Comment by eredengrin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eredengrin | Hacker News Reader

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I wouldn't go so far as to say the ux utterly sucks but it's certainly not something I've been able to recommend to most family and friends yet (I can't be too hard on matrix since I have to use Teams sometimes which is simply worse in pretty much every category I can think of, which is sad since the microsoft product teams replaced, skype for business, was itself light years behind teams).

It's a bit unfortunate to see matrix still not there yet, but on the other hand I'm still hopeful for the future. I think ElementX is the result of realizing that an excellent chat experience is what is needed. I also think the matrix foundation governing board elections [0] show that the community agrees that a rock solid chat experience is what is needed. At least for the individual members category, none of the candidates who were elected had a platform statement advocating for more work on the experimental matrix features. Sumner (who I think had the highest support by a good margin, although I can't find the exact numbers right now) specifically stated that experimental matrix features should not receive further investment until the baseline features are acceptable.

I realize that getting funding is a beast of its own and that is probably why some of the experimental things took focus at times so I can't fault that, but I really do want matrix to be something I can eventually recommend to all my family and friends instead of whatsapp or discord. I think it is slowly heading that way..

[0] https://matrix.org/blog/2024/06/election-results/

[1] https://matrix.org/foundation/governing-board-elections/#nom...

I installed a Matrix homeserver (private, separate and non-federating) for our family at the start of the covid lockdowns, and we've been happily using it ever since.

"Recommending" anything is pretty much worthless. Stand them in front of a done thing that is already set up, that's worth a hundred times more.

How much effort took that process and how many people are using it?

I would like to do the same, but with the possibility of scaling it up a bit.

I did the same except federated and it's pretty easy if you have some experience with Ansible and Docker. This repo has a great Ansible playbook that will set up the whole thing for you on whatever VM or VPS you point it at:

https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy/b...

I mean, I was still learning how Matrix works, so it took some trial and error - especially voice/video calls - so a few days of reading docs and doing.

Later, though, I stood up my own Matrix server, this time federated, and that only took maybe an hour or two. :)

I did not use the community Ansible playbook that someone else in this thread suggested, because I enjoyed instead figuring out how the individual pieces work together, but I tried it much later, and it seems to work very nicely, so I too can recommend it.

Meamwhile the Wikimedia foundation are still stuck on a fragmented mishmash of IRC for the old guard, and Discord or Telegram for the younger crowd who quite literally would rather not engage then forgo GIFs.

You'd think they could dig into their hundreds of millions of donated dollars they don't even need and help Matrix and themselves but apparently not.

In their defence WMF have been an Element customer for years, for internal usage. But rolling out Matrix across a large community requires significant community management effort (e.g. what Mozilla did with https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/synchronous-messaging-at-moz...), and that's probably the gap you're alluding to here.

To be fair they never did make any effort to provide community chat spaces. Maybe they think it will legitimise not using wiki talk pages to post memes and go off topic, but 20 years of evidence says people will find their own places to hang out. Time was, everyone kind of just happily used Frenode IRC by default (after all, what else was there? MSN?). Now it's all sorts of apps all over the place, mostly set by whoever got fed up with whichever IRC channel first starting their own channel with blackjack and hookers...uh...image attachments and emojis...in their current favourite app. The Freenode/Libera debacle dented what was left, and now it's a pretty sad closed, Balkanized state of things.

I still think they'd get more value out of slinging you guys a small-to-them wodge of cash to run a community homeserver than most other things they spend money on.

A single guy produced in a single year something more private and with a UI that doesn't suck: SimpleX.

This Matrix case in my opinion is either lack of talent or intentional. One should never discard the second option when considering how governments tend to interfer in such tools and Matrix is quite sus on the funding side.

In 5 years we've seen little to no remarkable progress. I'm not recommending this platform any further to anyone, other options have delivered what this one had been promissing for years. Time to move on.

Absolutely intentional. Various members of the Element community had been fighting tooth and nail for better emote support, and many implementations have been developed and tested, and even for the ones that followed the Matrix-backed MSCs and passed the necessary tests every single one was outright denied and more recently told that Element makes major money off of government interests so why listen to the desires of the people, even if they do all the work necessary for free anyway?

we’ve had to prioritise keeping the lights on by building stuff we can sell rather than merging custom emoji PRs. it’s a “please put on your own mask before helping others” kind-of thing.

thanks for understanding…

Enough said when the priority is to please governments that throw money to you rather than the open source community submitting new features.

As I've said before: won't be using your platform nor recommend it.

There is zero logical reason you cannot do both, especially as a lab (which are all minimal value adds and have been broken for years). This has been open for 8 years. And there have been many people willing to implement it for free, who have gone out of their way to work around the painful busywork involved, where they would selflessly rework it as needed to fit within the MSC once the SCT fully approved one.

