The gardens you're tearing down didn't have especially thick walls. But yes. In any case, it's your project. You can name it what you like, no matter what I think.
Going out of beta we had to decide on something which was really carrying what the app is, we loved Vector but it has always been a code-name and a nice pun on Matrix :)
Riot is more representative of what the app can do and its ambitions! Break the barriers between apps, give the control back to the user to choose their client, if they want to encrypt, host themselves, tune the notifs, the fact it's open, built on the open ecosystem of Matrix and thus benefiting of all the integrations and bridges built for Matrix.... Sounds pretty revolutionary to me ;)
Worth noting that only the name changed: the app and the team and the openness are still the same (modulo new features)!
Yeah, I felt the matrix link made more sense. And yeah, I mean, Riot kind of works, but you have to think about it. The connection is pretty obvious with vector.
But at the end of the day, it's just a name, so I'm not too upset about it.
Less of a link to Matrix, which many of the initial adopters probably would get.
it doesn't feel to me as a stronger brand later (both are fairly random words for many people if you don't look at an explanation)
violent connotation (CNN headline: "protesters organised using the encrypted Riot app").
potential confusion in tech-y circles with Riot the gaming company (which could totally be in the market to offer a messenger, given that they run one of the biggest online games), for Vector I didn't have any other project in mind.
In the end it's just a name and it won't make or break the app for me, but I personally don't see the benefit of the new one.
It's important on HN that titles reflect only the content of the submission, and since the homepage doesn't reference Vector, the title can't. We've just updated the link to the blog post from the homepage, which informs us of the rebranding.
Riot, and Matrix in general, were designed to beat that: It's designed to inter-operate with existing chat protocols as much as possible, so that this isn't a problem, but also to provide things that those protocols can't.
Absolutely; as much as the Matrix people claim they're not doing that by "interoperating with other protocols" they don't seem to understand that it's exactly what they're doing. The existing standards (XMPP) already interop in exactly the same way (gateways/transports), so making another protocol instead of improving the gateway / transport story on an existing one is just silly.
Mmm... I wouldn't quite call it silly. The protocol does support better stuff than XMPP. We're talking about single view notifications across multiple clients and other goodies sometimes implemented by XMPP plugins. And quite frankly from what I've heard the plugins are a pain. I do think a fresh break is what's needed.
I don't disagree that XMPP has problems, like anything, but having multiple federated protocols defeats part of the purpose of federation. Also, as far as I can tell, Matrix just carried over most of the same problems because they don't have 20 years of fixing edge cases and making sure things are scalable and easy. I'm not sure why plugins would be a pain; I'm sure making recommendations could be done better, but otherwise they're no more difficult to implement than the same things in the Matrix core spec. A fresh break is most cretainly not what's needed; we just need people to volunteer their time and effort and help make things better, not make up new protocols to compete with the old ones and make the messaging ecosystem more fragmented than it already is.
As parent said, XMPP covers all of these cases with plugins. The FAQ you link says, over and over again, "the base setup doesn't cover these features, but plugins do," and doesn't explain away writing improved plugins or XMPP spec extensions. All I see is "buttt it'ss haaaaarrdddd".
> Rather than fighting over which open interoperable communication standard works the best, we should just collaborate and bridge everything together.
Matrix actually has a good point about the spec extensions though: if your spec is that minimal, nobody is going to be able to agree on what feature set to support. As a Schemer, I can attest to that.
>Absolutely dripping with irony.
As is your comment. Matrix made a different set of design tradeoffs, and is a legitimate protocol in its own right. And yet every time it pops up on HN, people complain about how we should all just use XMPP.
Screw that. XMPP isn't perfect, and there is room for a chat protocol that solves these problems in a different way.
> Matrix actually has a good point about the spec extensions though: if your spec is that minimal, nobody is going to be able to agree on what feature set to support.
If that were true, nobody would agree on which Matrix features to support either. What difference would it make if Matrix just-so-happened to be defined as "XMPP, plus the following extensions..."?
> As a Schemer, I can attest to that.
It's one thing to say "the Scheme spec is too minimal; I'm going to make Racket a hard dependency", it's quite another to say "the Scheme spec is too minimal; I'm going to invent my own Python derivative"
Actually, that's pretty much what Racket did: Racket isn't a superset of Scheme, any more than Clojure is a superset of Common Lisp.
