Gonna stop tracking Matrix progress for now

This is relevant to #changelog, since I started tracking the Matrix project, but didn’t follow up. I just noticed the Synapse server is at 0.25, so I’d like another person to track it if they’d like.

A variety of reasons make me not want to spend time on it:

  • I can’t see progress on server admin
  • It is unclear to me if Riot is a brand or a client, and it includes push-malware from Google and will likely have it from Apple, too
  • Something is off, my gut feeling

Instead, gonna focus on making jabber the best platform it can be, via Prosody. I want to really grok XMPP, the relevant XEPs, and how folks use instance messaging.

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Hmm, and I’m still meaning to look into Matrix at all. Regarding Riot, the f-droid link on https://about.riot.im/ gives me good feelings. But you’re right, it looks like a brand/company and a client. I’m also happy to see lots of different programs at Try Matrix Now! | Matrix.org but maybe they are all less than half-baked and/or scams?

http://about.psyc.eu/Federation is down on both Matrix and XMPP but I guess its answer http://about.psyc.eu/PSYC2 isn’t far along?

The vast majority of those projects are half-baked, never getting much further than describing in their readme what Matrix is, and how this is an opportunity to learn $LANG.

I like Conversations because it is an IM client that doesn’t feel second class if it doesn’t use Google push services. Folks using Riot sans GCM have reported missing messages or running their battery out polling. That is a problem for me.

I also am not sure there is a reason to use Matrix in a public sense. I think it would make for good groupware, based on features, but for communication, jabber works abundantly well for me, and I suspect for lots of others. I’ll find out! :slight_smile:

I’ll likely become more interested in Matrix dev as the Librem 5 starts shipping.

I tried joining https://riot.im/app/#/room/#freeculture:matrix.org to see what the experience is like and it looked like a fair number of people (180). Almost no traffic except occasional spam. The UI felt kind of difficult, in a way that mountains of javascript apps that don’t have vast numbers of people working to make them tolerable, only from a clicking-human perspective, I guess like Slack, feel. That’s just one room and I guess there might be other clients worth trying, but my first impression is no community, not great UI.

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We can spin these posts off into a new thread if it is a tangent, but I wanted to ask: how does channel namespace work? If I create #freeculture, does it sync with the one at matrix.org? Are those 180 people all martix.org or riot.im users?

#freeculture:matrix.org is the room, which could be accessed by any matrix client such as the one hosted at riot.im, I think. https://matrix.to/#/#freeculture:matrix.org seems to agree.

It’s a work in progress, but quite usable. I follow this bunch of hams down in taz to learn things:

Also, while I have exactly one person in the app on my tablet (a contact I met on masto) and I accidentally dialed her one night and we spoke back and forth glitch free for around twenty minutes. Prior to that we had only used text. Wait, I lied. That conversation was actually in GNU Ring. Sorry, I experiment a Lot! :wink: