Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThatGeoGuy | Hacker News Reader

Because the same behaviour never exists on IRC?

All things considered, I can't say that the Matrix.org team responded slower than I've seen any IRCops respond. The main difference is you don't tend to see news about this happening on IRC as much anymore because IRC has had spam problems for decades, and there's hardly as many people who are out and about making it news.

Plus, for what its worth, most of us who run our own homeservers never encountered this issue at all, because public registration isn't open in the first place. It seems awfully dismissive to wave off Matrix for purely this one incident as it being "immature" as a protocol / platform.

View on HN

As a person who maintains a moderately sized irc network (700 users when I last checked) one of the things that had put me off matrix a couple of years ago was the lack of powerful moderation tools.

IRCs are absolutely archaic, for sure. Inspircd’s modules are awkward to use, single characters have special meaning… there’s g/k/u-lines and don’t get them mixed up!

But, they’re very powerful and absurdly flexible. We’ve been able to mitigate absolutely huge spam attacks with quite complex logic, and you have strong moderation tools at every level- from the channels with quite rich permissions (voiced, half-ops, ops, admins, founders) and the network level (the aforementioned lines).

Maybe matrix has caught up- but it’s hard for me to run a public network without such rich moderation tools.

Even if those tools are clunky and awkward.

Moderation tools are slowly improving, but definitely still don't fit all use cases, and it's very unfortunate they don't come natively with synapse. I'm the lead admin of a Matrix ' Space', and our main room now has over 6,000 users (80%+ are inactive or barely active). We use mjolnir(https://github.com/matrix-org/mjolnir) to ban and redact users/servers/messages across all of our rooms, which has been a godsend since I used to have to redact all the racist/gore myself message-by-message. It's still reactive instead of proactive, but I'm hoping these tools will mature in time.

fwiw https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation/ enumerates the current moderation approaches in Matrix, which are relatively comprehensive. there's still stuff we can do though (e.g. ability to set rooms to text-only)

I meant immature literally, this is a growing pain that will make Matrix a stronger network/protocol. IRC has been around for decades and Matrix hasn't, that's all.

But this will be one of many _novel_ attacks on what is a more complicated network.

When clients and servers need to be updated to fix these issue, it becomes a drag.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com