>If that were true, nobody would agree on which Matrix features to support either. What difference would it make if Matrix just-so-happened to be defined as "XMPP, plus the following extensions..."?
because some of Matrix's design decisions are fundamentally different from those of XMPP. also, the reason why everybody agrees about Matrix features is that they have no choice: there's a far larger base standard than there is for XMPP.
The XEP which allows all clients that a user has open to actually receive messages has not even been accepted yet. Last Call was supposed to finish on 2015-08-28 - 11 years after the advent of XMPP - and the document hasn't been updated since. Many clients don't support it, including Pidgin, and at least the Prosody.IM server needs a "community module" to enable support for it.
XMPP is a pretty terrible user experience, tbh, and its developer experience isn't a whole lot better.
I get the 'different philosophy' part, but I don't understand why their list of 'problems with XMPP' includes things like 'second-class citizen', since Matrix itself is a second-class citizen compared to XMPP.
They might as well list 'Can't talk via Skype' as a problem with XMPP, since it's just as true and Matrix is just as incapable of solving it.
As for 'requires plugins/extensions', if you think that's a problem then there's an easy fix: define a new protocol as "XMPP + the following extensions...". That requires some effort, e.g. to get servers and clients to support this new protocol, but unlike a "clean break" it wouldn't require much technical or social work.
I especially enjoyed the "no open source implementation exists" reasoning; no open source implementation of Matrix used to exist, but that didn't stop the developers ;)
Matrix is group-chat-first ("direct messages", or one-to-one messages, are actually just implemented as an unnamed group with two people in it), while XMPP's group chat support is in a rather unwieldy extension (as with a lot of XMPP's functionality).
Matrix also builds on existing standards with decent libraries available for things like voice/video chat, and is web- and mobile-first. There's integration of arbitrary client-defined "push services" built into the protocol, which Riot uses to push events from a Matrix server through Google and Apple's cloud device messaging services to save battery, all without the Matrix server having to know the details of how those push systems work. Also, I can do web-based single sign-on through my CAS server, and all the variations of Riot handle it perfectly.
Leveraging http for file transfer - via, say, web apps - avoids "civilian" (non-techie) users from having to install yet another tool (like ftp client)...though I do agree that browsers shouldn't replace every other tool under the sun. ;-)
As someone who appreciates the design goals of both but is a user of neither Matrix nor XMPP for practical reasons (I don't know anyone who is), seeing users of both of these small networks sighing at each other leaves me nonplussed.
An end-to-end solution for interop between the two ought to be insanely high on the priority list. By this I mean it should be braindead obvious if I want to try one of them how to chat with a user of the other. Obviously this is bigger than just the protocol but so what, it's the problem that needs to be solved.
I can't even imagine how working together would not be top of everyone's mind in this space, since chat is all about network effects. The incentives to cooperate are huge.
It's based on the Matrix protocol, which you may have heard of. So, yes, it bears more than a little resemblance to Wave by way of IRC, and was built to fix IRC's problems (lack of identity, poor netsplit tolerance, weak extension support, etc.), and also provide strong capabilities for bridging between protocols, so it doesn't wind up in an xkcd.com/927 type scenario.
XMPP is radically different from IRC. And I don't know about you, but I don't see a lot those extensions in use on actually servers (freenode, efnet, quakenet, etc).
This said to me "Riot is just a messaging app" and I bounced. I'd recommend changing that tagline to indicate briefly why a user might use Riot instead of Slack or Whatsapp
Riot is based on Matrix. If you scrolled down, it would tell you that it's got strong crypto, you can run your own servers, it's got really good cross-protocol bridges, and a ton of other stuff. And it's totally free, save the cost of running your own server if you choose to do so.
With that you mean "a worse IRC bridge than Slack"? Every user and dev of IRC clients and servers I’ve talked to in the past weeks has only complained about Matrix’ bridge.
The main difference is that Matrix acts effectively as a bouncer, bouncing all the different clients into IRC, rather than a bridge - unlike Slack's bridge which is just a single bot.
We're aware that we haven't enabled membership list syncing into Matrix yet from IRC (due to performance issues on synapse), but otherwise it should be pretty good.
The most complaints are about not working private messages to Matrix users (because the bridge doesn’t join people), about the bridge de-syncing from IRC – and you suddenly having every matrix user thrice in the channel, and similar issues.
General stability, ability to chat with Matrix users as if they were there natively, etc.
I've been using the Freenode-to-Matrix-bridged Freenode IRC rooms for around a month now and am pretty happy, besides the occasional glitch due to Matrix and its bridges still being in beta.
