Curious how none of the coverage of this launch mention that the app isn’t actually open-source (though they pretend to be an open-source project), which makes all of their claims of “end-to-end encryption” worthless...
@Samsy@arbocenc#XMPP can run bridges (called "Transports" or "Gateways" in XMPP terms) since the early ages. And nowadays, there are modern ones with tight integrations: #Slidge being a flagship (including a #Matrix gateway), and I'm myself working on ActivityPub gateway and soon a email one with #Libervia. #Cheogram is also working on SMTP gateway. And #Biboumi is the flagship #IRC gateway.
It has become among the most popular open messaging protocols, but it remains a scalability nightmare.
It's literally the Blockchain of messaging. Its current state is given by the sum of the whole chain of events received since t=0. It's a brittle append-only ledger, and any modifications you do to it are very likely to break it.
Do you have a huge 100GB database and you want to clean up old stuff? Sorry, you can't. There are some non-official solutions for compacting the events, but they're all likely to break your db - and none worked so far in my case.
Do you have users on your instance that entered a busy room on matrix.org? Then you'll get all the join/leave events of that busy room on your db, with no way of deleting them, and nothing to do unless your users exit those rooms.
Did you start your instance by toying with the default SQLite backend, and now that it's become big you want to move to Postgres? Sorry, no official guides provided, only unofficial procedures scattered across a bunch of blogs.
Do you want to change the name of your server? Sorry, you can't. All the events are tightly coupled to your server name. The advised solution is to simply start a new instance.
Such a rigid and brittle implementation shouldn't have become an open de facto standard without much questioning about its poor design decisions.
At the very least, some official tools must be provided to enable admins to compact events. If the size of the database is guaranteed to increase indefinitely, then entry barriers against self-hosting are only going to increase.
There is also a company called Beeper that tries to sell you access to Matrix bridges/gateways for $15/month. Maybe @nicoco (Slidge¹ developer) needs to go talk to some VCs.
@drazraeltod
Biboumi is the best bridging service I've ever seen. It's also the only way I use irc.
Especially how it maps and how it deals with the shortcomings from either protocol to each other is very nice and thoughtful.
I guess native is always the best for some people. Especially if you're used to it. But using biboumi you already have your bouncer too and I don't have to switch apps to access irc rooms. #biboumi @jabberati
Automattic buys Beeper for $125MM, launches closed-source "privacy" app (techcrunch.com)
Curious how none of the coverage of this launch mention that the app isn’t actually open-source (though they pretend to be an open-source project), which makes all of their claims of “end-to-end encryption” worthless...