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Comment by infogulch | Hacker News Reader

Congrats! I've been watching conduit for a while and I'm glad to see it progressing so much.

Matrix is moving towards a model where the 'homeserver' can be embedded in each device in order for users to fully own their identity. A lean implementation that uses an embedded database is a big enabler of that vision.

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What's the upside of that? Each device being it's own homeserver sounds like a huge increase in the number of federation requests. It will simultaneously make it possible to run on every device, but impractical to do because of the huge increase in federation requests.

The domain name also seems more important. I can already migrate my identity to any host I want because I own the domain. If I didn't own the domain, I don't see how I could migrate "myuser@matrix.org" to my own homeserver. You don't own your identity unless you can migrate it.

I still love Matrix, I just don't see who wins in an "everyone runs a homeserver on each device" scenario.

If you can’t have everyone running their own homeserver, I’d count Matrix as having failed at federation.

Well, if everyone is running their own homeserver Matrix wouldn't be "federated" anymore, it would be "distributed" instead. You seem to argue for Matrix to go in two different directions :)

The following graph is helpful in this context: https://networkcultures.org/unlikeus/wp-content/uploads/site...

Matrix is aiming for (B) here while you're arguing they should go all the way to (C). As long as it isn't (A), I'm personally happy.

They've already stated their goal is to enable P2P Matrix in the midterm.

Makes it a lot of sense, and P2P is exactly what we're discussing here. But P2P can take a lot of shapes, two of those shapes are "federated" and "distributed".

My issue is not that Matrix is moving towards P2P, but this particular user saying "unless everyone is running a server it's not federation" which is strictly false.

The way Matrix is doing it blurs the line between "federated" and "distributed" into a continuum which is really the best of both worlds imo. The existing concept of federation as a bunch of dedicated servers constantly synchronizing with each other 24/7 will continue to work just fine. But now each individual client device will be a full federated node itself, though perhaps a bit more flaky than a normal node might be; but this isn't a problem because the matrix protocol was designed from the ground up to be robust to such issues.

Based on your diagram, the system can seamlessly blend between (B) and (C) based on the needs of users. Eventually the default would become (C) while being backwards compatible with existing systems, but it might blend down to (B) if a user sets up a homeserver for friends and family, or an organization may want to have a homeserver for continuity or legal reasons etc.

I’m not saying everyone will run their own homeserver (setup/maintenance costs, maintenance skills required, and economies of scale combined guarantee some considerable degree of consolidation, as with email), but that if it should be capable of it. If it’s not capable of it, it won’t be capable of even limited federation at sufficient scale.

The Matrix team is working on making identities portable, that is, not tied to a particular MXID and domain. See https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/neilalexander/...

Vector is working on Dendrite, a new Go server implementation that is also targeting P2P, so they are definitely planning for this ise case.

> 'homeserver' can be embedded in each device

There's pros and cons for that. In a stateless "message passing" model having many different servers has little cost, but in a "state resolution" (consensus) model having many different servers can have a cost because servers may be offline at times (and then need to reconcile history) or have their connections blocked to other nodes.

There's also the "backup" problem. You wouldn't want a user loosing their phone to lose their digital identity completely. It should be possible to craft some "social recovery" protocol using Shamir's secret sharing, but we're not quite there yet.

That was for the cons, since i'm sure we're all convinced of the pros :)

> Matrix is moving towards a model where the 'homeserver' can be embedded in each device

This can't possibly be reliable, especially with mobile devices and especially with the kind of NATs that cellular carriers put up.

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