Wtf that's huge, right?
this post was submitted on 28 May 2022
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Matrix
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Absolutely enormous as far as I can see. The Matrix devs understandably spend a lot of their time on the protocol and backend, so getting more dedicated user client side devs is pretty critical. Most people go to Discord for the features it offers, and Element just progresses really, really slow towards feature parity.
As far as I'm aware, rocket.chat were previously considered a competitor, so I'd say yes.
Why? An open-core enterprise communication tool promises to maybe in the future implement a non-standard protocol of another enterprisy communication tool also struggling with wider adoption...
It is not even clear from the announcement if it will be possible to openly federate or if it will be like other enterprise Matrix deployments that are shut off from the wider network.
Rocket chat had closed federation before, so likely very little changes with this, other than that some enterprise customers have the choice between Element and Rocket Chat clients in their networks in the future.
The real community federation standards are XMPP and ActivityPub. If you want to break the monopolies of the big social media companies then it is those you should support, not some badly done enterprise Slack clone like Matrix or Rocket Chat.
Rocket chat had closed federation before, so likely very little changes with this
The blog says:
building its new federation capabilities on the Matrix protocol to allow its users to communicate with users on other platforms.
The Rocket.Chat adoption of Matrix makes it simple for organizations to easily connect with external parties, whether they're using Rocket.Chat or any other Matrix compatible platform
Which I think suggests otherwise. It seems like they're hinting at being able to interoperate with a platform self-hosting Matrix or using one of Vector's hosting services.
How is Matrix enterprise-y and struggling with adoption? Many hackers I know use it, Lemmy has a Matrix field in your profile which lets you send Matrix messages directly and there's no vendor lock in due to the fact the protocol and all implementations are open.
Matrix is run by a single for-profit company (the foundation is a joke, all members are employed by or closely affiliated to that single company), and their main paying customers are government and enterprise clients.
As for vendor lock-in: there sort of is. There is only one single fully functional homeserver implementation (Synapse) and it does not follow the official specs, but rather the specs follow it, meaning alternative implementations have to constantly play catch up with incomplete information. But I agree that it could be worse.
As for adoption: Matrix user numbers are hugely inflated, except for channels of organizations that have officially adopted Matrix (see above) and those bridged to IRC it is in my experience mostly a ghost town.
And what's your proposed solution? They not make any money on their cool FOSS project and die while taking money from google and fade away slowly like Firefox?
Also there's a lot of catch up with messaging apps thats happening to attain feature parity with the likes of slack, discord or twist. So it is bound to happen. Have you seen any of the cool projects built on top of the protocol?
Its gaining traction .. The network effect is an issue but there are a lot of Foss projects and communities on matrix even for less known ones (And they aren't bridged).
We need a self hosted messaging service, XMPP is good but there's room for other ideas to achieve something similar. Matrix and XMPP try to achieve similar goals differently. Wouldn't hurt to have more protocols in this space.
How is Matrix enterprise-y and struggling with adoption?
Matrix is ran by a company (with links to the Israel government).
can you back it up with evidence?
amdocs was an early founder and funder for matrix development, now they may remain as a shareholder
the matrix foundation isn't majority element employees, I'd say the situation is better than with most open source projects developed by commercial entities
It is not even clear from the announcement if it will be possible to openly federate or if it will be like other enterprise Matrix deployments that are shut off from the wider network.
Doesn't matter as both are good for the standard, as it leads to more implementations highlighting flaws and missing information.
The real community federation standards are XMPP and ActivityPub. If you want to break the monopolies of the big social media companies then it is those you should support, not some badly done enterprise Slack clone like Matrix or Rocket Chat.
I agree with that, but there’s been cases of XMPP and ActivityPub providers shutting down federation before.
rocket.chat
[rocket.chat] is building its new federation capabilities on the Matrix protocol
Sigh… why is XMPP always forgotten?
At least this means folks can focus on bridging XMPP<->Matrix, instead of having to support another flavour of JSON soup too...
Don't think it's forgotten as much as it's intentionally left to the side, like IRC. It's showing it's age
Similar to IRC people that say that have usually last used XMPP a decade ago, or only used some extremely outdated software like Pidgin for XMPP or libera.chat for IRC.
Modern XMPP is just as good if not better than Matrix, and it is certainly much less buggy.
Less buggy? I have had OTR and OMEMO fuck uo countless of times. XMPP only somewhat works when both parties use the same client. Multi user chats are abysmal, too.
That said, XMPP is great for building other communication systems since it's pluggable and modular. If I wanted to build a chat system in an MMO or real time IoT communications for example, I'd certainly consider XMPP for its light weight compared to Matrix.