This is not true. One of the benefits I’ve enjoyed greatly is being able to point a group of non-techies at a URL and have them up and running […]
I was talking about the protocol’s complexity, Matrix is indeed notorious for that (you can lookup “Matrix state resolution” if you want to know more). That’s not removing anything from the good work they’ve accomplished on the client-side, which you’ve highlighted, but just to be fair to XMPP, that’s not unique to Matrix and you can find something comparable e.g. here: https://jabberfr.org/
with only a single entity […] being in charge
Also not true.
It’s true and easily verifiable in practice, just check-out who’s doing the work, who’s operating the network (still very centralized), who’s operating the gateways/bridges, and where the finances are going. Being an open protocol is a good start, but more important is how diverse is the ecosystem of client and server implementations and actors, and although the client-side has seen some diversification in the recent years, it’s still very much an issue. New Vector Ltd is failing in one area, and now tens of thousands of users are disconnected from thousands of rooms. Now, compare that with the XMPP ecosystem, and the dozens of companies, individuals and NGOs contributing/sponsoring and authoring the protocol and its implementations.
There is no single client or server.
There is only one client that’s fully featured, and it’s element, there’s only one server that’s mature and that’s synapse, none are fully spec-compliant, both are maintained by New Vector Ltd. You don’t encounter such a rift between “the reference client” vs “the rest” in the XMPP world, and you don’t see situations where the spec is updated “best-effort” from the implementation.
but it’s a niche within a niche. It doesn’t address the problems that Matrix solves.
What do you think are the problems that Matrix solve, essentially?
It won’t ever become a “messenger for the masses”, it’s just not that good compared to WhatsApp and Messenger.
It won’t ever become the reference “open-source, open-protocol” messenger, Signal is there to stay.
Remains the niche of “the messenger that I self-host because I can” which is shared with XMPP.
In this regard, Matrix is much harder and costlier to run. It addresses the same problem space with more overhead and complexity, which costs them in terms of diversity of implementation and resilience. When I wrote earlier about large users dropping them, I had in mind the French government which cut their losses and stopped subsidizing New Vector Ltd, while much larger XMPP instances comfortably run millions of users privately and quietly (in things like online games).
I also have in mind the upcoming “Matrix 2.0” shake-up, which is the 3rd or 4th reboot of the Matrix protocol. It has a good chance of being the last one, though, because the new design basically starts from the realization that “the protocol is too complex, the client can’t efficiently deal with that on the user’s device, so clients will now run remotely, and a dumb frontend will connect to the proxy”. So, expect even greater self-hosting costs and marginalization.
I was talking about the protocol’s complexity, Matrix is indeed notorious for that (you can lookup “Matrix state resolution” if you want to know more). That’s not removing anything from the good work they’ve accomplished on the client-side, which you’ve highlighted, but just to be fair to XMPP, that’s not unique to Matrix and you can find something comparable e.g. here: https://jabberfr.org/
It’s true and easily verifiable in practice, just check-out who’s doing the work, who’s operating the network (still very centralized), who’s operating the gateways/bridges, and where the finances are going. Being an open protocol is a good start, but more important is how diverse is the ecosystem of client and server implementations and actors, and although the client-side has seen some diversification in the recent years, it’s still very much an issue. New Vector Ltd is failing in one area, and now tens of thousands of users are disconnected from thousands of rooms. Now, compare that with the XMPP ecosystem, and the dozens of companies, individuals and NGOs contributing/sponsoring and authoring the protocol and its implementations.
There is only one client that’s fully featured, and it’s element, there’s only one server that’s mature and that’s synapse, none are fully spec-compliant, both are maintained by New Vector Ltd. You don’t encounter such a rift between “the reference client” vs “the rest” in the XMPP world, and you don’t see situations where the spec is updated “best-effort” from the implementation.
What do you think are the problems that Matrix solve, essentially?
It won’t ever become a “messenger for the masses”, it’s just not that good compared to WhatsApp and Messenger.
It won’t ever become the reference “open-source, open-protocol” messenger, Signal is there to stay.
Remains the niche of “the messenger that I self-host because I can” which is shared with XMPP.
In this regard, Matrix is much harder and costlier to run. It addresses the same problem space with more overhead and complexity, which costs them in terms of diversity of implementation and resilience. When I wrote earlier about large users dropping them, I had in mind the French government which cut their losses and stopped subsidizing New Vector Ltd, while much larger XMPP instances comfortably run millions of users privately and quietly (in things like online games).
I also have in mind the upcoming “Matrix 2.0” shake-up, which is the 3rd or 4th reboot of the Matrix protocol. It has a good chance of being the last one, though, because the new design basically starts from the realization that “the protocol is too complex, the client can’t efficiently deal with that on the user’s device, so clients will now run remotely, and a dumb frontend will connect to the proxy”. So, expect even greater self-hosting costs and marginalization.