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.
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 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!!!
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.
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).
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.
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. :/
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
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 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.