMHO it should be the norm now.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/11/tech-companies-fix-the...

Matrix.org is a non-profit open source project that publishes an open standard for decentralised interoperable communications (IM, VoIP, etc), an example server implementation and a bunch of example client SDKs, bridges, bots, etc. 'Matrix' is the name of the resulting ecosystem on the 'net.

Riot.im is one of the various client apps for Matrix, supporting iOS & Android, and is probably the most advanced at this point.

EDIT: clarify org structure: Matrix.org is being set up as a non-profit UK company owned by the various individuals running it. The business model is to create a new ecosystem for interoperable comms that everyone can benefit from.

Riot is a for-profit company (technically called Vector Creations Ltd) which is a subsiduary of Amdocs (a big telco supplier company). The business model is to offer paid hosted services in future for users wanting commercial-grade hosting and hosting private bots/bridges/etc.

Since you are UK-based and Snooper's Charter is a thing now, how will that affect Riot/Matrix? Will you be moving the official base to some countries with greater respect for privacy?

Well, you can always use Riot with a Matrix server in whatever country you like (or run by a company HQ'd in whatever country). And the code is all open, so you can always check for backdoors or build your own copy. For folks worried about the security of the default hosted service for Riot I guess we could set up a canary or something but I really hope we won't get to that :(

(Also, in practice Riot is half UK and half French - although France has its own fair share of crypto confusion).

I'll start right off the bat: I'm not affiliated with the riot chat or matrix crew, however, I am an enthusiastic user of both technologies. So any of the following is what I've learned, and not any official communications...

Matrix is a protocol for decentralized communication. Plenty more info can be gained from their FAQ: http://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html The gist: the protocol can theoretically be used for decentralized chat, WebRTC, and comms between internet of things...With decentralized chat so far appearing to be the most popular. As to your question on the "Who is behind" this? See: http://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#who-is-funding-matrix...

Riot (aka Riot chat, formerly known as Vector.im) is one of a number of client applications for interacting with Matrix servers. More clients can be found here: http://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html#clients

Also, the folks who created Riot/Vector, manage a public matrix homeserver that anyone can join. See https://riot.im Naturally, the point of this being a decentralized effort (and shying away from silos), you don't have to create an account on the riot.im homeserver, but in fact can setup/manage your own (matrix) homeserver! You know...like email used to be more decentralized ;-)

Cheers!

Thank you! How mature is it? How usable is it - usable for the HN crowd? Power users? Typical end users?

IMO Riot is a late beta - pretty much all the features are there, but performance needs work and the UX needs work (this is next on the plate now E2E is done). HN and Powerusers are fine. Right now typical end users require a little handholding to get started.

I have a private homeserver set up and I tell my (nontechnical) wife to fall back to using Riot on her phone to talk to me if / when hangouts doesn't seem to work.

We end up talking on Riot instead of hangouts roughly 1x / month, and I've had no troubles with it so far (except that the matrix server seems to want to use way more memory than I think it "should", so I have it running in a loop that restarts the server whenever the OOM killer kills it. It gets killed fairly regularly (>1x / hour) and I don't really notice it while using Riot).

edit: I don't use the e2e encryption stuff. I have an SSL cert and if chat messages are encrypted as far as the server (which I control), that's fine with me.

https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse#help-synapse-eats-all-...

I launch my instance like this: SYNAPSE_CACHE_FACTOR=0.01 synctl restart /etc/matrix-synapse/homeserver.yaml

I run synapse on a machine with 1.5GB of total RAM and have had zero memory issues since limiting the memory usage with the above command.

thanks for trying to help out. just checked, this is how I'm running it:

    while : ; do SYNAPSE_CACHE_FACTOR=0.01 python -B -m synapse.app.homeserver -c homeserver.yaml  ; sleep 20 ; done

I'm not even using runit or anything; I set it up like this several months ago and haven't bothered touching it since because it's been relatively solid and reliable.

Even at a "cache factor" of 0.01, my tiny DO droplet is still swapping and eventually the homeserver gets OOM killed.

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