[twentydollars]

A lot of Linux-y people, including myself, reject Matrix. It's not the solution it claims to be.

I could write a list of criticisms of Matrix's software products, organization, and track record, but the main problem is that we want an ip-native comms tool that's /actually/ decentralized.

Matrix is Open Source, federated, self-hosted Slack (plus voice calls). That's great, but that leaves you needing to trust a homeserver admin or host your own homeserver. Putting aside that there STILL isn't a finished homeserver implementation, you'll have to rely on a third party no matter what. Either it's hacker Joe (the admin of your homeserver), or the server hosting company that hosts your homeserver, or the DNS registrar who legally has to have your real identity...

It may be theoretically possible to host a homeserver without a domain name, but you'd still need to register your real name with an ISP to get a static IP.

Freedom from this kind of control should be baked into the software. Plenty of teams have tried it (retroshare, Scuttlebutt, etc.) but unfortunately none of them are quite there yet.

[m52go]

How is Matrix not the solution it claims to be? What's not /actually/ decentralized about it?

Keep in mind software of this kind doesn't just [poof] appear out of nowhere...it's typically built incrementally on meager budgets.

What you seem to want is a peer-to-peer solution, which at this point in time is not something Matrix has built or claims to have built.

[schmorptron]

it is something they're currently actively working on building!

[decentralisedog]

Yep, it exists as https://p2p.riot.im/! The team is making tons of progress including the new pinecone project. It regularly gets talked about in https://matrix.org/blog/posts if you want to keep up to date.

[twentydollars]

It's not decentralized because it's federated, client-server chat software. This is more decentralized than Discord or what-have-you, but it requires reliance on multiple centralized internet services and authorities, as I outlined.

I'm well aware that FOSS projects tend to be underfunded. Matrix is an outlier with some large grants fueling the project and opaque organizational structure.

> What you seem to want is a peer-to-peer solution, which at this point in time is not something Matrix has built or claims to have built.

Peer-to-peer is not absolutely necessary (it can be both). There's nothing wrong with routing message through a network, but e2ee is absolutely necessary, and it took until May this year for Matrix to enable that feature by default. Most importantly, in Matrix, your identity is associated with and controlled by a homeserver. It's under someone else's control. That's not good... Your identity should be under your control. We've known how to do this with asymmetric encryption for at least a couple of decades.

[Arathorn]

Wow, there's some spectacular FUD going on here. "Opaque organisational structure"? Have you even read https://matrix.org/foundation, which I personally spent months trying to make as transparent as possible?

> What you seem to want is a peer-to-peer solution, which at this point in time is not something Matrix has built or claims to have built.

Except we have: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/02/introducing-p-2-p-matrix. We have people working on it full time, and hopefully going to evolve into hybrid P2P/Client-Server eventually as per that blog post.

Meanwhile, portable identities are also in active development (as part of P2P), as per https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/neilalexander/....

> e2ee is absolutely necessary, and it took until May this year for Matrix to enable that feature by default

Sorry, you're complaining that we... did the thing you want us to do? But it took longer than you wanted? My heart bleeds.

[aiilns]

Don't let the negatity and accusations here bring you down. I have great faith in what you're doing and greatly anticipate what is to come. I also really liked the post on backdoors and the EU proposal.

I've managed to talk 6 people into making an account (matrix.org) and using element. None of them are linux-y or tech-y and they've mostly managed fine (apart from help with setting up e2ee, exporting keys etc which I helped with).

Is the app dead easy to use (like WhatsApp, Viber, Signal)? No it isn't but it's understandable.

[moksha256]

> Except we have: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/02/introducing-p-2-p-matrix. We have people working on it full time, and hopefully going to evolve into hybrid P2P/Client-Server eventually as per that blog post.

Gosh sorry I remember seeing that post, but for some reason I thought it was more of a concept without anything shipped yet. I should do a better job of reading.

Exciting!!

[twentydollars]

> Sorry, you're complaining that we... did the thing you want us to do? But it took longer than you wanted? My heart bleeds.

Wasn't complaining. I don't use Matrix.

> Meanwhile, portable identities are also in active development (as part of P2P),

Portable identities should be how it works by default. Nobody should be asked to sign up with a server and share their email address and metadata with it.

[andrewshadura]

You don't need an email address to sign up.

[zanny]

I am an open source fanatic but I also acknowledge there is no tenable way to make fully decentralized communications palatable to the masses. Federation is a necessary feature because its way more important to draw people away from the status quo of totally proprietary walled gardens farming all your communications for data with no privacy than it is to march for some Tox based holier than thou crusade against having to trust someone to run a server to provide a service.

[Arathorn]

I have no idea why you think that Synapse isn't finished. It exited beta last summer, and is a pretty decent and robust server these days. The amount of weird Synapse bugs we have to debug has dropped by 10x over the last year, and we even fixed its scalability too: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapses-sca....

[twentydollars]

Ah, my bad. The REFERENCE implementation, written in Python, which was supposed to be supplanted by a faster, better implementation years ago, now has 10x less bugs.

[FreeTrade]

Interested to hear your thoughts on Member with its self-sovereign identity, piggy backing on BCH's P2P network. Its not real time chat, but with some interface changes, it could be.

member.cash