great post from the libera staff, respecting the matrix folks while dealing with all of that must have felt disheartening.
matrix has other driving forces and incentives. there’s only so much time they can spend on things like individual bridges.
meanwhile, they devote developers to writing two different homeserver implementations in parallel. or writing an experimental p2p homeserver - or the three guys working on thirdroom. ugh
i just hope they realize what’s important. people just want to chat on a distributed platform that isn’t irc - make it as simple and fun as possible. that is your entire mission.
no metaverse, no experimental backend shit, no securitygasm cryptography - nobody is buying drugs on matrix. this isn’t signal or whatsapp, this is discord for tech dorks.
just focus on making GROUP chatting good, simple, and fun. the ux just utterly sucks right now.
it’s the difference between scrolling through a menu on an ipod versus a self checkout kiosk - the kiosk just FEELS bad, simple human revulsion. the element interface offers the same experience.
and we _still_ don’t have custom emojis or selfserve moderation, even though matth himself promised them to us 2 YEARS ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33014245
element is _the product_, and it hasn’t moved a single inch in years from my point of view.
The reason it feels like Element hasn’t moved for years is because we have been focused on fixing the mobile apps and crypto: https://element.io/blog/we-have-lift-off-element-x-call-and-...
The web app has been evolving too, but less dramatically - we need to enable instant sync there.
In terms of custom emoji and selfserve moderation: both are the direct casualties of having to focus exclusively on servicing the government customers who actually pay for Element development. Since the end of 2022 we have had to completely change focus to first generating $ in order to be sustainable, and that meant parking everything but Element X, Web, Call and Synapse. The Libera mess is also effectively a symptom of that.
P2P, Dendrite, Thirdroom etc have all been shelved for over a year. (Weird to see so many year-stale comments on a year-stale blog post).
I wouldn't go so far as to say the ux utterly sucks but it's certainly not something I've been able to recommend to most family and friends yet (I can't be too hard on matrix since I have to use Teams sometimes which is simply worse in pretty much every category I can think of, which is sad since the microsoft product teams replaced, skype for business, was itself light years behind teams).
It's a bit unfortunate to see matrix still not there yet, but on the other hand I'm still hopeful for the future. I think ElementX is the result of realizing that an excellent chat experience is what is needed. I also think the matrix foundation governing board elections [0] show that the community agrees that a rock solid chat experience is what is needed. At least for the individual members category, none of the candidates who were elected had a platform statement advocating for more work on the experimental matrix features. Sumner (who I think had the highest support by a good margin, although I can't find the exact numbers right now) specifically stated that experimental matrix features should not receive further investment until the baseline features are acceptable.
I realize that getting funding is a beast of its own and that is probably why some of the experimental things took focus at times so I can't fault that, but I really do want matrix to be something I can eventually recommend to all my family and friends instead of whatsapp or discord. I think it is slowly heading that way..
[0] https://matrix.org/blog/2024/06/election-results/
[1] https://matrix.org/foundation/governing-board-elections/#nom...
A single guy produced in a single year something more private and with a UI that doesn't suck: SimpleX.
This Matrix case in my opinion is either lack of talent or intentional. One should never discard the second option when considering how governments tend to interfer in such tools and Matrix is quite sus on the funding side.
In 5 years we've seen little to no remarkable progress. I'm not recommending this platform any further to anyone, other options have delivered what this one had been promissing for years. Time to move on.
I'm not that active on matrix (mostly just passively listening on a few topics that interest me).
However, regarding your last point there seems to be an active focus on improving element and their recent post about elementX [1].
I agree with your other points though, there are a lot of experiments that often lead to nowhere (e.g. P2P is basically abandoned AFAIK).
ElementX on iOS feels really good these days. On the desktop though, I feel nothing really scratches the Discord itch.
Where does someone begin with Matrix? The homepage mentions servers but how do you choose one? Is it like the ferdiverse with its hundreds of mastodon servers?
Yes, it's like the fediverse. The "main" server by the developers is matrix.org (similar to mastodon.social), but there are others too. You can also host your own server from different providers as described in this post: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/hosting/
Putting aside all the other problems this post talks about, for me the biggest issue was the bridge itself appeared to be run by a single person. When the bridge crashed and he was asleep or on vacation just got stuck waiting hours/days for it to come back. Made for a terrible user experience.
Since then I just run 1-to-1 heisenbridge connections with my homeserver. It's not as fancy but it works reliably.
> Within a few months after welcoming the bridge, we were routinely dealing with a sizable and often automated abuse load from the bridge that made use of easy anonymous registration and the protocol’s persistent and distributed archiving of files, including images, videos, and long messages converted to pastebins.
Umm libera itself allows "easy anonymous registration". You don't even need to have an account. You just join with a made-up name if you want to.
This is in fact one of the things I love about IRC. Nothing wrong with it but it feels wrong calling matrix out on that.
The archiving makes kinda sense for matrix' features of scrollback on demand. I believe there's an IRCv3 feature for it too. The bridge should have a provision to prevent users to see any backlog from before the moment they joined.
Ps I really hate those new "single puppet" third party bridges they recommend. Because they break nick colouring and also the actual nick of the user speaking is in a different place. Having each matrix user have their own IRC puppet is much nicer on the IRC side. Especially when there's more matrix than irc users.
> Nothing wrong with it but it feels wrong calling matrix out on that.
The difference is that Libera relies on blocking anonymous connections abusive IP ranges (proxies, gratis VPN providers). When abusers connect through Matrix, Libera only had their username, which delayed spam mitigation.
> The bridge should have a provision to prevent users to see any backlog from before the moment they joined.
That's already how it's supposed to work, though it had some issues.
> Ps I really hate those new "single puppet" third party bridges they recommend. Because they break nick colouring and also the actual nick of the user speaking is in a different place.
I think everyone hates them. Some IRC clients have scripts to substitute nicks from relayed messages though.
Really a pity this. Suddenly all those bridged-to-matrix chatrooms were left out in the cold. I am using IRC now to reach those, and they lost a lot of folks that were active in their channel before.
> We have been reluctant to go into detail before now because the last thing we wanted was to put our communities through another public dispute with a for-profit company. However we believe you, our users, deserve to know the circumstances of our decision, so this post is an attempt to satisfy your expectation of transparency from us as an organisation.
The idea of transparency being a "burden" is ridiculous. It implies that sharing information is a problem, which seems like an excuse to avoid accountability.
Are you aware of what happened to freenode?
Sounds to me like they wanted to avoid publicly shaming a company, I see nothing ridiculous in that? How would users have benefited from knowing the specific details of EMS' incompetence/deception?
Free speech absolutism has its place, but so has diplomacy.
They don't say anything like that and I wonder how that sounds like that to you. You are interpreting things into it, that they didn't say.
I am assuming it is due to their own moderators not acting appropriately because they seem to have a big problem with that.
I think libera has enough problems with moderation as it is. And most of the regulars (including most mods) in all the biggest channels seem to have cosmically inflated god complexes and are regularly and demonstrably abusive to their users with no recourse available (if you try to report it they just ban you).
If things were so terrible the communities would just move on or open their own channels. Maybe the problem is you.
You described my experience learning C and mistakenly asking for input from the channel in IRC