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Comment by dec0dedab0de | Hacker News Reader

I haven't used IRC in a long time, and never used Matrix, so I could be way off, please correct me if I am. I think the main difference between matrix and IRC in regards to spam is the federated nature of matrix. In IRC, each organization[1] only has to worry about it's own users. So they can add any kind of verification, bans, filters, etc to manage spam. With matrix, you have to rely on every other organization to police it's own users. Kind of like email, which has way worse of a spam problem than IRC.

[1] I said organization, but what is the right word here? Group? Domain? Do IRC and Matrix have their own terms for these things? I wanted to say server at first, but surely there is more than one server.

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I think the terminology you're looking for is "homeserver." Homeservers are tied to a single hostname / domain, but may be a collective of servers running the different services that comprise the protocol itself.

That said, you _do_ have to worry about spam from other homeservers, but that only matters if you have users from that other homeserver in your room. You can choose to federate / not-federate on a room-by-room basis, or just not federate at all ever.

Needless to say, you're right that it is a bit different than IRC in that regard (IRC can just kline hosts / IP ranges from the whole service if you're spamming). However, in practice there's a lot less instances of random spam such as in the article than you would think.

For myself, I never noticed any of these spammers at all (anectodal, so mileage may vary). I do have my own homeserver through Element Matrix Services, but I am part of a good number of rooms that exist purely on the Matrix.org server. Certainly I have to "police my users," but that's pretty easy since I run a small homeserver for ~5 users, and we just federate with the greater network when needed.

I guess I agree with you in general that there's different failure modes, but I don't think it's as simple as dismissing matrix because it "has the same spam problem as email" compared to IRC. In practice at least, it doesn't seem to be as much of a problem despite how much larger than IRC Matrix has become.

Thank you for the insight. To be clear I'm not dismissing Matrix, just trying to explain/understand it. I would say that federation is the main reason that email has been so successful for so long, even if it is the same thing that makes spam so hard to control.

Ah yes, the part in my comment about dismissing matrix was in reference to the thread parent. Apologies if you thought that was directed at you.

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