Matrix 1.0 and the Matrix.org Foundation

https://matrix.org/blog/2019/06/11/introducing-matrix-1-0-and-the-matrix-org-foundation

by Arathorn • 7 years ago

598 156 7 years ago

matrix.org

driminicus• 7 years ago

Congratulations on this huge milestone!

Arathorn27• 7 years ago

thanks :D we are applying beer and shipping cookies

metildaa• 7 years ago

W00t! Congrats :P

cvwright• 7 years ago

Congrats Matthew and your team!

elagost• 7 years ago

This is exciting. Glad to know they're focusing on making a stable, secure protocol, and that development is going strong. Great job and keep up the great work!

xj9• 7 years ago

there are some big security and performance holes in the DAG resolution algorithm, but hopefully more funding will give them the resources to revisit some of their dangerous assumptions.

Arathorn27• 7 years ago

If you are aware of security holes in the DAG resolution algorithm please let us know asap at security@matrix.org as per https://matrix.org/security-disclosure-policy/.

As far as we know, we have addressed all known issues in the original algorithm - which is why we have declared ourselves out of beta. Matrix 1.0 has an entirely new state resolution alg, as well as many other security fixes.

Performancewise there are still issues, but we know what needs to be done to fix them, and this will be landing shortly now 1.0 is out.

s9w• 7 years ago

Matrix is a very generic name.

k__• 7 years ago

At least they didn't call it Tensor, lol

Arathorn27• 7 years ago

cough https://github.com/davidar/tensor

also https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/quaternion O:-)

TuringTest2• 7 years ago

It evokes The Matrix, [1] which seems apt given that the project intends to be a universal, decentralized middleware protocol.

Funny that this submission arrives nearly after a project called Desktop Neo.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix

[2] https://desktopneo.com/

superfist• 7 years ago

Good job!

davefp• 7 years ago

Fantastic! I know what I'll be doing this evening :D

mxuribe• 7 years ago

Congrats to everyone involved!!!

reizorc• 7 years ago

End-to-end encryption is all well and good but until the app stores provide verifiable builds I think promoting messaging apps such as Riot as "Secure decentralised chat/VoIP" is unprovable and therefore somewhat misleading.

jchw• 7 years ago

I disagree that it’s totally hopeless but OTOH verifiable builds sounds like an awesome idea to increase security. Still, at the end of the day you always are trusting some entity or machines...

Arathorn27• 7 years ago

Fdroid looks to be heading in the general direction of verifiable builds where possible. Failing that it’s really not that hard to build yourself. But in the end you have to be trusting trust somewhere...

danShumway• 7 years ago

Security isn't binary.

That's not to say that we shouldn't have verifiable builds (we totally should), but if we follow this line of logic we will never be able to call anything secure. By the time we have verifiable builds we will have identified other security risks that also need to be addressed.

Apps like Riot are secure compared to the majority of alternatives available today. Arguably we shouldn't use a binary term to describe that, but I'm sympathetic to the idea that consumers think in those terms and that it's not too harmful to use them. Other metrics typically don't see this kind of feedback (for example, you hardly ever see anyone complaining about someone marketing their app as 'fast', even though performance is also not binary).

SI_Rob• 7 years ago

Words like security and decentralization are indeed not binary, but referring to them as being on "a continuum" or something similar is not particularly helpful either. I wish I saw more application of them as modalities, such that they refer to not to a perpetual state but a systemic tendency toward an ideal (if asymptotic) structural equilibrium over time, as in "X tends toward greater decentralization", "tends towards greater security" over time.

Even better if these claims could be backed, if not by a formal proof, at least an informal definition of these terms as used in the claim and reasonable justification as to why the models being promoted would not tend to collapse into greater centralization, weaker security over time.

ntw1103• 7 years ago

This is exciting. Great job! I've been using matrix for over a year now, and I've been extremely happy with it, as have the users of my homeserver.

nurettin• 7 years ago

At least I learned a lot from the github issues their hacker opened. Wonder if there are any surviving archives of those that the repo owners did not delete in shame.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19642554

Arathorn27• 7 years ago

I (the repo owner) reposted them via links to archive.org after github deleted them, actually: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues/367#issuecom.... See https://matrix.org/blog/2019/05/08/post-mortem-and-remediati... for the full details of what happened, fwiw.