What's this trend of websites making it hard to find screenshots of their app off the bat? Should I really have to sign up just to see how your interface functions/flows?
Also, the link to view the main site is tiny and easily forgettable. I think the site could benefit from a stronger CTA that directs you to what I should do.
I know this is every Hacker News comment ever, but I genuinely don't have a good idea of what the app is like after using the site and watching the video. :/
I have to say, if I was ever launching a product, I'd never even put a link for my product here. Many people in this thread are acting like overgrown toddlers.
Also, why is that some poor girl or guy can't use HN to link to a product without ten million of these:
"This is neat, but have you heard of my best friends app that does this already!?? links to Github"
Yes, but for every comment poking fun at or linking to some lame repo, there are how many of us who just check it out? The visibility on HN is pretty good. If I had a product like this I'd shout it out here. Sure there are some comments to ignore, but the exposure is good and someone will have a good question, somewhere. I hope.
I started playing around with vector (both web client and mobile app) a couple of months ago, and really like it. I haven't tried the bridge stuff just yet, but am excited to try, especially now that it should be easier. I even installed my own personal server (synapse) for my family - again to kick the tires and test stuff out. Now that you've re-branded and changed the name, you should start thinking of neat taglines...here are few (admittedly silly ones) to get started:
- Riot: Come for the decentralized chat, stay for the community.
- Riot like its a true democracy.
- Riot: Think outside the box, act outside the norm, and chat outside the silos.
- Riot: Chat disruption for the matrix.
Once again, kudos to the Riot (fka Vector) team for this launch/re-launch!!!
Note that there is a very popular game called League of Legends (played by millions) and the company behind it is called Riot. Some people might confuse your brand with their name.
Did they search for "Riot chat" first? There's another software company named Riot that currently dominates results there despite chat being auxiliary in their products. Hopefully they can shift that in their favor.
It seems like an improvement over "Vector", which is essentially un-googleable, but seriously, this trend in giving projects single common english word names is really annoying.
That is still going to be an impossible cliff to climb, they could just be washed out of search results from topical events of actual riots. Hopefully there is a plan attached to this, but it is hard to say because Vector was no better a name to start with (also gets washed out by programming documentation and cutlery sellers).
Vector (+Matrix) is kinda like self-hosted slack/discord with proper history sync across all your devices, file uploads, nice UI, etc.
It's really good. I recommended it to 7 people and every single one liked it, even got 5 of them to set up their own federated homeservers. We're thinking about moving a ~60-people skype group there as well.
Only issue I had is Synapse hogging the CPU and getting laggy with a large room (#matrix:matrix.org with its 4 thousand members). I'm using scaleway's 3 EUR/month Starter VC1S server for Synapse though. Hopefully it will get even better with time.
Or you could just use IRC with quassel + quassel-webserver, and get basically all of the same, but with an actual open protocol. Which actually has support.
Actually matrix - the protocol upon which vector and now riot depend - is an open protocol; reference here: http://matrix.org/docs/spec/
And then of course, there are the matrix bridges to IRC, etc. Admittedly although i have been using vector clients AND have installed my own personal synapse server, i have no experience using/supporting the various matrix bridges, so can't speak to their quality.
That being said, if you've ever been curious about re-doing some aspects of IRC for the better, you might want to take a look at matrix (the protocol), and suggest improvements; we all stand to benefit from your (and the community's) suggestions.
> you might want to take a look at matrix (the protocol), and suggest improvements; we all stand to benefit from your (and the community's) suggestions.
My suggestion: stop the project, burn the code.
Seriously, by splitting up the dev effort between yet one more project, the open source community ends up with even more competing standards.
You don’t even believe yourself you’ll be able to actually replace the ecosystem of IRC and so on yourself, so there will always be competing standards, and Matrix and IRC will never bridge natively.
IRC, on the other hand, will reach feature parity with Matrix over time, which would be faster if you’d instead work on IRC.
For IRC, currently only 3 useful clients exist where the user has the same features as if they’d run on Matrix.
In the end, we’ll have to build hacky bridges the other way around, too, and end up with more developer time spent on interoperation than useful features, and people will continue using Slack.
So, my suggestion: Just give up, and help improve things.
Rewriting everything just creates a worse result for everyone.
