[Arathorn]

Sorry, my point was perhaps a bit mangled.

If you want to send someone a message in Matrix it's indeed a trivial HTTP PUT; something like:

curl -XPOST -d '{"msgtype":"m.text", "body":"hello"}' 'https://example.com/_matrix/client/api/r0/rooms/!CvcvRuDYDzT...

However, what's happening under the hood is that you're not saying "Hi Bob, here's a message from Alice" - instead, you're saying "Hi everyone, I've added a message to the history of this room. Please can everyone sync their copy of the room with mine?". In other words, it's talking about the way the federation (server<->server) protocol is architected.

There literally isn't a way in the federation protocol to say "please send a message from Alice to Bob"; instead the way you do it is to say "create a room and invite Bob to it (if you don't have one already); add a message to the room's history, and once the history has synchronised with Bob's server he'll have a copy of the message too".

[Promarged]

So if I understand it correctly the client-to-server API is simple but servers internally build a Git-like structure? Interesting design, I think I'll read the specs for how history is stored.

[Arathorn]

Precisely. Matrix is a shameless rip-off of Git, but applied to realtime messaging.

[e12e]

Seems we now just have to wait for the next generation that's a rip-off of piul[1] rather than git, and we'll be all set!

On a more serious note, this seems to be a trend; to model chat as a converging set of edits. From an architectural pov it sounds similar to Google wave and lotus notes.

[1] https://jneem.github.io/merging/