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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

HN frequently seems obsessed with Matrix. So I want to ask, where do you all hang out and how do you use it? I think Matrix is cool, I just am not sure how people are actually using it.

Please don't tell me to look at the channels list there's a lot of porn and most channels I have joined are dead.

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I use it as a one-stop-shop for messaging. I setup a Synapse server ~5 years ago and since then have convinced many of my close family and friends to join my server (or another). Now many of the folks I want to chat with are regular users of Matrix. For some of my stone-age friends that are still on WhatsApp, I run a bridge [1] so that I don't need to look beyond my Matrix client to see WhatsApp messages. For other random SMS messages, I use the dated SmsMatrix [2] to push text messages so I can see/reply from Matrix. Beyond that, I also use Matrix to connect to several open source communities (e.g. Mailu.io [3]).

1. https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp 2. https://github.com/tijder/SmsMatrix 3. https://matrix.to/#/!RJFCFtixHgPhzacdhW:tedomum.net?via=ghos...

This seems like the best answer, but I already did that switch with most people and Signal (took years to grow that network). But I do like the idea of bridges for WA and SMS (I know there is a Signal bridge too)

I don't use it often but I'm a big fan. I think just like how you don't look up whether someone is using outlook or gmail when you want to email them, IM and video calls should not be bound to clients. It's stupid that I need MS Teams to talk to someone, when all my stuff are on another platform. Matrix is fixing that.

It's a battle-tested open source Discord/Slack/etc replacement with sound 1-on-1/group chat E2EE encryption. It's like Facebook Messenger:Signal as Slack:Matrix, and it's easy to use software even for people not familiar with dealing with the ins and outs of complicated cryptosystems. Unlike Signal it has always been completely open source.

> Unlike Signal it has always been completely open source.

Honest question: when was Signal closed source, as Signal? I’m not familiar with this. I know it’s roots are in the old Moxie Marlinspike OpenWhisper apps, but that’s a long time ago and the last I looked, Signal open sourced all their code.

There's gripe from people because they didn't update the GitHub repos for the server code for a bit. Client side code was always up to date. There's also another complaint (imo this one is more legitimate) that Signal only allows messages to be passed through their servers. I don't think the parent is really arguing in good faith tbh.

For a year

There has been a lack of transparency with their server code. Very late pushes (>1 year) when they were adding their cryptocurrency, and now some black box code to "eliminate spam" [2]. By contrast, Matrix has always had master public and allows users to run their own servers either privately or connected to the federation, something not really possible with the Signal app family.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26345937

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/qlw1ag/signal_is_a...

LMAO "battle-tested" that's one way to describe that Meteor.js pile of junk. I'll never forget that time one of my users on my small Rocket Chat server two or three years ago changed their username and it not only immediately crashed the server but also corrupted the database because the change had to check every message ever sent for that user in the database because they didn't put an index on an immutable ID. I had to write a program to manually remediate the data in order to get our chat back online.

Don't get me started on the mobile app. I have so many stories of pain from Rocket Chat that it isn't funny.

I then spent several months writing a bespoke application to extract my community from RocketChat and move it to a different product because it was so terrible.

Now, I stopped using it in 2019 but had used it for the prior four years every single day and it only got worse with every release. I used to joke to my friends "what new bugs will this release have?" until the mobile app rewrite became so unbearable that it almost killed my community entirely.

Is it better now? Well, I bet it has more half baked features, like Matrix integration I guess. Rocket Chat always looked great on paper... Just don't try to use it too much, or look at the code.

I was referring to Matrix suite, not Rocket.Chat. I've never used Rocket.Chat so I can't comment on that. :)

I hang out in a ton of FOSS projects' rooms / bridged IRC channels / other rooms I saw mentioned in discussion. I use it to give and receive support, to learn, and as an occasional break from work.

https://view.matrix.org is a good list, at least the first few pages seemed SFW, most populous rooms are first, and you can search by keyword.

Once you get into the main room of any large community, check the topic or ask if there's a Space, which gives an organized overview of a community's rooms (in a featureful matrix client like Element).

I've been using it in daily chats with friends, and with my gaming groups, for about two years. The end-to-end encrypted, Google-free comms have elevated the quality of our online conversations: We no longer feel the need to self-censor, so we talk more freely about personal matters. When I noticed this, it felt like an invisible weight I had been carrying for ages was finally gone.

I'm avoiding public rooms until my Matrix clients support multiple accounts/identities, so open source chats are still on an irc client for now.

Matrix is where open source projects move their chat rooms when they don't actually want public input.

As a maintainer of an open source project, we moved to matrix when freenode imploded and so we could bridge our users (mostly on discord) into the same room with our developers many of whom refused to use discord on principle.

The public room list is generally considered a bad idea, and we're seriously considering deprecating it in favour of space hierarchies - i.e. curated hierarchies of groups of rooms, so that folks who like curating lists of interesting rooms can go and do so - rather than them all being dumped in a huge mess in a linear list. There'd then be social pressure to curate the best space index, rather than it being a tragedy of the commons of random lost forgotten rooms.

In terms of where to hang out and where to use it, here are some handy spaces picked from my personal space bar...

* https://matrix.to/#/#community:matrix.org <-- rooms about Matrix itself

* https://matrix.to/#/#space:ansible.com <-- rooms about Ansible

* https://matrix.to/#/#activitypub-community:codelutin.com <-- rooms about Activity Pub

* https://matrix.to/#/#wikimedia-space:matrix.org <-- rooms about the Wikimedia community

* https://matrix.to/#/#solarpunks:solarpunk.cloud <-- a random solarpunk community i lurk in...

* https://matrix.to/#/#rlang:matrix.org <-- rooms about the R language

* https://matrix.to/#/#buddies-of-budgie:matrix.org <-- rooms about the Budgie desktop environment

etc etc. This ends up being way higher signal-to-noise than the room list (although there's always the risk that a space will get forgotten and neglected).

Obviously this selection is biased a bit towards open source software, given that's what I'm into, but there are loads of other communities too. Nobody's yet started a big global space tree to help find them (probably because subspace performance needs some work), so the best bet for discovering them otherwise is probably simply through DDG or Google or whatever, looking for folks advertising them on their websites.

Alternatively, you can head off into IRC or some other Matrix server (e.g. mozilla.org) from the room directory selector in your matrix client of choice. Many of my rooms are actually bridged into IRC, XMPP, Slack, Discord etc rather than entirely native Matrix.

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