EDIT: I can’t answer right now (you are submitting too fast – because of the downvotes, I assume), so I’ll answer inline:
> Regarding "Who is working on bouncers in IRC networks, push notifications, etc?"
> Well, the IRCv3 Working Group is. How to ask for previous logs, how to handle push notifications in the future, how to integrate seemless bouncers is what they’re doing, and some networks already have seemless bouncers integrated (most notably Snoonet).
> Regarding "Forking doesn’t fork the community"
> That is true for file formats, but not true for chat systems. For a chat system to work, it needs critical mass. IRC still has that, Matrix doesn’t (otherwise Matrix wouldn’t even build a Matrix-to-IRC bridge).
> Trying to split the community will just make things worse there.
Occasionally you need to re-baseline or you risk getting mired fighting backwards compatibility and the limitations of the original design. Just like Git "rewrote" Subversion. Or clang "rewrote" gcc. Or PNG "rewrote" GIF.
It's incredibly shortsighted to assume that attempts to create new projects that overlap with old ones are are splitting dev effort and harm overall progress.
So who's working on federation and single identity across IRC networks? Who's working on a protocol which would let me ask other users for their chat logs from before I joined a channel? Who's working on WebRTC signalling over IRC? When will bouncers be built into IRC servers so I don't have to run my own? When will IRC have a standardised HTTP protocol by which I can run whatever webclient, mobile client, or otherwise that I want? When will it support proprietary push services to keep mobile battery life up?
IRC has had 28 years to do any one of these things.
Matrix is not trying to split any community. If it were, it wouldn't have bridges to IRC, Slack, or any other chat system.
I'd like to see Freenode integrate a seamless bouncer. I suspect I won't in the next few years. Right now, Matrix provides one. Fancy that. (Also, I'm chatting across four different Matrix servers, with people in those rooms from many more, and have only ever had to manually connect to one server (my own) and have only had to create one account. IRC isn't working on fixing that.)
It’s not just about developer time, it’s also about the users.
The amount of users willing to use an open source chat system is limited.
If we want to profit from the same network effects that proprietary chat systems profit from, we need to get everyone into one system, which also scales to extreme scales, and, yes, allows content censoring on some level – but also allows anyone to open their own federated server with different censoring policies.
Adding more standards doesn’t help, unless they federate both ways.
(Although Matrix is the least problematic example there, Signal is far worse in those regards)
> Adding more standards doesn’t help, unless they federate both ways.
> (Although Matrix is the least problematic example there, Signal is far worse in those regards)
Not everyone in open source is out here to dethrone proprietary systems (although many of us have "enemies", my personal one ATM is Oracle, although with a smile, -I wouldn't sabotage them even if I could get away with it but I love to tell people about alternatives)
Some are just experimenting, some are building reputation, some are just out here to make the world a better place for everyone etc.
Telling people who produce nice useful stuff to "stop the project, burn the code" is, IMO, rude and harmful.
Edit: Let me add, - thanks a whole lot for working on opensource and on irc specifically. Many of us here love IRC and the reason why I downvoted one of your earlier comments is because we don't think anyone should be allowed to tell people what open source projects they should or should not start or contribute to.
The user I replied to asked me what I’d suggest to fix with Matrix, or change with it.
So I replied honestly.
I knew most wouldn’t like the answer, but it’s still what I’d do.
I also didn’t suggest to actually do it – just that that would be what I’d do, if it was my responsibility.
> some are just out here to make the world a better place for everyone etc.
and
> Not everyone in open source is out here to dethrone proprietary systems
Are the same, though.
It’s just that if we want to compete with products that have multiple-billion-dollar marketing budgets, have thousands of paid engineers working on perfectly planned timelines, etc, we really need to coordinate.
The "let’s go and everyone build their own" is good for hobby projects, but as soon as it comes to building something for users to actually use, you need quality control, coordinated branding and marketing, you need focus of development, you need people doing QA and support.
Also take a look at IRCCloud or Quassel or Weechat+GlowingBear to see what can be possible with IRC already today, if you use a modern bouncer. (Part of the work of IRCv3 is integrating that functionality again).
98 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadincluding http://riot.com/ - http://riot.io/ - http://riot.org/
Going out of beta we had to decide on something which was really carrying what the app is, we loved Vector but it has always been a code-name and a nice pun on Matrix :)
Riot is more representative of what the app can do and its ambitions! Break the barriers between apps, give the control back to the user to choose their client, if they want to encrypt, host themselves, tune the notifs, the fact it's open, built on the open ecosystem of Matrix and thus benefiting of all the integrations and bridges built for Matrix.... Sounds pretty revolutionary to me ;)
Worth noting that only the name changed: the app and the team and the openness are still the same (modulo new features)!
