Is matrix good to use, seen a lot of drama around it. For example hackliberty.org left it because of lacking of security and moderation, do you still recommended it?

  • moonpiedumplingsEnglish
    31·
    8 days ago

    Along with the other bits that people like and dislike about it, I have another problem with it.

    In order to deploy software in a manner that is resilient, it’s necessary to deploy it in a “High Available” manner. This usually involves duplicated the service across multiple machines, and then automatically switching from one server to the next if one machine goes down. I consider this necessary for something to be a true alternative to the big proprietary software like discord/slack/etc, for smaller groups or nonprofits who want more reliability. Someone losing internet at their house should not result in the whole service going down. A datacenter going up in flames should not result in that lemmy instance going down (forgot which one this happened to, but I’m referencing a real thing).

    The most common way (and arguably, one of the easiest) to do high availability is Kubernetes. Kubernetes has a sort of package manager, called helm where you can quickly spin up services in a highly available manner. Many services offer official helm charts (Unofficial ones are not going to be maintained reliably, so I don’t like them).

    The helm chart for Synapse and the rest is enterprise only meaning you have to pay. Discovering this is what finally really soured me on Matrix as using it as a discord alternative.

    Of course, I never really considered Matrix a discord alternative. It lacks certain features that people want, mentioned below, like voice rooms (although voice rooms are by definition, metadata leakage, meaning people who dislike matrix for the metadata leakage would dislike voice rooms lol).

    Rocketchat appeals to me because of this. Kubernetes/helm, single sign on, and interestingly, it seems to be able to federate with matrix (although I don’t know if it supports e2ee with matrix). It seems that rocketchat has it’s own e2ee, though I don’t know how it works (or if it’s any good). It also seems to support matrix clients, but doesn’t seem to actually be based on matrix.

    But otherwise, rocketchat seems like a much better discord alternative.