Re: Is Matrix a good choice?

[Max Mehl]

~ Dr. Trigon [2022-03-16 15:10 +0100]:
>>Free Software and offers additional value for our community, and
> 
> What is the additional value? (just curious)

In the process of FSFE teams deciding to switch to Matrix, quite a few
have been brought up. IIRC, just from the top of my head and rephrasing:

* Reactions to messages (like thumbs-up)
* More people use Matrix, therefore easier to attract new audiences
* More reliable archiving
* Upcoming features like polls
* Federated rooms with multiple addresses allow preserving a room if the
  "original" server it was hosted on is offline temporarily or
  permanently
* Easy and seamless encryption, also for group chats
* Spaces allow for easy hierarchy and organisation of rooms
* Feels more actively developed and at the same time usable on all
  servers. Good interoperability of advanced features

All these points may have downsides, and in some cases XMPP may even be
better (e.g. OMEMO has a few cryptographic advantages in terms of
perfect forward secrecy). Also the client side of Matrix is admittedly
far from perfect as the protocol is developed rapidly. Again, it's not
an obvious choice, and I hope that fair and healthy competition benefits
both (and more) worlds.

>>see defects or bad developments, but let us also try to fix these
>>issues. If they are unsolvable, one should at least try to make the
>>competing software solution (in this case XMPP, but also sysinit etc)
> 
> That is another good point. What facts would make you state "it is 
> unsolvable"? To me the critics cited target the foundation of Matrix and from 
> that I concluded even if it can be fixed it might be very costly and thus 
> it's not worth the try. Just thinking aloud...

That can be a hard or soft fact. If the repository owner or project lead
is unresponsive and thereby let's the project die slowly, issues are
unsolvable, at least in this space (forks to the rescue). Also a license
change to a proprietary license is a hard no-no for our community.

But it could also be that you have personal difficulties with lead
developers, or that you generally dislike the strategy of a project.
Well, instead of badmouthing the project then, I am suggesting to invest
your energy in a project or initiative you prefer.

Best,
Max

-- 
Max Mehl - Programme Manager -- Free Software Foundation Europe
Contact and information: https://fsfe.org/about/mehl -- @mxmehl
The FSFE is a charity that empowers users to control technology
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All
participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other:
https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct

Criticisms and choices (was Re: Is Matrix a good choice?)

[Paul Boddie]

On Wednesday, 16 March 2022 12:37:26 CET Max Mehl wrote:
> 
> On a personal and general note, I sometimes wonder about the energy some
> people put into badmouthing certain projects in lengthy posts because of
> personal taste or disliking a person behind the project. This did not
> happen in this thread or by the initial poster, but I recently see it a
> lot with Matrix or of course also systemd.

There's a pervasive attitude in Free Software thanks to the influence of 
broader commercial and social culture, particularly American-style capitalism, 
where there apparently has to be a winner and, therefore, losers. So, a lot of 
energy is spent pursuing the zero-sum game of hustling for one's chosen winner 
and/or denigrating the competition. Ever heard anyone tell you that you should 
"stop needlessly competing with us and join our project instead"? That gets 
said quite a bit in Free Software, certainly in the Python community.

The zero-sum game thing showed itself when people started to consider 
alternatives to Facebook: pretty quickly, there was a lot of hype for Dispora 
with the usual media focus on the personalities involved, plus a lot of 
product focus rather than a focus on standards and interoperability. 
Personally, I don't pay a lot of attention to this form of communication, but 
I understand that things have since settled down. I guess everyone realised 
that the opportunity to be the one wearing the crown and ruling the kingdom 
wasn't really there.

Our wider societies are largely consumerist and focused on "brand name" 
solutions to everything, and it is arguably easier to deliver such messaging 
than it is to communicate a more complicated and nuanced picture. 
Counterintuitively, it seems that although competition and choice are 
supposedly valued, the last thing that people seem to want is to be confronted 
the existence of competition and the need to actually make a choice.

Then again, this is understandable: things like privatisation have effectively 
conjured up pretend markets that compel everyone to choose something that 
should just be provided uniformly and in a reasonable way, and choice in such 
a context is less about preferences and more about avoiding being exploited 
and overcharged by middlemen. The UK energy supplier "market" has recently 
been learning about this the hard way, although such "financialisation" has 
been underway for years in various countries.

> Is that helping Free Software? I don't think so. Sure, we should have a
> close look at software solutions, criticise them based on facts if we
> see defects or bad developments, but let us also try to fix these
> issues. If they are unsolvable, one should at least try to make the
> competing software solution (in this case XMPP, but also sysinit etc)
> better than the one one is criticising; there have to be valid reasons
> why users and projects switched to the newer software apart from "hype".
> With this, we could achieve much more for the benefit of user freedoms
> as a community.

