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u_tamtam

@ u_tamtam @programming.dev

Posts
4
Comments
130
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

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  • , and this is just the beginning.It's bad omen to criticize an opensource project, I know, but in my eyes Matrix is a big technical and organizational failure, for not having succeeded in stabilizing the protocol after a whole decade of unsuccessful explorations, and for having its leadership consistently fail to define clear goals and steer the project towards them (just get it done and working well before trying to make it "peer to peer" or "in the metaverse").

    If this is the electroshock that Matrix needs to reconsider its design and directions? good for them. If that kills them? Well too bad, but it's not like they are the only cool kid in town.

  • Decentralized Matrix messaging network says it now has 115M users

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  • Many communities went back to IRC, though, because Matrix still is a hot mess, and the most visible ones which didn't (Mozilla, KDE, ...) are not hosting their own Matrix instance but letting New Vector do that for them, which makes in practice a disproportionate amount of users and accounts be managed by a single organization. I do think it's better than discord, but barely so.

  • Decentralized Matrix messaging network says it now has 115M users

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  • Don't ever bring this to the people in charge or you might be told "sorry for that" "but now it's been fixed, deployed any week now" "you are a liar, this has never been true" and "it doesn't really matter for the general case" either in the same post or few responses apart. Matrix has been in a permanent state of unstable mess, and the leadership disingenuous attitude made me lose hope that this will ever change. More people should start reading through the fanfare and superlative blog posts, which, admittedly is the thing they do the best and much better than the other projects out there.

  • databag: A tiny selfhosted federated messenger for the decentralized web.

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  • It says it's federated. When you are your own provider, e2ee doesn't matter nearly as much (you probably have a bunch of personal files, backups, services running on the same box anyway).

    Edit: I would gladly take constructive comments with the downvotes. For a moment I thought we were on "selfhosted", where "you are your own provider" should resonate in with most

  • Why do most people choose to use WhatsApp over telegram??

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  • I’m selfhosting a Matrix server and have all my Chats from other apps also bridged to there.

    Same here, but with XMPP in place of Matrix. For historical context, XMPP was invented about 25 years ago on the premise that people were already tired of having their instant messaging scattered over multiple protocols (rather than Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, iMessage now, it was Yahoo, MSN, AIM, ICQ, … then), so bridging is very much front and center in the XMPP world. Over time, people also realized that bridging sucks in general (you either dumb down your client to the lowest common denominator which sucks for yourself, or your client isolates itself from the source protocol enough that it sucks for everyone else).To add insult to injury, most modern protocols also forbid, by their ToS, the use of alternative clients (which very much includes bridges), and to the best of my knowledge WhatsApp, Signal and Discord will eventually suspend your account on this basis.Matrix is still trying to carve a niche for itself in this space, and is failing IMO (judging by the quality/security of the bridges they have come-up with, and the recent libera.chat fiasco). I'd say that the situation in this regard in XMPP is only marginally better due to the fact that XMPP had a decade headstart to fail and try over, and I would not recommend using bridges on either of them if that can be avoided.

    It XMPP better for group VC?

    I'd say "it depends". Fun fact, Matrix uses jitsi-meet under the hood (which is XMPP + a media transcoding/multicasting component that doubles as a relay), and jitsi-meet is my recommendation for this use-case: as long as the central server has good bandwidth, you can really scale up your VC to many attendees. On top of that, XMPP has support for peer-to-peer group VC, with the benefit that hosting is simpler, it doesn't require any central component/relay (but the bandwidth cost is incurred on all participants and you won't go beyond a handful of attendees that way).

  • Why do most people choose to use WhatsApp over telegram??

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  • I'd rather push for XMPP personally, the matrix protocol has been a dumpster fire in an "almost ready, trust me bro" state for as long as it has existed, and failed to justify its own weight and complexity. But that's mostly irrelevant since they are open protocols and can somewhat bridge with one another.

  • Why do most people choose to use WhatsApp over telegram??

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  • People don't choose, people use whatever most people around them use. Whatsapp and telegram are both centralized, and shouldn't be trusted because, by the nature of it, they can (and eventually will) turn user-hostile.

    Messengers come and go, if we really want to make some progress in this area, we should embrace federated and p2p protocols as the logical evolution. Anything else is just wasting time and user privacy.

  • Another good reason not to open port 22

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  • Or, you know, just use key auth only and fail2ban. Putting sshd behind another port only buys you a little time.

  • What types of services are you not willing to self-host?

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  • And so damn easy to self-host in general. Ejabberd is batteries included down to offering stun/turn for audio/video calls, Erlang is just unrivaled when it comes to hot reloading so updates are effectively zero-downtime (unsurprising considering all the business critical environments it's deployed).

    At first (and especially because I went with Matrix originally) I wouldn't think of self hosting all my instant messaging, but in retrospect, ejabberd is one of the easiest services I've got to maintain. I highly recommend everyone to give it a shot, especially to all the matrix refugees to whom it was a surprise/disappointment.

  • Your favorite "next-gen" matrix server

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  • For me it's ejabberd, I gave up on Matrix, it was too stressful and expe/ansive to sysadmin.