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Comment by sparky_ | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, but it leaves me wondering - why ActivityPub, which IIRC is the Mastodon/Lemmy protocol, rather than, say, Matrix? Wouldn't a protocol designed for private messaging generally be preferable?

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Matrix's decentralised rooms cause tons of problems in practice.

Could you name 1gram of the problems?

I use an account on a matrix server other than the default matrix.org. My password manager won't fill it in so I have to type this server into the login form manually every time I login.

"waiting to receive message" and it never gets received

you really shouldn't be getting "unable to decrypt" or "waiting to receive message" problems in Matrix since ~Sept 2024. The only scenario is if you have logged out of all your devices (so the sender has no way to encrypt for you), or if network federation is so broken that messages are flowing indirectly by other servers.

"shouldn't" is secondary to what actually happens in the real world.

it still happens occasionally but i think its mostly something client side as sending a few more messages usually resolves it, thats still annoyin tho

but yeah i agree this should have been Matrix i see no reason for it not to be, this is just causing unnecessary fragmentation

fwiw, i'm sure y4my4my4m has good reasons for not using Matrix (beyond unable-to-decrypt memes) - i'd be genuinely interested to know what they are. For instance, i'm wondering if this is more about wanting to avoid being constrained by using an open standard, and instead being able to freestyle rapidly on top of activitypub? After all, it's much easier to go fast if you don't have to interop with anything else. Or consciously wanting to simplify the E2EE? Or having had a bad experience with Matrix server performance/complexity in the past?

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