I agree that people should absolutely invest in alternatives to the latest 
trends and fashions. One damaging element of our societies has been the 
running down of their resilience by people deciding that any form of 
duplication of effort is "inefficient" and therefore unnecessary. As noted 
above, however, there is considerable resistance to pursuing such parallel 
initiatives. It even becomes internalised and considered as common sense or 
some kind of natural order: for example, why bother doing this or that when 
"you can just put Linux on it"?

Here the case of systemd is actually illustrative, too, often being presented 
as a controversy based on technological ideology: one side wants to further a 
particular technological agenda; the other apparently rejects that agenda and 
appeals to earlier ideological principles. Soon enough, the discussion gets 
heated and personal, which is, of course, unwelcome and regrettable. But 
nobody really addresses the social and commercial dynamics that underpin the 
real nature of the conflict.

As with other technologies, like the Free Software desktop environments, by 
the time end-users get to use the software, a bunch of other people have 
decided precisely how the experience is going to be. And increasingly, if 
those end-users don't like what they see, their complaints end up being 
brushed off as "entitled" or unappreciative of the vision or hard work of the 
designers and developers of that software. (Never mind that the designers in 
various cases are pretty visionless and seem to have little sense of the 
history of the technologies in which they claim to be authorities.)

But what chance do the end-users actually have of influencing the result? They 
can get involved and presumably be told to "pipe down" when making their 
suggestions, so as not to upset the visionaries, or they can fork the entire 
software stack, which is hardly realistic. One can argue that many influenti

Re: Is Matrix a good choice?

[Dr. Trigon]

Thanks for your reply.

>First of all, "may be very dubious" cannot be the foundation for a
>decision. Can you provide facts to support your doubts that take the

I agree. It should make you cautious and intressted in gathering more facts and 
information. Thats what I am after.

>did not discontinue XMPP at all [^1]. Teams can freely decide which

I like and apprechiate that. And it's part of the reason why I am intressed in 
discussing the facts and info with the people here.

>Free Software and offers additional value for our community, and

What is the additional value? (just curious)

>see defects or bad developments, but let us also try to fix these
>issues. If they are unsolvable, one should at least try to make the
>competing software solution (in this case XMPP, but also sysinit etc)

That is another good point. What facts would make you state "it is unsolvable"? 
To me the critics cited target the foundation of Matrix and from that I 
concluded even if it can be fixed it might be very costly and thus it's not 
worth the try. Just thinking aloud...

Thanks and Greetings
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All
participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other:
https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct

Re: Is Matrix a good choice?

[Dr. Trigon]

>Matrix, now, is a different story. My family and those friends I care about the
>most had no issues adopting Element. 

So XMPP basically lacks in a good cross-platform GUI like Element. That's a 
point I came across also.

>The article you linked raises some very worrying issues which I was not aware
>of; thank you for pointing them out. But, 

Your welcome! ;))

>I don’t much like the tone it is written in. For example (paraphrasing) “Matrix
>developers responded, but we didn’t even read that because we don’t care”.

I agree on this the tone is provoking and theatric, indeed.

>And third, I don’t think absolutes like “Matrix sends a lot of data” are the

What I was told in other places is Matrix uses a lot more of server ressources 
also because it shares / distributes a lot of user metadata between servers. 
May be something like 10 times as much ressources.

>best way to look at this. How does it compare to similar widely-used services
>like Signal and Telegram? How does it compare to an XMPP setup with similar
>functionality and user experience (I assume that such a thing is possible
>nowadays, it wasn’t when I last used it)? I think it would be useful to know
>where Matrix stands in the landscape of communication tools, and to see some
>path it could take to get to a more privacy-friendly position.

I agree that would be intressting indeed.

One point to make is about privacy. Basically it is not possible to setup any 
chat nowadays without at some point needing to thrust somebody else - except 
you host it yourself and for that you have to dedicate a serious amount of time 
and you have to really (really) know what you are doing.

Greetings
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All
participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other:
https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct

Re: Is Matrix a good choice?

[Jure Varlec]

“Dr. Trigon”  writes:

> The thing I wonder is; we have a quite good solution XMPP - now why follow the
> hype just to get something that may be very dubious…?

But /is/ XMPP a good solution? Admittedly, it’s been a long time since I last
used it, but it’s been terribly fragmented, and my attempt to get friends and
family to use it were not successful. Heck, I didn’t like it much myself. A
communication tool that only you yourself use is not terribly useful, right?
XMPP might be an appropriate choice for the technical crowd, but probably not
everyone else.