nothrabannosir• 7 years ago

As much as I love ridiculing matrix, I must admit that’s a beautiful move. Thank you, and apologies for laughing at the parent post.

jancsika• 7 years ago

Were the GPG signing keys the hacker found for signing official Debian packages for Matrix-related software?

jbverschoor3• 7 years ago

I have no idea what matrix is, and it is not explained

TuringTest2• 7 years ago

Because it's a blog entry for a project milestone. The definition is at the homepage and FAQ, one link away.

https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/faq/

ngcc_hk2• 7 years ago

Should it be in the first thing to do is to explain who you are and what your project is doing? Not everyone is in the matrix or everyone are but not woke up. Need to say.

Anyway thanks. Now has a lead.

chrismorgan2• 7 years ago

Blog posts that you can reasonably expect may be shared in places where context will not be known should start out by clarifying what the subject of the post is.

Rust is an example of doing this very well. Take a couple of release announcements, for example: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/05/15/Rust-1.0.html, https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/05/23/Rust-1.35.0.html. Both clarify what Rust is in the first paragraph.

jbverschoor3• 7 years ago

Checked my history. Before I opened the matrix link in the top left iirc( mobile) It took me to the try now page. Maybe not, but that’s where I ended up

dwb• 7 years ago

Congratulations, it's very heartening to see a new open application-layer protocol get to a stable v1.0 :)

rschulman2• 7 years ago

I am thrilled to be one of the newly announced Guardians of the non-profit foundation. I'm happy to answer any questions people may have, though bearing in mind that I'm going to be a little distracted for the next while until my son goes to bed.

mikenew6• 7 years ago

Are there any firm plans for what happens to the matrix.org matrix server in the future? I worry that all the friends and family that I've been convincing to register an account on matrix.org are going to one day be asked to migrate their account to somewhere else, and that feels like it could be a big bump in the road for the non-technical ones.

rschulman2• 7 years ago

So, New Vector (the for-profit org that the foundation has just spun out of) operates the matrix.org homeserver on behalf of the community.

With that said, though, I don't think it is going anywhere any time soon. Portable accounts/identity is on the spec roadmap and is a personal passion of mine, so moving servers while keeping all of your identity will hopefully be possible in the not-too-distant future.

ngcc_hk2• 7 years ago

Finally read through the faq. It is a bit 1990s.

In those days we worry about how to talk with each other. Share info. In fact find friends. Or server.

Whilst the the technology moves on you have E2E in beta and bridge to join other communication technology but is this addressing the more fundamental question of today’s real internet.

The internet now is fragmented by either firm (Facebook) or country bloc (Eu data and copyright law; china e-wall).

The internet is great to share but also a great way to isolate and record and arrest people. China is a good example of what is great and nasty of this IP protocol in the real world. Social credit system where you are not allowed to sit in train (or lately bus) and suppressing of freedom of speech is hard in the real world but with internet it is so much easier.

A global communication media without firm and country is what we dream of. Yes there would be troll. But we can find ways to anti-spam, may be using lisp like Paul has done. But we can dream to hack our way back to the original free internet.

I use this to measure everything. Can it help us or empower us to program, to hack, to share and just to chat freely

Can you work in today world?

Have you listened to the call for national internet by supreme leader of china or the cut off of internet link by Russia. Can you work in Eu data privacy and copyright law?

Can you empower individual... is there essentially a tor mode there?

Or even better can client talk to client direct without server so no one can have a record of what any guy (or girl as trinity would have said) said so to arrest him (or her).

Can we interop freely is my real question?

Arathorn27• 7 years ago

Yup, the FAQ needs some love.

I think your question boils down to: do you have to trust a server? Today, the answer is yes. In future, the idea is to have a hybrid p2p and client-server architecture where users can participate simply from an app if they want... but if they want to trust a server to also replicate their account, they can.

However, if you are capable of running your own server today (or know a trusted person who can), you can still have autonomy. For instance, there look to be many autonomous servers running behind the GFW.

Iv3• 7 years ago

First, for the record, I find it unfair to compare EU copyright laws to China e-wall. China blocks connections. People who block connections because of GPRD are people who oppose it, without good reasons IMO. To be in compliance, don't invade people privacy. That's it. Things only get complicated if you do.

"Or even better can client talk to client direct without server so no one can have a record of what any guy (or girl as trinity would have said) said so to arrest him (or her)."

