Matrix – An open network for secure, decentralized communication

Beyond the general idea of Matrix itself, a nice snapshot of all the stuff currently happening in the Matrix ecosystem right now is the This Week In Matrix blog series, which goes out every Friday. This week’s one is at: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/08/21/this-week-in-matrix-2020-... Some of the stuff I’m personally most excited about right now is Hydrogen (https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web): a super lightweight web client which heavily leans on indexeddb for storage and so minimises RAM. My primary…

Very interesting. Lots of questions, but I'll avoid those that are listed but not yet answered in the FAQ. How does Matrix deal with netsplits and partial-netsplits? How are highly diverged histories (e.g. a long netsplit in an active room) supposed to be merged? Does the protocol require O(N^2) connections for N users? (The number of users in some IRC rooms is measured in thousands.) Can it be more efficient? How are rooms administered? E.g. how is it decided that…

I’ve hosted a personal Matrix server (Dendrite) and web client (Element) for the last six months, with unhappy results. In practice an entirely self‐hosted Matrix stack seems to be kind of unreliable for me. Having joined just a couple of large rooms—open source project chats that migrated from IRC after the Freenode debacle—sync on login never seems to work right, either getting stuck on a loading animation, or loading messages out of order (“Friday” followed by “Today” followed by January…

This looks like an excellent alternative to Telegram or Signal group chats. Telegram group chats work so darn good, but they're not end-to-end encrypted if you want to be able to access them from more than one device. Signal/WhatsApp group chats are end-to-end encrypted but aren't nearly as seamless. Self hosted but not end-end-encrypted would be a good compromise i believe. I love that there's a web client. Has anyone really put it to work? I'd love to hear how…