Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dingnuts 487 days ago
yes and XMPP is actually a messaging protocol. Matrix is an eventually consistent database with a crappy messaging app implemented on top, and because of the insane architecture they are justifying decisions like message ordering that is non-deterministic[0] -- for multi user chat!

What could possibly go wrong if users in a multi user chat see messages in different orders? This decision is a perfect example of how smart systems engineers can be so completely divorced from the real problem (human communication) that they make completely asinine choices justified by implementation details no user cares about.

Matrix needs to die so it can stop sucking the air out of this space. The funding problems are also completely predictable but that's an opinion for another time.

0 https://artificialworlds.net/blog/2024/12/04/message-order-i...

2 comments

Even the E2EE implementation is garbage. To this day fifty percent of the conversation in every E2EE group chat I'm in is "Hey XYZ I can't see your messages because they fail to decrypt" because they still have bugs in how clients distribute their keys to other clients. Imagine the state of a chat platform literally failing at chat.

Or look at how until a few months ago, the media store of every homeserver served media on the internet without any authentication. Someone just had to post CP in a popular room and they'd get hundreds of servers rehosting it for free. (Recently they finally added the ability to require authentication for the media store, although they didn't add support for it to their web client, only their new Android one.)

> (Recently they finally added the ability to require authentication for the media store, although they didn't add support for it to their web client, only their new Android one.)

This is not true. If it were true, it would imply you can't view any newly uploaded media from the web client. Here is the web implementation of MSC3916: https://github.com/element-hq/element-web/pull/27326

Yeah, similar but different path for bluesky, sometimes we don't really need a prefect technical solution, just something works for average user.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43105028