Are you telling me that with the multi-millions of dollars you get from law enforcement, you cannot delegate a manager to, as a minor part time duty, oversee the free work given to you? Especially when the various Element apps have been in an effective maintenance mode for at minimum the last year? This sounds like either Element is run very poorly and despite the massive funds rolling in can barely maintain themselves, or there is a distinct distain for external work that does not generate immediate revenue for the company.

Trust me, I understand full well what you’re saying. You’re maximizing profits with no care for the “freeloaders”. That’s fine, you can do that, but don’t act like I have to care.

> Are you telling me that with the multi-millions of dollars you get from law enforcement, you cannot delegate a manager to, as a minor part time duty, oversee the free work given to you?

Correct. We are not profitable, and frantically trying to get sustainable by focusing on things which generate money so we can keep paying our salaries, rather than taking on maintenance of new “free” contributed features when we’re still focused on the core. The reason we don’t have more $ is because we gave away everything as Apache licensed FOSS, and turned out most people were happy to use that gratis rather than paying for anything. The most likely manager to oversee custom emoji was laid off last year due to lack of $.

Fwiw, we make almost no money from law enforcement.

> there is a distinct distain for external work that does not generate immediate revenue for the company.

No. We really appreciate the various custom emoji PRs, and I personally feel awful they are stuck. At this point the most likely way to get them merged is if i do so myself.

> You’re maximizing profits with no care for the “freeloaders”.

No. We are not profitable. We are trying to stop losing money, so we might actually be sustainable.

If you don't mind my asking, what are the features that you're working on to become profitable?

I know custom emojis sound dumb, but they are basically the differentiation factor for how Discord gets their billions. People almost literally pay hundreds of dollars for Nitro just to get their emojis/reactions. Other than bigger uploads, that's all the lower Nitro tier does.

Some people just laugh in my digital face when I suggest Matrix, because they will never, ever, countenance losing their emojis. I don't know why they care that much, but they absolutely do.

It feels a bit like trying to sell a car without Bluetooth. You might think it's a trivial frill and a distraction from the best engine ever, but the interest will be lukewarm at the very best. I bought a car without Bluetooth but then I fitted my own adapter. Even that isn't possible here.

So we do care about custom emoji, and they are obviously critical for folks looking for an encrypted Discord alternative.

However, right now we're not focusing on building an encrypted Discord alternative but instead a self-hosted WhatsApp (or Teams) replacement for governments: https://element.io/sectors, on the basis that they are the ones paying. Sure, we could have gone after Discord ~5 years ago and launched our own Nitro equivalent, and perhaps we should have. But instead we observed that governments REALLY want to run their own encrypted interoperable comms systems, and we thought that having Matrix used as the backbone for public sector communication would be a good way to prove and fund it sustainably. Ideally we could then use the public sector as a launchpad into other areas - a bit like how email & the web and even the internet spread from DARPA / NSFNet / academic etc to the rest of the world. After all, what better endorsement for Matrix than someone like NATO using it for comms?

As a result, custom emoji are stuck in the middle of the todo list still.

Some of the other features that we've worked on instead have been:

* Making encryption stable. As hilarious as https://www.reddit.com/r/elementchat/comments/1evz3kk/unable... is.

* Make encryption secure - i.e. migrating from the old C/C++ libolm implementation to the rust vodozemac implementation.

* Instant login/sync/launch - i.e. an entirely new sync mechanism.

* Rather than developing 4 different client stacks (js-sdk, ios-sdk, android-sdk and rust-sdk), converge on a single one: matrix-rust-sdk, and make it excellent.

* Rework the core UX to make encryption invisible (rather than full of confusing unactionable warnings and verification nags etc).

* Native Matrix-encrypted scalable voip/video calling.

* Migrating to OpenID Connect for auth, so getting 2FA/MFA etc

* Public sector enterprise features: antivirus, regulatory compliance, secure border gateways, cross-domain gateways, active directory sync, SCIM sync, kubernetes operators, etc. etc.

Now, the plan is to use the govtech business to get back to funding mainstream Matrix uptake. But first we need to be able to fund ourselves to work on it.

I see your point, and it sounds like an invidious and existential position to be in and you have my sympathy to be fighting uphill against legacy like that.

Honestly though, I would contest the logic here:

> bit like how email & the web and even the internet spread from DARPA / NSFNet / academic etc to the rest of the world.

It spread because it was useful and revolutionary, not because DARPA specifically used it. Yes there were network effects, but the network effect overlap today between "NATO" and "a friend group hangout" is pretty minimal.

> what better endorsement for Matrix than someone like NATO using it for comms?

Honestly, if all I knew was NATO funded and used it, I'd assume it was enterprise-grade cost-plus shitware 15 years behind the curve, and with zero organisational interest, if not outright hostility, to it being used by anyone without a governmental chequebook and service contract in hand, and steer well clear.

It's OK to write software for NATO and governments for the foreseeable future, but the website still says "communicate with friends, family, communities and co-workers", so you can see why people might think it's still targeted at them and then wonder why it doesn't even provide the baseline of human-interest features people have been getting from other platforms for about a decade.

