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Comment by your_challenger | Hacker News Reader

This is fine - different chat clients can have their own features and UXs. Telegram can have two ways of uploading an image - compressed and uncompressed. Matrix can have one. WhatsApp can have storefronts attached to business accounts, other chat providers may implement it differently. Each chat provider can build features that fit their customer demography. But the a common protocol of communication (or even bridges) can help people use any chat app they wish to. If your chat provider does not provide the feature you want then simply switch the chat client and take your chat history with you (in an ideal world).

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The problem is the downsides of poor compatibility are far greater than having to use multiple apps.

I don’t have trust in the matrix bridge to accurately represent my messages so I don’t like to use it because several times I have sent something and it has not come out right on the other side.

It’s like the emoji fragmentation issue on a much bigger scale. Chat is very complex and social/communication cues are very susceptible to being affected. I once sent someone a YouTube video with a timestamp and found out that ms teams did not load the video at the timestamp if clicking the thumbnail. I now kill the embed when sending a timestamped video because this caused a lot of confusion for the other person. Stuff like this happens much more for bridged communication where you don’t even have access to the UI to see how it worked or disable embeds

I count myself as a huge fan of matrix - both the protocol as well as the federation concept - and even i feel that bridges are a compromise...but i don't blame the matrix folks. In fact, bridges are the best compromise that i can think of in an ecosystem of outwardly hostile (or at least not cooperative) other chat services. If many chat systems used a singular messaging protocol - much like email uses the same underlying protocols - then i would imagine different systems and client/apps could differentiate on features, performance, price, stability, etc...Not so different from email providers might compete today. In other words, i don't think anyone *wants* bridges...its merely an artifact of others not cooperating. If more systems like rocket chat came out and began to leverage a universal protocol, then everyone wins - the app owners/designers, the app users, etc.

> i don't think anyone wants bridges...its merely an artifact of others not cooperating

Matrix itself does not cooperate with others. They could have avoided XMPP bridging by building on top of XMPP instead of creating their own protocol.

This is so tedious - it’s like having subversion users pop up every time someone mentions git and bemoaning how git should have just been built on svn. Or BSD fans complaining bitterly about Linus wasting time writing his own kernel when he could have just used 4.3BSD or Minix or whatever. If the same amount of effort went into improving XMPP as goes into complaining about Matrix, then XMPP would be in a much better state.

I was replying to someone who said everyone should switch to Matrix, and calling "uncooperative" anyone who doesn't, as if Matrix was somehow objectively superior to every other IM protocol. I agree it is better than most (maybe even XMPP), but this is a subjective matter, and protocols who don't switch to Matrix like Gitter or Rocket.Chat did do not deserve to be called uncooperative.

> If the same amount of effort went into improving XMPP as goes into complaining about Matrix, then XMPP would be in a much better state.

It goes both ways. I don't know about XMPP, but IRC would be in a better state if people who complain about IRC would spend as much effort checking out newer IRC software (which already exists!) instead of using legacy stuff, then throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

To clarify, my comment about non-cooperative chat systems was in reference to MS Teams, Slack, etc. I didn't bring up XMPP. XMPP *might have* been an ok universal protocol to standardize on, but many players (like Google et al) took things in a non-cooperative direction. Thereby somewhat killing its benefit of federation. Also, as much of a fan boy that i am about matrix, i acknowledge it may not be the most perfect, but i feel it is pretty damn awesome from a technology perspective...But even more awesome, are the people and community behind it who - more than any other effort that i'm familar with - actually listen to the rest of the members of the community, and try to find some accord for what is best for all. Finally, i could be wrong, but some of the founders of the matrix protocol (and community) actually loved and came from the IRC world. Obviously, you have a right to your own opinion. :-)

Yes - here is a comparison XMPP<->Matrix: https://www.freie-messenger.de/en/systemvergleich/xmpp-matri...

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