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by Gigachad 1615 days ago
I was impressed at how easy it is to work with the matrix protocol. While playing around I was doing it all interactively in bash using curl. Want to read the latest messages? Curl the sync url. Want to send a new message? Post a small json object.

It’s actually easier to use by hand than IRC which requires holding an open connection and quickly responding to pings.

It becomes a little harder when end to end encryption is on but you just import the library they supply for almost every language and then e2e becomes transparent.
3 comments
jeroenhd 1614 days ago
I've tried to set up some Matrix projects. The Client-Server API is easy to work with, but as soon as encryption is involved, things start getting messy. Many libraries have a hard time working right with E2EE enabled, because suddenly you need to keep track of all manner of things that aren't always documented well.

I tried to hack E2EE in by using Pantalaimon [0] but running that on a server with the necessary management capabilities is very tricky and doesn't do cross signing, so I've come to the conclusion that it's effectively useless for my use cases.

Every now and then I check back on the current state of E2EE in libraries and it does seem to be improving. Hopefully the entire process becomes easier next time I get the time to work on my proof of concept code.

[0]: https://github.com/matrix-org/pantalaimon

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nayuki 1614 days ago
> I was impressed at how easy it is to work with the matrix protocol

I think you were interacting with Synapse, the Matrix homeserver implementation, which is why you had an easy time. But I can't imagine the work done by Synapse to sync up with other servers is easy - and that's what I would consider the real protocol.

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Gigachad 1614 days ago
There are two protocols. The Server-Server protocol, and the Client-Server protocol. Both are "real". I was using the Client-Server protocol which synapse implements but other servers would implement exactly the same HTTP protocol.
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justaj 1614 days ago
Though, ironically, as per your example, there is no library for it in Bash as far as I know.
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