Not that it helps pays the bills to court Brian Everyman and his Warhammer group chat, I do realise that.

yeah. i'm not saying we've made the optimal choice here: for instance, we could have focused on growing mainstream usage at all cost without distractions of enterprise or govtech (similar to Bluesky), and assume that once we have enough users we'd be able to figure out monetisation somehow via a Discord Nitro style scheme.

However, we're at where we are now, and we're committed as to the current path as a way to get sustainable and then go back to supporting mainstream users (including Brian and his Warhammer clan). Perhaps a profitable govtech business can subsidise mainstream FOSS Matrix without having to do Nitro style value gates (which are tough to enforce anyway in a decentralised world).

> but the website still says "communicate with friends, family, communities and co-workers"

That was the messaging prior to early 2023, when we shifted gear to "get sustainable by focusing on govtech". Which is why the frontpage of the website currently doesn't say anything about friends/family/communities, sadly.

I just had to fish around to find out where you saw the old wording - i'm guessing it's in the footer for element.io/blog? ...which is a snafu due to the blog being Ghost and the website being Webflow.

All the best of luck. Genuinely, I hope it works out because I despise all the closed chat platforms and view the lack of a compelling FOSS alternative to be strange, frustrating and even embarrassing when someone uses it as an example of why FOSS just doesn't work for consumer software.

As for the wording, it's on the front page of https://matrix.org, just below the fold. Scroll down once and it's centre of the page.

https://imgur.com/a/jonz89P

The fold below that is "A cozy, safe, supercharged place for your community" and the image says "Kayak club".

Which, yes, is Matrix not Element, but it recommends Element specifically in the click through.

Oh! Well, yes, Matrix itself would love to be a cosy safe supercharged place for your community (even if i’m not sure a protocol should describe itself like that tbh). Some clients like Cinny or FluffyChat are close to that. Element will also get there eventually.

In terms of why consumer FOSS software often sucks:

* Good UX requires top down product discipline: cathedral model, not bazaar.

* Product folks are less likely to contribute to FOSS, especially in their spare time

* Therefore they need to do it as their dayjob.

* Running a sustainable FOSS company is hard.

> even if i’m not sure a protocol should describe itself like that tbh

Aren't you the matrix.org project lead though? (if not, maybe your bio needs an update).

yup. the problem on the matrix.org website is a tradeoff between a very dry “this is a protocol”, like w3c.org - versus trying to give some more accessible use cases for people who expect to find an instant messaging network. the current wording oversteers.

From the conversation it seems Matrix just grew bloated, when I look at what NOSTR is developing and the speed at which crutial features are delivered then it is quite a world of difference.

Those governments might be paying your bills for now, but you've lost the support from the open source community on the way to get there and soon be forgotten by everyone. I just hope one day we won't have the sad news of discovering that Matrix injected backdoors from the Israeli government to receive funding.

Nevertheless, I wish you all the best.

Thanks for the tipoff to look at 0xchat - it does remind me of where Matrix was about 8 years ago (in terms of maturity, speed of growth, features, etc). Good luck to them.

In terms of Matrix having lost the support from the open source community because Element hasn't implemented custom emoji yet... time will tell. In the end I suspect the open source community would be even more upset if Element had run out of money and exploded (although you never know; haters gonna hate :)

As someone who's (sadly) moving away from matrix due to the state of clients and running out of patience for Element X (it's been... What? Two years?) I have to say SimpleX and/or XMPP are where I am looking.

we literally released Element X last week… https://element.io/blog/we-have-lift-off-element-x-call-and-... :/

In spite of my earlier comment, I do think it is worthwhile to stick around a little longer to see how it goes. As Arathorn mentioned, the latest ElementX release just came out and they are saying it is production ready. I got the update yesterday (I was using it in beta before) and I did notice some of my rooms syncing faster in the ui. Once SchildiNext rebases I am hoping it will be something I could finally recommend to people, at least if voice/video aren't needed. If voice/video is a requirement for you, then I could totally understand going to discord, although I am hoping that with the native matrix calls it could change that once the ux is equivalent.

SimpleX is OK as direct replacement to Telegram, very similar except you are not able to write the comfy bots (yet) over there. On the plus side, no need to sign up with a telephone number either.

If you are willing to try out new things other than XMPP, I'd recommend looking at the NOSTR protocol and more specifically at the 0xchat client. They provide private message with E2EE but the biggest advantage IMHO is that you get connected to a huge variety of other services and people using the same protocol.

I find that better than building the connections on what are essentially closed gardens or, at best, isolated islands. Over there exist hundreds of servers (relays) run by volunteers where new features are proposed by users and actually implemented (success or failure depends truly on themselves).

Other good features being delivered on NOSTR are for example the anonymous IPFS (blossom files) where you can host complete static sites across the relays. There is truly plenty to discover there and to build, feels like the 90s and has been fun.

I just tried 0xchat. It's full of useless crypto shit, missing translation errors, their website is down and their "Oxchat Open Group" is basically dead.

Not a great first impression.

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