On Internet as we know it, even P2P does not implement that. Any router you bounce on can be an eavesdropping server. Actually we now know that some of them are, thanks to wikileaks and Snowden.

Server-less is just a guarantee against a narrow range of blocking techniques. To prevent eavesdropping by governments, you need end-to-end encryption. If you have a good encryption technique, using gmail is not a problem.

"Can we interop freely is my real question?"

It took me a while to realize that no technical hackery will ever guarantee that. This is not a technical problem. The incredible power of asymmetric cryptography gave us the dream that we could evade any kind of surveillance, but in the end, a government can always outlaw crypto and arrest people who use it. There is no technical way around it. Using Tor in China may protect your data but will put you on a suspect list.

A government may install spyware on every communication device that are sold nationally (as Syria did on smartphones) and record screenshots or cleartext messages as they are typed.

You can't solve this problem without doing some politics. Crypto needs to stay legal, governments need to refrain from installing spyware and privacy violations need to be seriously prosecuted.

We have the tools to get around surveillance in a state that guarantees some kind of freedoms, or that is clumsy in its implementation of surveillance techniques, but the gap between hackers and authorities have closed in many dictatorships and is very small in democracies as well.

If the problems you mention are of real concern to you, get involved in politics, donate to EFF and FSF.

cyphar5• 7 years ago

Can you empower individual... is there essentially a tor mode there?

Not at the moment really. There is a tracking bug for it[1] (which includes the idea of supporting .onion homeservers). The main issue I found when digging into it is that Twisted doesn't appear to have a way to set a SOCKS proxy for requests (there are several open bug reports about it) -- meaning that you couldn't get the hidden homeserver to proxy all their connections through Tor nor could you get the other servers to use Tor to contact the hidden homeserver.

But I am hoping this could be done eventually.

[1] https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/5152

bongobongo• 7 years ago

This is exciting. A big thank-you to all involved in bringing this sorely needed standard to life!

mikenew6• 7 years ago

The not-so-talked-about but killer feature of Matrix is that you can bridge other services into it. I'm currently able to send and receive messages from Hangouts, iMessage, SMS, and Slack all from within Matrix. If I'm working on my laptop I can put my phone in my bag and not even touch it for 8 hours, because there's no need. I have Riot running on my laptop with a full keyboard and access to all my communication platforms.

It's not exactly easy to do (iMessage requires a dedicated Mac, for example), but it's possible. And it works pretty well. Pulling out my phone to tap out an SMS when I have a full keyboard in front of me seems silly at this point. Hopefully the bridging will continue to evolve and become more accessible to the average user, because it's amazing.

ixwt• 7 years ago

Is this difficult to setup? How much of the data do you control?

lytedev2• 7 years ago

It's not super easy, I'll say, but you have all the data and it's searchable in the Riot client.

lytedev2• 7 years ago

Huge props to the Matrix team! It's given me back ownership of my messages for which I am very grateful. Simple integration is a really killer feature!

I'm not sure why every matrix post seems to be met with a lot of negativity here on HN, but I always appreciate the way devs handle it.

Well done!

dustinmr• 7 years ago

Can you point to any tutorials/articles/documentation? I got off Mac for Linux or Chromebook with the whole keyboard horror.

About the only thing I miss is a full keyboard for sms & iMessage. And I have an old Mac Mini laying around that could be put to use if necessary.

mikenew6• 7 years ago

It very much depends on the kind of bridging you want to do and on the service you want to do it with. My iMessage bridge, for example, is a "double puppeted bridge", meaning the people receiving messages from me via iMessage don't even know I'm using a different service, and they show up in Matrix as if I got a message from a matrix user. It's also possible to bridge the contents of an entire room (on, say, Slack or Discord) into a matrix room. The two rooms mirror each other and anyone who talks in either room has their messages relayed to the other.

A good place to get a basic rundown would be here: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/bridges For the puppet bridges (which is what I'm running), you can take a look at this repo: https://github.com/matrix-hacks/matrix-puppet-bridge. You're also very welcome to ask around in #matrix-puppet-bridge:matrix.org about getting the bridges set up. We're pretty friendly in general :)

wishinghand• 7 years ago

iMessage requires a dedicated Mac, for example

You had me really excited until this part. I'm moving away from a Macbook soon and my most missed feature will be desktop texting.

mikenew6• 7 years ago

Yeah sorry :/ There isn't an iMessage API to talk to, so the only way that anyone has found to bridge with iMessage is to have an instance of macOS running, logged in as you, and to send messages through the iMessage app via AppleScripts and to watch the filesystem for incoming messages. It would be great if there were some API you could use to send messages through, but Apple has worked hard to keep iMessage locked down to Apple devices.