But at the end of the day, it's just a name, so I'm not too upset about it.
I don't get why you would rename Vector, feels like everyone recommending 'Vector' to friends and family has wasted their time.
it doesn't feel to me as a stronger brand later (both are fairly random words for many people if you don't look at an explanation)
violent connotation (CNN headline: "protesters organised using the encrypted Riot app").
potential confusion in tech-y circles with Riot the gaming company (which could totally be in the market to offer a messenger, given that they run one of the biggest online games), for Vector I didn't have any other project in mind.
In the end it's just a name and it won't make or break the app for me, but I personally don't see the benefit of the new one.
Have you considered revising it, or something?
The Matrix developers have responded to this, explaining how Matrix is different from XMPP, and why they chose to write their own protocol.
https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#what-is-the-differen...
As parent said, XMPP covers all of these cases with plugins. The FAQ you link says, over and over again, "the base setup doesn't cover these features, but plugins do," and doesn't explain away writing improved plugins or XMPP spec extensions. All I see is "buttt it'ss haaaaarrdddd".
> Rather than fighting over which open interoperable communication standard works the best, we should just collaborate and bridge everything together.
Absolutely dripping with irony.
Matrix actually has a good point about the spec extensions though: if your spec is that minimal, nobody is going to be able to agree on what feature set to support. As a Schemer, I can attest to that.
>Absolutely dripping with irony.
As is your comment. Matrix made a different set of design tradeoffs, and is a legitimate protocol in its own right. And yet every time it pops up on HN, people complain about how we should all just use XMPP.
Screw that. XMPP isn't perfect, and there is room for a chat protocol that solves these problems in a different way.
If that were true, nobody would agree on which Matrix features to support either. What difference would it make if Matrix just-so-happened to be defined as "XMPP, plus the following extensions..."?
> As a Schemer, I can attest to that.
It's one thing to say "the Scheme spec is too minimal; I'm going to make Racket a hard dependency", it's quite another to say "the Scheme spec is too minimal; I'm going to invent my own Python derivative"
>If that were true, nobody would agree on which Matrix features to support either. What difference would it make if Matrix just-so-happened to be defined as "XMPP, plus the following extensions..."?
because some of Matrix's design decisions are fundamentally different from those of XMPP. also, the reason why everybody agrees about Matrix features is that they have no choice: there's a far larger base standard than there is for XMPP.
XMPP is a pretty terrible user experience, tbh, and its developer experience isn't a whole lot better.
They might as well list 'Can't talk via Skype' as a problem with XMPP, since it's just as true and Matrix is just as incapable of solving it.
As for 'requires plugins/extensions', if you think that's a problem then there's an easy fix: define a new protocol as "XMPP + the following extensions...". That requires some effort, e.g. to get servers and clients to support this new protocol, but unlike a "clean break" it wouldn't require much technical or social work.
I especially enjoyed the "no open source implementation exists" reasoning; no open source implementation of Matrix used to exist, but that didn't stop the developers ;)
Matrix also builds on existing standards with decent libraries available for things like voice/video chat, and is web- and mobile-first. There's integration of arbitrary client-defined "push services" built into the protocol, which Riot uses to push events from a Matrix server through Google and Apple's cloud device messaging services to save battery, all without the Matrix server having to know the details of how those push systems work. Also, I can do web-based single sign-on through my CAS server, and all the variations of Riot handle it perfectly.
An end-to-end solution for interop between the two ought to be insanely high on the priority list. By this I mean it should be braindead obvious if I want to try one of them how to chat with a user of the other. Obviously this is bigger than just the protocol but so what, it's the problem that needs to be solved.
I can't even imagine how working together would not be top of everyone's mind in this space, since chat is all about network effects. The incentives to cooperate are huge.
- Hmm... sounds a lot like Apache (née Google) Wave
- Intro thingy has definite zombo.com vibe
(yes, I do realize that I'm getting old..)
On a more serious note, this could be really good concept if executed well. Time will tell, I hope for the best.
Which definitely doesn’t apply to IRC
> lack of identity
Which the CAP Account extension allows to provide
> strong capabilities for bridging between protocols
And a Matrix-IRC bridge that constantly breaks, doesn’t properly handle private messages, and which badly handles IRC extensions?
CAP Account is just that: an extension. It's not inherent to the protocol, and it shows.
And I didn't say the present bridges were perfect yet. The project is still a ways from completion.
IRC extensions are supported by over 90% of clients already, and provide exactly that.
In contrast to XMPP is IRC actually renewing itself in production.
http://IRCv3.net/
EDIT: I can’t answer you right now (you are submitting too fast), so here is my answer inline:
> I’ll show the list of extensions both supported by every modern client, and each of the networks you mentioned:
> freenode: sasl, account-notify, identify-msg, multi-prefix, extended-join
> efnet: multi-prefix
> quakenet: none
> Hackint: invite-notify, cap-notify, chghost, echo-message, userhost-in-names, account-notify, server-time, account-tag, multi-prefix, extended-join, away-notify, tls, sasl
> Snoonet: away-notify, sasl, account-notify, invite-notify, userhost-in-names, multi-prefix, extended-join
> Mozilla: sasl, userhost-in-names, multi-prefix
> EsperNet: away-notify, sasl, account-notify, multi-prefix, extended-join, tls
> Also, support for extensions by server: http://ircv3.net/software/servers.html
> And by client: http://ircv3.net/software/clients.html
> Any more questions?
This said to me "Riot is just a messaging app" and I bounced. I'd recommend changing that tagline to indicate briefly why a user might use Riot instead of Slack or Whatsapp
If you had just scrolled down a little bit more...
It could benefit from focusing on:
1. Why is this thing for me? 2. What is this thing and how does it address #1?
Both of those, if possible, should be answered in 1-3 short sentences, above the fold.
With that you mean "a worse IRC bridge than Slack"? Every user and dev of IRC clients and servers I’ve talked to in the past weeks has only complained about Matrix’ bridge.
The main difference is that Matrix acts effectively as a bouncer, bouncing all the different clients into IRC, rather than a bridge - unlike Slack's bridge which is just a single bot.
We're aware that we haven't enabled membership list syncing into Matrix yet from IRC (due to performance issues on synapse), but otherwise it should be pretty good.
More fact, less FUD please? :)
The most complaints are about not working private messages to Matrix users (because the bridge doesn’t join people), about the bridge de-syncing from IRC – and you suddenly having every matrix user thrice in the channel, and similar issues.
General stability, ability to chat with Matrix users as if they were there natively, etc.
Also, the link to view the main site is tiny and easily forgettable. I think the site could benefit from a stronger CTA that directs you to what I should do.
But no need to signup to play with it :) Full guest access available! Come and chat: https://riot.im/app/#/room/#riot:matrix.org
Also, why is that some poor girl or guy can't use HN to link to a product without ten million of these:
"This is neat, but have you heard of my best friends app that does this already!?? links to Github"
I started playing around with vector (both web client and mobile app) a couple of months ago, and really like it. I haven't tried the bridge stuff just yet, but am excited to try, especially now that it should be easier. I even installed my own personal server (synapse) for my family - again to kick the tires and test stuff out. Now that you've re-branded and changed the name, you should start thinking of neat taglines...here are few (admittedly silly ones) to get started:
Once again, kudos to the Riot (fka Vector) team for this launch/re-launch!!!Others are in development at http://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html#servers but they are all alpha at the moment.
It's really good. I recommended it to 7 people and every single one liked it, even got 5 of them to set up their own federated homeservers. We're thinking about moving a ~60-people skype group there as well.
Only issue I had is Synapse hogging the CPU and getting laggy with a large room (#matrix:matrix.org with its 4 thousand members). I'm using scaleway's 3 EUR/month Starter VC1S server for Synapse though. Hopefully it will get even better with time.
Thanks for the support :)
And then of course, there are the matrix bridges to IRC, etc. Admittedly although i have been using vector clients AND have installed my own personal synapse server, i have no experience using/supporting the various matrix bridges, so can't speak to their quality.
That being said, if you've ever been curious about re-doing some aspects of IRC for the better, you might want to take a look at matrix (the protocol), and suggest improvements; we all stand to benefit from your (and the community's) suggestions.
My suggestion: stop the project, burn the code.
Seriously, by splitting up the dev effort between yet one more project, the open source community ends up with even more competing standards.
You don’t even believe yourself you’ll be able to actually replace the ecosystem of IRC and so on yourself, so there will always be competing standards, and Matrix and IRC will never bridge natively.
