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Comment by curryst | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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/...

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.

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

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