Having said that, I bought an old Mac Mini off of ebay for about $100, and it's been working pretty well for the past year or so. It's not an easy solution, but as far as I know it's the only solution for using iMessage on an Android or non-macOS desktop.

jacobush• 7 years ago

If you are willing to wade in gray, you can make a virtual machine Mac for this.

roland-s• 7 years ago

If you're willing to ditch iOS, Android has Messages for Web (an official service by Google) which lets you view/send SMS from any browser and supports file attachments etc. It's pretty great.

sametmax• 7 years ago

Pulse sms does that with android, don't know if it exists in iphone.

nichos• 7 years ago

You can switch to a protocol like signal. It had a desktop client.

amelius• 7 years ago

The best solution here is to convince your friends to move to Matrix too.

xtat• 7 years ago

imessage: not even once

Stubb• 7 years ago

Pulling out my phone to tap out an SMS when I have a full keyboard in front of me seems silly at this point.

Responding to SMS encourages people to keep using it.

A1B73A63• 7 years ago

I wish you the best of luck getting everyone you communicate with to stop using SMS.

cedex12• 7 years ago

Is that bad?

defanor• 7 years ago

The not-so-talked-about but killer feature of Matrix is that you can bridge other services into it.

It seems to be getting brought up each time Matrix is mentioned, with a standard reply that it's not unique, and available in XMPP for a while.

chrismorgan2• 7 years ago

This interests me, as a potential user; but it’s only a killer feature if it’s accessible.

I start by looking into Hangouts matters, because I use Hangouts to talk to some of my family, currently only on my phone and not on my laptop; and I see three projects listed in https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now: matrix-appservice-hangouts, mautrix-hangouts, and Hangouts Bridge. https://matrix.org/docs/projects/bridges/#hangouts lists two, matrix-puppet-hangouts and matrix-appservice-hangouts.

Bridge, puppeting bridge, appservice—I have no idea what any of this means. I’m generally hoping for something like an instruction to install a piece of software on my laptop with `curl … | sudo bash` or some unsigned .exe or something. (Are any of these things basically a Matrix server that I could run on localhost, or do they slot into a Matrix server that I’d need to host elsewhere?)

And so I give up. The content formatting of those pages on matrix.org was super-ugly anyway, it’s clearly either not a good product or not for normal people. (This remark may seem harsh, but this is how most will think.)

What do I need to do for all of this to get Hangouts, SMS and Slack working in Matrix? Is Matrix ever going to focus on users and make questions like this easier to answer, or will it remain a niche product that I should not bother with?

shaan7• 7 years ago

or not for normal people

Given that the documentation you're reading is for sysadmins, it shouldn't be a surprise that its not targeted to end-users (assuming that is what you meant by "normal people")

but it’s only a killer feature if it’s accessible.

Again, depends on your definition of accessible. Personally, if there is a feature I really like, I don't mind being patient and spending couple of hours to understand the docs.

I'm not denying that Matrix needs to improve the issues that you've pointed out, but that shouldn't make one disregard how useful it is.

mikenew6• 7 years ago

Maybe "killer feature" was the wrong way to put it. Matrix has good support for things like bots and bridges, but those bridges are written by people like myself who are mostly just trying to hack something together and make it work. Over time they're becoming more solid and easy to use, and hopefully at some point it will just be a matter of `pacman -S hangouts-bridge` or whatever.

For certain things it's pretty easy. Bridges like IRC, Gitter, and Slack are a couple clicks from within the Riot app, although you do have to go goof around in the settings for those third party services to get it talking to Matrix. There's also starting to be some hosted services for bridging public rooms where you can just invite the bridge bot to the room to get things going. Like here: https://t2bot.io

The thing that I find particularly exciting about Matrix is that it 1) has support for doing that kind of thing, and 2) it can scale pretty gracefully from a 1-to-1 chat all the way up to a room with thousands of users. So you can (even if it isn't always easy, currently) bridge a 1-to-1 Hangouts chat, or a Slack room with a few dozen people, or a Discord server with thousands.