IRC, on the other hand, will reach feature parity with Matrix over time, which would be faster if you’d instead work on IRC.
For IRC, currently only 3 useful clients exist where the user has the same features as if they’d run on Matrix.
In the end, we’ll have to build hacky bridges the other way around, too, and end up with more developer time spent on interoperation than useful features, and people will continue using Slack.
So, my suggestion: Just give up, and help improve things.
Rewriting everything just creates a worse result for everyone.
EDIT: I can’t answer right now (you are submitting too fast – because of the downvotes, I assume), so I’ll answer inline:
> Regarding "Who is working on bouncers in IRC networks, push notifications, etc?"
> Well, the IRCv3 Working Group is. How to ask for previous logs, how to handle push notifications in the future, how to integrate seemless bouncers is what they’re doing, and some networks already have seemless bouncers integrated (most notably Snoonet).
> Regarding "Forking doesn’t fork the community"
> That is true for file formats, but not true for chat systems. For a chat system to work, it needs critical mass. IRC still has that, Matrix doesn’t (otherwise Matrix wouldn’t even build a Matrix-to-IRC bridge).
> Trying to split the community will just make things worse there.
It's incredibly shortsighted to assume that attempts to create new projects that overlap with old ones are are splitting dev effort and harm overall progress.
IRC has had 28 years to do any one of these things.
I'd like to see Freenode integrate a seamless bouncer. I suspect I won't in the next few years. Right now, Matrix provides one. Fancy that. (Also, I'm chatting across four different Matrix servers, with people in those rooms from many more, and have only ever had to manually connect to one server (my own) and have only had to create one account. IRC isn't working on fixing that.)
> Seriously, by splitting up the dev effort between yet one more project, the open source community ends up with even more competing standards.
Oh come on: there is no lack of developer time, so many developers are rotting away in front of TVs.
There is however a lack of developer motivation to do open source projects.
If anyone wants to work on this instead of wasting their life in front of the tv, thumbs up from me.
+ as already has been pointed out, matrix seems to go way way beyond irc.
The amount of users willing to use an open source chat system is limited.
If we want to profit from the same network effects that proprietary chat systems profit from, we need to get everyone into one system, which also scales to extreme scales, and, yes, allows content censoring on some level – but also allows anyone to open their own federated server with different censoring policies.
Adding more standards doesn’t help, unless they federate both ways.
(Although Matrix is the least problematic example there, Signal is far worse in those regards)
> (Although Matrix is the least problematic example there, Signal is far worse in those regards)
Not everyone in open source is out here to dethrone proprietary systems (although many of us have "enemies", my personal one ATM is Oracle, although with a smile, -I wouldn't sabotage them even if I could get away with it but I love to tell people about alternatives)
Some are just experimenting, some are building reputation, some are just out here to make the world a better place for everyone etc.
Telling people who produce nice useful stuff to "stop the project, burn the code" is, IMO, rude and harmful.
Edit: Let me add, - thanks a whole lot for working on opensource and on irc specifically. Many of us here love IRC and the reason why I downvoted one of your earlier comments is because we don't think anyone should be allowed to tell people what open source projects they should or should not start or contribute to.
So I replied honestly.
I knew most wouldn’t like the answer, but it’s still what I’d do.
I also didn’t suggest to actually do it – just that that would be what I’d do, if it was my responsibility.
> some are just out here to make the world a better place for everyone etc.
and
> Not everyone in open source is out here to dethrone proprietary systems
Are the same, though.
It’s just that if we want to compete with products that have multiple-billion-dollar marketing budgets, have thousands of paid engineers working on perfectly planned timelines, etc, we really need to coordinate.
The "let’s go and everyone build their own" is good for hobby projects, but as soon as it comes to building something for users to actually use, you need quality control, coordinated branding and marketing, you need focus of development, you need people doing QA and support.
> So I replied honestly.
OK, I see I misunderstood your intentions.
I won't take all the blame for the misunderstanding though.
That said you managed to get me interested so if you don't mind:
Where should I start reading to read up on modern IRC?
And again: thanks a bunch for helping in maintaining an open-source project! Very much appreciated!
Also take a look at IRCCloud or Quassel or Weechat+GlowingBear to see what can be possible with IRC already today, if you use a modern bouncer. (Part of the work of IRCv3 is integrating that functionality again).
edit: ok it seems it's in BETA and only on the web app for now. Great guys, keep it going and thanks !