Matrix, now, is a different story. My family and those friends I care about the
most had no issues adopting Element. Especially now that cross-signing works,
having effortless end-to-end encrypted chat with not much technical knowledge
required is a very good thing in my opinion.

The article you linked raises some very worrying issues which I was not aware
of; thank you for pointing them out. But, first, as others noted, it’s been a
few years since the article was posted, so this topic is due a refresh. Second,
I don’t much like the tone it is written in. For example (paraphrasing) “Matrix
developers responded, but we didn’t even read that because we don’t care”.

And third, I don’t think absolutes like “Matrix sends a lot of data” are the
best way to look at this. How does it compare to similar widely-used services
like Signal and Telegram? How does it compare to an XMPP setup with similar
functionality and user experience (I assume that such a thing is possible
nowadays, it wasn’t when I last used it)? I think it would be useful to know
where Matrix stands in the landscape of communication tools, and to see some
path it could take to get to a more privacy-friendly position.

Just my thoughts. I’d love to do some research myself, but I have already
committed all of my free time. If you or someone else can dig up the current
state of things, I would greatly appreciate it.

Best,
Jure


signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All
participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other:
https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct

Re: Is Matrix a good choice?

[Max Mehl]

~ Dr. Trigon [2022-03-10 09:58 +0100]:
> The thing I wonder is; we have a quite good solution XMPP - now why
> follow the hype just to get something that may be very dubious...?

I see multiple problems with your statement.

First of all, "may be very dubious" cannot be the foundation for a
decision. Can you provide facts to support your doubts that take the
most recent developments of Matrix/Element into consideration?

Furthermore, while the FSFE has decided to set up a Matrix instance, it
did not discontinue XMPP at all [^1]. Teams can freely decide which
communication channel to use. Some moved over to Matrix, some stay with
XMPP. 

As every software, it is imperfect. What's important is that Matrix is
Free Software and offers additional value for our community, and
therefore it is not fully overlapping with XMPP.


On a personal and general note, I sometimes wonder about the energy some
people put into badmouthing certain projects in lengthy posts because of
personal taste or disliking a person behind the project. This did not
happen in this thread or by the initial poster, but I recently see it a
lot with Matrix or of course also systemd.

Is that helping Free Software? I don't think so. Sure, we should have a
close look at software solutions, criticise them based on facts if we
see defects or bad developments, but let us also try to fix these
issues. If they are unsolvable, one should at least try to make the
competing software solution (in this case XMPP, but also sysinit etc)
better than the one one is criticising; there have to be valid reasons
why users and projects switched to the newer software apart from "hype".
With this, we could achieve much more for the benefit of user freedoms
as a community.

Best,
Max

[^1]: https://fsfe.org/news/2022/news-20220202-01.html

-- 
Max Mehl - Programme Manager -- Free Software Foundation Europe
Contact and information: https://fsfe.org/about/mehl -- @mxmehl
The FSFE is a charity that empowers users to control technology


pgpP9bpW22N9V.pgp
Description: PGP signature
___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All
participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other:
https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct

Re: Is Matrix a good choice?

[Dr. Trigon]

The thing I wonder is; we have a quite good solution XMPP - now why follow the 
hype just to get something that may be very dubious...?


Am 8. März 2022 11:27:58 MEZ schrieb "Daniele "Mte90" Scasciafratte" 
:
>Considering that FSFe is using Matrix I don't think that is a problem.
>
>Also this page was published in 2020 and in the meantime various things are 
>changed (like protocol versions). Like Riot the client now changed name (I 
>don't remember why honestly).
>Another thing is that is FOSS so should be easy to confirm the fact that send 
>data to matrix central servers (and what kind of data anyway?). In my 
>experience vector.im is used for login authenthication but I never studied how 
>works.
>
>To me the real issues with Matrix are the UX that is very bad comparing to any 
>other chat solution.
>
>Daniele Scasciafratte - OpenSource MultiVersal Guy
>daniele.tech  - @Mte90Net  
>- GitHub  - Italian Linux Society council member 
> - Mozillian 
>Mozilla Reps, Mozilla TechSpeakers, WordPress Core Contributor 
>, FSFE member ,
>LibreItalia member , Wikimedia Italia member 
> and LUG Rieti founder .
>Il 27/02/22 09:13, Dr. Trigon ha scritto:
>> Has anybody read https://www.hackea.org/notas/matrix.html ? What is the 
>> position of fsfe regarding these issues?
>>
>> ___
>> Discussion mailing list
>> Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
>> https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
>>
>> This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All
>> participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other:
>> https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct___
Discussion mailing list
Discussion@lists.fsfe.org
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All
participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other:
https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct