I guess it’s back to ventrilo.
Well, it was a good run.
So, tell me about matrix and how to use its full basic potential…
gentlemen start your enshittification.
Great time to start working on a replacement… if you have several million hanging around.
Start making your plans for a replacement because it will be going to shit soon.
Now is the time for Matrix to improve usability and whatnot, because I think that’s the most credible replacement.
I really wish Matrix had been more successful, but it has some pretty core problems that prevented it from gaining more traction.
It fell into the same trap as XMPP, though perhaps even worse, with a focus more on its protocol and specification than a single unified product vision. The reference server implementation is slow, and using a language not optimal for its purpose, with alternative server implementations left incomplete and unsupported. It took a long time for them to figure out voice and video and for it to work well, and the “user flow” still isn’t at Discord levels.
I’ve rooted for Matrix for a long time, but as a former XMPP evangelist, to me the writing on the wall says it isn’t suited for success either. I’d love to be wrong, but I don’t see a way through.
What do you think the main problems are?
In terms of performance, there’s Rust in the synapse repo already, and both Conduit (Rust) and Dendrite (Go) seem viable. If one of those projects reaches parity with Synapse, do you think that’ll “fix” matrix?
If not, are there other issues core to matrix design? I’m not that familiar with matrix except as an occasional user that follows a few tech rooms, but I’d love to help out if I’m pointed in the right direction. I’m comfortable with Rust and Go (and do Python at my day job), so if backend performance is a bottleneck, I could make help out.
But if the problems are fundamental to how it’s designed or how the project operates, I’d rather work on other things.
I do think the other home server implementations gaining parity (production-ready) with the reference home server would go a long way. I haven’t run a home server but I’ve heard from those that have that it really has a hard time scaling. (Though this serves as impetus to give it a try over spring break)
Which brings me to the caveats of the protocol, I personally don’t think the design is ideal, it’s more described as a distributed message bus, what I’ve read of the spec it’s over engineered, it made good decisions wrt using modern web technologies (JSON, WebRTC), but it didn’t scope itself to the particular task.
That said, I haven’t written a federated protocol, and they have. But if I was going to, I’d really want to look at Discord and see how to copy a lot of that model, but break parts of it out to facilitate federation:
I originally wrote a huge hypothetical design here that I speculated would fare better, but honestly the specifics become less relevant, point is that the shared state of rooms is a real challenge, and one out of scope for just a federated instant messaging system, and I’m no longer certain it’s viable.
I’m personally more interested in P2P protocols than federated, so that’s the stuff I build in my spare time.
So instead of something like Lemmy or Matrix, I’d have something like BitTorrent or Tor, so nodes just add capacity instead of hosting specific content. You could configure your node(s) to pin specific content (e.g. for backups or latency), but your data would also be distributed to other peoples’ computers.
This provides data redundancy, permanency of the service (no centralization whatsoever), and ease of scaling (every client could store and seed data), but comes with complexity. I think it’s workable though.
Matrix is probably something worth looking at, at least from an intellectual standpoint, for you. It uses shared message state and a DAG, plus some fancy perfect forward secrecy (using Signal’s Double Ratchet algorithm), which is at least interesting. There’s also Tox (chat/protocol) if you want totally distributed chat.
Personally, I really like distributed models from a theoretical standpoint; but for end-user applications they pose very difficult constraints, we live in a world with ⪅50% publicly routed IP for one, they fundamentally require immense data replication, latency in peer-finding, bandwidth constraints, and ultimately sub-par UX. I thought IPFS with a way to pay nodes to pin content was a really neat idea, but hasn’t caught on, for example. Not to discourage you, if you think it’s workable then have at it, but I think it at least explains the current state of things.
Finally, I hope Discord’s inevitable enshittification will be the kick in the ass that will launch a platform that doesn’t gargle donkey balls - preferably someting fediverse capable.
That explains all the AI crap they’ve been chasing for a while now. They’ve been trying to juice up the value to make it look appealing to potential buyers because you can basically slap “AI” on anything and it instantly shoots up in value.
Discord is effectively dead if this goes through.
If they’re courting buyers, it’s already dead. It’s just not started to stink yet.
They also put ads on the screen and have been shilling their apps for a while now. There is not even a button to go to the webapp on their mobile site, you have to switch to desktop mode just to get in.
Duuude. Discord is a dumpster fire right now. I’m interested to see how much hotter that fire can get.
First thing they will do is put in some AI that can talk to people for you or something.
I can’t wait for Discord to enshittify so that lazy devs can’t say “join our Discord for updates and support!” anymore.
Hate that shit.
Fiiiiiiiiiinally.
How can it not be awful for them too? Like users may even try to ✌️search Discord✌️ for their issue only to come up short and have fo ask a question asked a million times already. Gross.
It’s quite shit already
Welp, there goes the neighborhood. If they want to do an IPO they’ll probably enshittify the hell out of the platform and jettison all remotely raunchy communities. Because nothing says “good investment” than a service that just drove out a fair chunk of its user base.
I just hope further Enshittification will cause devs to ditch it and start using proper forums instead. It‘s always tragic when a software has no other way of giving feedback and answering questions than Discord where you can‘t find anything, let alone with an external search engine. The abandonment of internet forum culture and searchable discussions has been one of the biggest losses in the virtual space.
Devs using Discord instead of forums perplexes me as much as it annoys me. It’s just the wrong tool for the job.
I want to adopt Matrix but getting started is the hardest part
Getting my friends to shift over is a pain in the ass for sure
I have my friends and family on Matrix.
My instance is over 7 years old.
Love it, can’t imagine being without it.
That’s where a Ulysses pact can help: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/
It was hard to get everyone off aim too but it happened.
Then again there is always IRC.
You SHOULDN’T have gotten people off AIM. AIM was awesome!!!
We used it literally til the servers turned off.
Apparently at least one person is working, fairly successfully, on a server clone. I think it was this one, but I only know about it from one YouTube video I watched weeks ago.
I wonder if Flotilla on Nostr will be ready in time. The nostr community can unfortunately be a bit iffy right now, but I like the tech, and I’m always excited to see someone taking a good stab at Discord.
Soon as you hear the term instance, most people are out.
Call it a server, then. Tons of people already call them Discord servers. And it’d be a lot more true of Flotilla than Discord. Functionally, from a UX perspective, there’d be VERY little difference to an end user. You’d get an invite somehow, probably through a link, maybe combined with whitelisting your identity for more private communities, and you’d be in, using a client remarkably similar to Discord once it’s in a good spot. For most users, they can fully ignore the technical complexities.
Is there one very central, singular instance/server that everyone can join from, without causing performance issues (like if everyone on Lemmy was on the same instance)?
That’s required for normies. Look, 90% of people won’t ever move from reddit to lemmy because they’d have to CHOOSE an instance. It’s not that the choice even matters TOO much. It’s just the fact that there’s a choice. It’s a problem.
When Steve Jobs said Apple restricted your customizability and settings because users are dumb and don’t know what they want, I always thought he was an arrogant dickhead. And he was an arrogant dickhead, but he was also right. Average users don’t want choices, they want the OOTB experience to be as good as possible.
That’s a moot point because Discord doesn’t even have that. Community discovery happens almost entirely through users sharing invite links. There are third party websites that aggregate and categorize public communities with long lasting or permanent invite links, and that’s about the only other option. Functionally, a user can ignore where the community is hosted. All that matters is that they get the invite they want, just like today with Discord.
I think you see it as a federated system like the Fediverse, but that’s not really the case. Nostr relays are under no obligation to propagate content between each other, and for a Discord-like community, there’s no real need to. Clients are free to connect to as few or as many relays as they like. For something like this, the relay used by the community would be baked into the invite so users can connect without worrying about it. From their perspective, the only real difference is that the link doesn’t start with the Discord domain name.
Discord has a single point of registration though.
You can see the same communities from lemmy.world and lemm.ee, more or less. But the average user doesnt know that. They get confused. People are stupid. Sad, I know, but also true.
Nostr identities are entirely self generated, and there’s no need for a traditional registration with each community. A single invite link could theoretically convey all the information required to join a community. Exact implementation will depend on the relay that hosts the community and the software they use to do so, but there’s no explicit need to make users register in a traditional sense, just join with the npub identity they created themselves. Some may make further requirements to curtail spam and other low quality content, but that becomes a decision for each individual community as best fits their needs.
here it fucking comes, if you thought it was enshitified you haven’t seen anything yet!
Enshitification is on the horizon…
