Hacker News Reader

Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

> myself am waiting for a healthy ecosystem of servers and clients to spring up before starting to rely on Matrix

Good luck with that. Right now there's only the centralized matrix.org server, or actually there isn't because it's down. If you want open standards and multiple servers (or your own) use XMPP period.

It's not so much a technical question as it is the attitude of "hey we're implementing our own chat protocol cause XML sucks". Totally not getting the point why users and developers would want to use standard protocols - to save their efforts becoming obsolete, taken over by a single entity, or both. It doesn't help either that scarce development resources are needlessly fragmented between XMPP and matrix.

That said, if the matrix protocol can actually manage to attract users and multiple implementations some years down the road (about 30-40 years after IRC), more power to them.

View on HN

> It doesn't help either that scarce development resources are needlessly fragmented between XMPP and matrix.

In my experience, there's virtually no overlap between the two groups, and therefore no fragmentation. And for good reason: XMPP is a nightmare to implement, so there's a significant group of developers that just won't touch it, but that might be interested in working on Matrix.

And yes, part of the blame for that lies in the usage of XML. While XML can be useful to represent complex data or documents, it's unsuitable as an over-the-wire format because it doesn't have a directly mappable representation in most languages, due to the combination of attributes and child nodes.

This problem doesn't exist for JSON, because pretty much every language directly supports arrays, objects/maps and primitives. This makes a JSON-based protocol much more pleasant to work with, as there is less data-wrangling complexity involved.

> This problem doesn't exist for JSON, because pretty much every language directly supports arrays, objects/maps and primitives

No, JSON will not map directly to a language with advanced type system (with tuples, variants, etc). Even in Elm it's recommended to write a decoder to convert incoming JSON into an internal structure. So in fact the mapping is very poor. And I see no difference in this regard: both XML and JSON is crap.

A chat log is rich text with emojis, photos/videos and other binary data, memes, rich inline citations, block quotes, attachments, and endless new formatting practices and gimicks that are unknown yet as digital communication evolves. XML/SGML is made for this kind of application.

End users don't throw arrays and maps at each other on chat, so JSON's affinity to co-inductive datastructures of programming languages (actually just JavaScript) doesn't help all that much when you have to invent ad-hoc markup over arrays, maps, and primitive types, or ad-hoc hex string encodings of binary data. TBH flocking to JSON because JavaScript can represent it as an object literal is a pretty junior attitude and reflects poorly on the matrix effort. It's equivalent to using BASIC or notepad.exe because that's what's installed on a computer out of the box.

> In my experience, there's virtually no overlap between the two groups, and therefore no fragmentation

Right, so there are two groups of developers working on different IM protocols. If this is not fragmentation (of developers) then what is it?

You know, I never understood why people consider JSON better than XML. Yes, any particular use of XML can be overengineered (namespaces, I'm looking at you), but as long as you control the format or scheme or however you want to call it, it's exactly the same thing as JSON, but encoded differently. In the end, it's all just keys and values or lists of values, arranged in a tree-like hierarchy.

And frankly, I would rather be looking at a well-designed XML format than at a well designed JSON format, with its braces and brackets and commas.

I don't like XML namespaces either (and neither is the original authors of the namespace spec very proud of it [1]). They're greeting you with verbose and rather ugly pseudo-URLs (another bad and confusing concept IMO) and xmlns:xyz boilerplate on page one when you're interested in quickly gleaning XML data.

But arguably, chat log data is actually an appropriate use cases for namespaces, given that you would want a text format that can evolve over time in a heterogenous client and server ecosystem, yet provide a baseline functionality supported by all clients. It's also very helpful if you want to keep chats for archival rather than treating chat as an ephemeral medium. OTOH people have said the excessive use of namespaces and other XML modularization features, and too many XEPs/RFC specs is turning them away from developing XMPP software.

There are valid use cases for JSON though such as ad-hoc data protocols where you own both the server and (JavaScript) client and maintain those in the same repo, and when dealing with simple app data that doesn't benefit from using markup constructs.

[1]: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/01/17/Extensibl...

> Right now there's only the centralized matrix.org server,

I wasn't affected one bit by the outage. Why? Because I run my own homeserver.

> Right now there's only the centralized matrix.org server

That's just blatantly false. Approximately 50% of Matrix users are on other homeservers.

> It's not so much a technical question as it is the attitude of "hey we're implementing our own chat protocol cause XML sucks".

This is just a strawman. Every single talk by Arathorn explains, in great detail, why Matrix is not just "XMPP but JSON". Maybe you disagree with their reasons, but then you should argue against their reasons not some other reasons that you came up with.

> That said, if the matrix protocol can actually manage to attract users and multiple implementations some years down the road

Given the recent hack it looks like Matrix has about ~10 million users federating with each other (if 50% of them are on Matrix.org and Matrix.org has 5 million users) -- and this doesn't count bridged users which aren't using Matrix but are benefiting from the ecosystem.

And there are also several implementations. Riot is the most popular and polished one, but there's a whole bunch of others[1].

[1]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/clients-matrix

Where are you getting that 50% estimate from?

Arathorn mentions this in a bunch of his Matrix talks (and has mentioned it on HN too I think).

For the record: about 2.5M of these 5.6M users on matrix.org are native to Matrix, rather than bridged. the 50% guess comes from the fact we see 8M in the phonehome stats right now (including the 5.6M on Matrix.org) so that gives 2.5M on and 2.4M off. In practice the number off would be much larger given lots of bigger deployments we know about don’t phone home.

According to the stats they've last reported, the split's about 50/50 between people on matrix.org and people on alternatives, and they've said several times they want to eventually disable or turn off matrix.org.

Also, Matrix is definitely about more than just not-XML - the entire protocol is set up as eventually consistent sync of rooms between servers, which they said would have made a mutant XMPP if they had tried to shoehorn it in

>they want to eventually disable or turn off matrix.org.

What happens to everyone on matrix.org?

Disabling registrations of new accounts, not deleting old user accounts.

However something that they are working on (which is a fairly complicated project) is making accounts migrateable between homeservers. Then, users would be able to seamlessly migrate their accounts off Matrix.org.

That sounds great!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com