[Jnr]

At this point I just want them to die off completely so we could get something better. They have been unable to make real improvements that make using Matrix a nice experience. And their existence somehow inhibits other solutions from emerging in the OSS community chat space.

[Arathorn]

> And their existence somehow inhibits other solutions from emerging in the OSS community chat space.

How?

[mystraline]

People new to the system think that Matrix can work. So FLOSS devs spend time trying to lipstick the pig. Takes time away from other areas.

Matrix is completely busted, for the article's aforementioned reasons, and others.

My complaints is that ive seen child sexual assault imagery on your primary servers, hours later (and thousands of CSAM images) finally the user banned. And still does it cause some federated server they are connected to still allows them to be half-joined to a room.

The only safer way to federate is to disable image caching and preloading, and ideally defed from matrix.org.

And combined are the laughable moderation tools. I'm sure for some gov deployment, they're not going to spread child sex images. But on the public internet, even basic tooling is a joke.

I recommend all Matrix admins to discontinue. Its frankly too legally dangerous to run it, given all the various failure modes and E2EE failures.

Its 1 size doesnt fit at all. And it being gone would allow others to potentially succeed.

[jorvi]

> People new to the system think that Matrix can work. So FLOSS devs spend time trying to lipstick the pig. Takes time away from other areas.

What I don't understand is how multiple governments and militaries are able to make it work. Are they using a reduced core-features-only version?

[Arathorn]

They're typically operating in private or semi-private federations, and so aren't so worried about spam/abuse issues like the one in question here. They may also not care as much about serverside metadata footprint (or indeed they may actually require serverside metadata in order for the server admins to enforce who can talk to who).

As a result, the popularity of Matrix in public sector has resulted in focus there - which is somewhat different to the expectations of folks looking for a Discord replacement or a privacy-at-any-cost solution.

[JuniperMesos]

> As a result, the popularity of Matrix in public sector has resulted in focus there - which is somewhat different to the expectations of folks looking for a Discord replacement or a privacy-at-any-cost solution.

Unfortunately, a Discord replacement is the sort of thing that the free software world actually needs, because in its absence people are just using Discord, even for free software projects.

[immibis]

Rocket Chat, Mattermost, Zulip

[tcfhgj]

Do you know Cinny?

cinny.in

[dingnuts]

This is an astute comment, despite "Arathorn" CEO of Matrix LLC's downvote ring pushing down the score. (Hey bud you know you can just read without commenting, right? Sit and listen for awhile)

ActivityPub has the same problem. Browse a Japanese MissKey server and it'll start loading yours up with questionable drawings. I turned off my server FAST

This is a big, big problem for federated software that I have not seen addressed or even frequently discussed. Arbitrary file upload by the public is not something small operators can reasonably allow on their servers.

Even large operators of non federated systems with controlled access like Facebook struggle with this. It's impossible to protect yourself as a server operator on Matrix or ActivityPub from malicious actors that want to use your server to distribute illegal material, and you'll be the one found liable!

No thanks!

[petre]

Hosting any publicly uploaded content is a bad decision and a problem since e-mail. IRC and MQTT with QoS 0 do not have this problem. They have others though. At least criminals won't use them because of how easy is to snoop.

[immibis]

half baked solutions often "crowd out" potential better solutions. If something works enough, someone is less likely to make one that works well. Especially when there's a network effect involved.