I'm not trying to oversell it right now. Many of the bridges are difficult to set up and not really something the average user will be able to do (although there are many that are). But it's pretty damn cool that we're able to do it, and I expect it to get easier as things progress. Matrix itself is only just now leaving beta, and even then the reference server is slow and still missing some big features. So the "extra" stuff written by the community is going to take a while to develop into "click to enable".

EugeneOZ2• 7 years ago

With approach like this we would still use horses - cars are too complicated.

Arathorn27• 7 years ago

The most mature bridges are available today via a user-friendly appstore if you click on the integration button in Riot. The matrix.org site is intended for developers rather than end-users. If you want to see user-focused stuff, go to Riot.im. That said, there is still work to be done to make the UX around bridging better.

jovdg4• 7 years ago

This interests me too; just this weekend I tried to set up a matrix homeserver with matrixsms, puppet-hangouts and puppet-facebook integration and I got no single integration working. I did try to get it working in docker containers, but still.. I would be very grateful to learn if anyone has a recent, detailed write-up! (I also planned to integrate with Skype and WhatsApp, but didn't get that far)

bubblethink• 7 years ago

The not-so-talked-about but killer feature of Matrix is that you can bridge other services into it

This is useful, but why is it killer ? Stuff like this has always existed even with IRC or XMPP. The annoying part with all these proprietary services is reverse engineering their APIs and APIs not being stable etc. Once you do the main legwork, can't you pipe it to anything, whether it's Matrix or not ? What does Matrix add to this ?

ATsch• 7 years ago

Well, not directly, but for seamless bridging to work properly, your protocol must support being able to mock users easily. Many new protocols simply don't allow that. This means you need to fall back on a protocol session per user (like with IRC, telegram, etc), Bot Api hacks (Discord, Slack), or, worst of all, putting the name of the chat participants into the message.

Unlike that, matrix has the concept of Application Services, which are priviledged "users" that can pretend to be any number of users that are bridged over from other protocols.

zaarn8• 7 years ago

Probably not so talked about because, in my experience, it barely works. The bridges I've tried to install were either largely outdated for either matrix or the service it's federating to (Discord for example), or dropped a lot of messages going through (Slack, IRC), or had incredibly annoying limitations (SMS, Hangouts). I don't see how that is a "killer feature" if it's barely developed.

Arathorn27• 7 years ago

The bridging API in matrix hasn’t really changed since day 1, so unsure how they can be outdated for Matrix. For something like Discord, folks are constantly hacking on the bridge; PRs merged 5 days ago on https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-appservice-discord for instance, and last I checked it worked relatively well and targets the highest common denominator of functionality between Matrix and Discord. Lost messages sounds like the server is overloaded (certainly there is performance work still to be done). Unsure it’s fair to say that it’s barely developed...

frayesto• 7 years ago

I'm also really interested in setting up a bot/bridge with our Matrix server.

Anyone know of a bot that will send emails for messages in a room? I basically want to bridge a room with an already existing email list to send out announcements using Matrix.

jrruethe• 7 years ago

Is there a way to bridge Matrix with ActivityPub? I see MXToot[1] as an option, but I'm hoping for something a little less Mastodon-specific. I'd like to be able to bridge Matrix with Mastodon, Hubzilla, Peertube, Pixelfed, and the other ActivityPub federated services that are popping up.

Would it be possible to get the Bifrost[2] to integrate with ActivityPub?

[1] https://github.com/ma1uta/mxtoot [2] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-bifrost

Arathorn27• 7 years ago

There isn't a particularly sophisticated ActivityPub bridge yet, but there's also nothing stopping someone from writing one.

Bifrost would be a nice framework for writing such a thing - it's basically a bridge server you can plug protocols into as needed, a bit like Bitlbee is for IRC.

megous2• 7 years ago

So where's the spec 1.0? All I see is old <1.0 versions.

https://matrix.org/docs/spec/

Arathorn27• 7 years ago

https://matrix.org/docs/spec/#matrix-versions. Matrix 1.0 is the blanket term for the set of various specific API releases we just cut: CS API 0.5 etc. We could have bumped them all to 1.0 for the sake of it (and perhaps we should have), but it felt cleaner to let each API version evolve independently, and instead say “hey, as of this set of versions, we consider the protocol stable”.

megous2• 7 years ago

Thanks for the clarification.

est312• 7 years ago

Looking forward to seeing performant server implementations. Especially looking forward to ruma maturation: https://github.com/ruma/ruma

cyphar5• 7 years ago

Or even dendrite. The Ruma author said on Reddit that they are waiting for async/await to stabilise in Rust before they continue working on Ruma because they'd likely need to rewrite it later if it was written without async from the start.

est312• 7 years ago

async/await is right around the corner. Meaning few months give or take until it's on stable. The 1.37 goal [1] will most likely be missed though.

[1] https://boats.gitlab.io/blog/post/await-decision-ii/

avinium2• 7 years ago

Matrix has been on my to-do list for some time - I'm interested in exploring it as a replacement for team Slack.

As a side-note, I think the copy on the Matrix website could use some love - it's a little wordy and not immediately clear what Matrix is, and why/how you would use it. I've read a few other commenters make the same point.

Are you open to some suggested wording? If so, how would you prefer to receive it?

Arathorn27• 7 years ago

So we just reworded some of the site, but agreed it needs more love. We're (hopefully) much better at writing communication protocols than describing them to a broad audience.

Proposals for changes are very welcome (although we can't guarantee we'll accept them verbatim); the new site lives at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org. PRs welcome.

avinium2• 7 years ago

Great. If I have any suggestions once I've actually had a chance to take it for a spin, I'll make sure to submit it for consideration via Github.

c487bd623• 7 years ago

Honest question. What's stopping Matrix from being adopted by, say, Google or Facebook, and then pulling a XMPPEEE? Imagine Matrix gets really popular, more even than Discord. So they offer their own "version" but add features like free 250GB on Google Drive or things like that. After they get everybody on board they do what they do best and cease control of it.

Arathorn27• 7 years ago

We're obviously very aware of this risk, and one approach is to try (as the Foundation) to steer uptake as best we can to ensure that no single 800lb gorilla ends up adopting Matrix and smothering it with love(?), even if they have the best intentions. So if Google did suddenly start using Matrix, we'd do everything we possibly can to ensure that at least one of Microsoft/Facebook/Amazon/Apple/Samsung/etc jumped on board too, to try to balance things out and ensure that the value of participating in open network outweighed the risk of proprietary extensions leaking in.

But in the end, the onus is on us to make sure there's enough stuff of value in the wider open network that the idea of someone using the protocol to try to create a walled garden is laughable and clearly missing the point - much like running a private email network is somewhat missing the point, or for that matter a walled garden like the web content on old-school AOL.

Hopefully we're on the right track to ensure there's enough stuff of value on the public Matrix network to make participation in it a no-brainer.

c487bd623• 7 years ago

Very interesting. I wonder if there's a killer feature that would appear when you follow that line of thought. So even if adoption looks like 60~70% users and 30~40% enterprise, if you're indispensable to either of them, it would still prevent a take over because of the network effect. And the fact that you have an API that developers can trust would solidify the position even more. If that feature ever surfaces I hope it doesn't involve blockchain or machine learning.

Forellen• 7 years ago

These "what if" questions will always be relevant because of the nature of big (and small) tech companies. Creating a monopoly, data mining, and controlling the flow of information are simply irresistible - if not necessary - for tech companies like Google or Facebook. The only real solution is to have educated users that care about their privacy and security. In that case, if Google turns a free, open source protocol into a surveillance machine, the only solution is to step away from it and not use it. We cannot stop big tech companies from creating user-friendly, tempting malware.

c487bd623• 7 years ago

The only real solution is to have educated users that care about their privacy and security.

I don't believe that will ever be possible. Winning with technology seems like the only way to do it. Google wants even IMAP.

jasonzemos• 7 years ago

Matrix is an inherently decentralized system. You can run your own fully featured instance on your own property. If the company behind Matrix is acquired, the foundation being announced here today stands in the way of the intellectual property becoming a toxic liability to your own use. This is very good news today.

Furthermore, the openness of the protocol allows free software projects to emerge and exist independent of the matrix company and even the foundation. Such projects can be developed by your contributions and the FOSS community's support until the end of time. One of those projects, for example, is one I started [disclosure] called the Matrix Construct server: https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct and your support of this project is necessary to that end.

zaarn8• 7 years ago

The same was true for XMPP until Google EEE'd it. What stops Matrix from being EEE'd?

upofadown• 7 years ago

XMPP was not really extended by Google in any way that mattered. Their federation hardly even worked even in the beginning.

XMPP has hardly been extinguished. There are something like 8 server implementations and zillions of client implementations. With OMEMO and Let's Encrypt it has has actually undergone a sort of resurgence lately. There are 100+ public XMPP servers out there. Matrix could only hope to be so extinguished...

So I am not really sure how you could EEE Matrix even if you wanted to do so for some reason. Something like this is hard to extinguish. If the network of servers was functional before it would still be functional after some entity pulled their server. Decentralization is sort of the point here.

phicoh4• 7 years ago

My experience with Matrix compared to XMPP, is that Matrix is way ahead in usabiliy. I wanted to get people to use XMPP for years, but I always found too much lacking.

Matrix is not there yet, cross device signing has to land. But the way it is moving is way more promising than XMPP.

(I also remember that federating with Google was always painful)

cyphar5• 7 years ago

I am not really sure how you could EEE Matrix even if you wanted to do so for some reason. Something like this is hard to extinguish. If the network of servers was functional before it would still be functional after some entity pulled their server. Decentralization is sort of the point here.

Yes, though I would say that decentralised MXIDs (and generally being able to transfer users) is an incredibly important part of this. Otherwise users will have immense inertia stopping them from migrating from a big homeserver that is being used to EEE the system. Luckily that is something that's being worked on.

vbezhenar• 7 years ago

We should launch more alternative servers and avoid central big servers as much as possible. There's no reason to buy Matrix if they don't have a lot of users.

Honestly I think that we need implementations with smaller RAM requirements. Last time I've heard that it's recommended to have 2 GB RAM for Matrix. That's a lot. I can run VPN, SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, Tor servers along with operating system in a 256 MB VPS. I can imagine that a lot of folks are employing similar low-power VPS for personal needs. Now if they want to launch Matrix, they have to significantly upgrade their VPS. I see no reason why personal home server with few users should require more than a couple of megabytes. I hope that alternative implementations like Dendrite will be better in that aspect.

nerd7473• 7 years ago

Matrix really is an awesome clinet/service. Really glad this Matrix exists and allows for security and privacy.

sansnomme2• 7 years ago

What's the best option available for chat embedding right now? E.g. if I want to build Facebook's chat feature or Fiverr's Inbox feature and have it integrated into my main web app.

Arathorn27• 7 years ago

We haven't published an official embedded chat SDK for Matrix yet, but there are a bunch of options from the community. https://gitlab.com/sanlox/tangent is one, which is very new and immature but looks to be headed in the right direction.

Alternatively, you could take a scalpel to matrix-react-sdk and strip it down to do what's needed.

Maintaining UI SDKs like this is very time consuming, and we're currently putting our time into ensuring matrix-react-sdk (and thus Riot) pull their weight against Slack & Discord etc.

sansnomme2• 7 years ago

The biggest issue I have found is Auth, specifically session sharing. Any advice for that?

sandGorgon• 7 years ago

Congratulations for the release.

We were seriously evaluating Matrix as a replacement for Hipchat (about a few months back) through their hosted service modular.im . We didn't end up going for it because it didn't have privacy controls (there's no concept of an org like Slack) and integration with Auth mechanisms like SAML/Google,etc.

I'm glad that matrix.org is now a very different organisation than New Vector. Hopefully it should allow you to focus on polishing the user facing product, Riot.im

I have already used the re-designed Riot - it's nice from a UI perspective, but there's a lot of enterprise use cases that are missing.

Iv3• 7 years ago

Is there a docker image of synapse (Matrix's reference server implementation) that is updated with 1.0 version?

I found this https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/tree/master/docker

but the last update is 21 days ago.

I guess for now, installing from source is the only option to get 1.0?

bn8t• 7 years ago

The docker image got updated to 1.0 yesterday. See: https://hub.docker.com/r/matrixdotorg/synapse/tags

Iv3• 7 years ago

Thanks!

slyrus• 7 years ago

It's unfortunate that "Matrix" has nothing to do with actual matrices and that "Synapse" has nothing to do with neuroscience or even neural networks. Makes me want to name my next matrix (actual rows and columns of numbers) library something like "advanced telephony and messaging" but a stupid name for a stupid name makes the whole world utterly ungoogleable so I'll refrain.

mlevental• 7 years ago

matrix

/ˈmeɪtrɪks/

noun

noun: matrix; plural noun: matrices; plural noun: matrixes

an organizational structure in which two or more lines of command, responsibility, or communication may run through the same individual.

