| heavenlyhash: I think you struck a nerve ;) Dave: yes, the Matrix 3rd party ID to Matrix-ID mapping service is currently logically centralised. The good news is that the service is entirely optional and you don't have to use it, and indeed in practice today nobody does: as of today everyone uses Matrix IDs to talk to each other. Matrix IDs themselves are completely decentralised, just like Jabber IDs, and are indeed fully partitioned by domain. I'm afraid you're the one shamelessly spreading the FUD here :D That said, if you have suggestions on how to decentralise a 3rd party ID to JID or Matrix ID mapping database, we'd love to collaborate on it, given the user discovery problem is an open issue for both XMPP and Matrix. In terms of whether XMPP and Matrix are competitors: personally, I don't think of it that way. They have utterly different semantics and features. Matrix is fundamentally a decentralised object database with pubsub; XMPP is an extensible message-passing system. It might be worthwhile trying to play nice together rather than flaming each other - for instance, one of the folks in the Matrix community is writing an XMPP<->Matrix bridge that could benefit both ecosystems. I'd also point out that there are loads of chat use cases where XMPP is currently miles better than Matrix - Matrix is inherently a heavier protocol due to all the state synchronisation, and if you want to just chuck messages around the place then I'm sure there are super-speedy mature XMPP servers that let you do so. The idea that Matrix is branding for a commercial outfit is pretty ridiculous for anyone who's actually spoken to or worked with us :) I guess we're lucky that we've got corporate sponsorship to let us run around and try to tell folks that we exist, but the whole project is entirely transparent and open in every sense of the word I can imagine. Please stop hating and consider embracing the existence of a complementary open initiative rather than getting all defensive all the time... |
As to whether XMPP and Matrix are competitors, you make direct comparisons between them (with incorrect assertions that have been pointed out to you before), and since you attack XMPP constantly on Twitter et al, I take it you think it is a threat.
Specifically, from your website's FAQ: - There's around four or five XMPP/Web implementations allowing you to easily speak XMPP from a browser, but the two most popular with web developers seem to be stanza.io and xmpp-ftw - the latter is JSON objects via HTTP/Websocket. - Most server implementations cluster, so a chatroom is highly available across multiple physical servers within the same domain. This latter restriction can be avoided using FMUC. - Hedging your comments with "(without extensions)" is crass, since there are many extensions that have very wide support. - Talking about a minimal baseline is at best ignorant, at worst deliberately misleading. Chatrooms aren't in our baseline, but that doesn't mean we should ignore them. - "Not particularly suited to mobile". We've actively worked on push recently, but on Android it's really optional. As for bandwidth efficiency, you use HTTP, so that's laughable - as noted above, stanzas go across HF radio in their native format just fine.
Yes, you can chuck messages around fast in XMPP. You can also chuck messages through pubsub systems very fast in XMPP.
So Matrix is a brand with no legal entity behind it, where the people operating it and controlling the specification seem to be entirely employed by the same company who owns the domain and sponsors an extensive publicity campaign? I shall never suggest it's merely branding for a commercial outfit again, my deepest apologies for having clearly misunderstood the situation.
As for getting defensive, I admit that too, but it's quite common when being attacked.