"matrix structures are said to foster greater flexibility"

nullwasamistake• 7 years ago

Matrix works great once setup but they really need to work on install process. All the "easy ways" are unofficial. Some of the clients, like Riot, appear to be really well written, but the server itself gives me pause. Just from looking at the configuration, the codebase appears to be a mess.

They also built the thing without specifying a protocol which was the original goal. I once attempted to implement a matrix client and the majority of doc pages on the protocol are "TDB" or "look at server source"

Arathorn27• 7 years ago

the client-server API has been stable and fully docced since early 2016, which explains why there are so many matrix clients out there. you must have been attempting a long time ago...

__david__2• 7 years ago

I note the announcement says this about things coming soon:

- Editable messages! (These are in Synapse 1.0 and Riot already, but still stabilising so not enabled by default)

Is there some way to enable editing on a locally hosted server to play with? (In my case I don't care if federated servers don't handle it). I've poked around the code a bit and I don't see anything obvious documented…

Arathorn27• 7 years ago

On Riot/Web, you’ll need to enable it in labs settings (in config.json) - riot.im/develop already has it turned on. On synapse there is a config flag called experimental_aggregation_support or something, but it’s optional (it makes reactions/edits more efficient).

__david__2• 7 years ago

Thanks! In case anyone else is wondering, I added:

    "features": {
        "feature_message_editing": "labs"
    }

to my Riot's config.json and

    experimental_msc1849_support_enabled: true

to Matrix's homeserver.yaml.

zaarn8• 7 years ago

Did 1.0 fix the crippling resource consumption of their "reference implementation" or are they still tinkering on something half done?

Did they fix the barely working and maintained bridge ecosystem (ie, everything other than IRC)?

I'm someone who ran a Matrix server in the past and got burned by it, the announcement doesn't seem to address any of the issues I encountered running my server or make the UI any more discoverable for non-technical users compared to alternatives like Discord.

It feels more like this 1.0 announcement was done so they could have 1.0 and declare to have done it, without actually fixing the glaring issues in the Matrix ecosystem. At this point, the ActivityPub Ecosystem (Pleroma, Misskey, Mastodon) offers more versatile and user friendly experiences. I hope someone builds a chat server on top of AP.

nickik• 7 years ago

Maybe consider reading the post?

larkeith• 7 years ago

Did 1.0 fix the crippling resource consumption of their "reference implementation" or are they still tinkering on something half done?

From the fourth paragraph: "...we have deliberately not focused on performance or features in the 1.0 release - so I’m afraid that synapse’s RAM footprint will not have got significantly better..."

"Crippling resource consumption" is an interesting viewpoint, however - I'm federating to the four largest rooms currently available and using <.75g RAM, so unless you consider every modern browser "crippling"...

zaarn8• 7 years ago

I did run a Matrix server for a while. It continously consumed between 4 and 6 Gigabytes of RAM with about 5-10 users active at all times. Joining on of the larger rooms took 3 days, 2 days unil I didn't just receive plain errors and then another day until it would let me open the room without timeouting. While joining large room sit consumed almost all available CPU and several database connections for IO.

This was less than 3 months ago on a fresh install based on Docker with no modifications to the code other than instructed in the installation guide.

intea3• 7 years ago

Are there decent Admin tools for hosting your own homeserver now? Last time I checked it out I could neither disable file uploads completely nor remove users from the server short of editing the database.

Arathorn27• 7 years ago

you can disable fileuploads completely from the config (set a max filetransfer size of 0). however, we still need to build a proper admin web interface for it. the admin API is improving however, but it's a matter of hitting the API with curl currently (for removing users etc).

intea3• 7 years ago

Setting the max filetransfer size to 0 still showed the button and allowed uploading of 0 byte files. Probably just a UX oversight but annoying nonetheless. Not having a simple to use admin or even moderator interface makes Matrix unusable for my purposes for the time being.

Matrix 1.0 and the Matrix.org Foundation

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