I recently tried riot.im and I'm realy blown away by the good UI they have and how easy it is to get started to develop your own stuff.
It is a shame that nothing by the likes exists in the XMPP-sphere.
EDIT: As a side note: Daniel Gultsch from the conversations-fame is doing a great job by providing/developing a realy awesome XMPP client for android and pushing the standard forward.
I registered when it was called called Vector and recently started using it more seriously. It is freaking fantastic. Voice/video calls actually works and the Android app is very good. It was long since I had such as strong feeling of "this is it".
When it comes to protocols (as opposed to "services"), they're seldom replaced. I mean, we're still using IRC for open source projects. Matrix/Riot gives me a glimpse of the future.
> I mean, we're still using IRC for open source projects. Matrix/Riot gives me a glimpse of the future.
Matrix/Riot does tend to break down in channels with 30k users all chatting, sending hundredthousands of messages per minute. (Which is a real use case of IRC).
I guess you're talking about something like Twitch? That's certainly a use case but a rather extreme and rare one. Among public IRC networks I believe QuakeNet has the record with a peak of ~240k users in total on the entire network (that was a long time ago). Channel record on QuakeNet was ~10k users. These days it looks like only two IRC networks have >30k active users in total (according to http://irc.netsplit.de/networks/) - freenode and IRCnet.
Right. I do share your concerns about performance, but I'm sure it will improve considerably. A few months ago on reddit, one of the Matrix core devs (ara4n) answered a question about how much they can improve performance:
"enormously. much of synapse's algorithms and DB schema are still unoptimised, plus python is not exactly renowned for being super-fast. we're effectively going through rewriting chunks of synapse - e.g. the new state storage representation in 0.18, and meanwhile Ruma is going through writing a cleanroom impl in Rust that should be a bajillion times faster :)"
I'm ignorant on the subject, how can hundred/thousands messages per minute be a real use case? I would expect such massive amount to be parsed by robots, not humans, and in that case why use IRC at all instead of a queue system like RabbitMQ? Maybe because it's easier to share an IRC channel than an open queue?
Think of it as a crowd cheering. You can't make out any single voice, but there's a coherency to the noise. In the same way, mass-chats conform around smileys and memes in response to whatever the crowd is viewing together.
How does it break down? The largest Matrix rooms we've seen have got ~50K users in them with very high traffic, and Synapse is good for at least 10 msgs/s currently (with orders of magnitude improvements on the horizon).
There is a reimplementation of the Python based server in Rust going on right now. The Python version has proven really slow in places, and Rust is probably a great answer to shortcomings in Python performance without having to change semantics much.
A native server with a socket-based and not longpolling based transport system would indeed solve many of the issues.
But even then, Matrix will likely not scale well enough to replace Twitch's backend, or to be able to nicely handle QuakeNet's event channels.
You'll also have to have a native client at that point, because the webclient also breaks down at those amounts. And you'll need to use a binary protocol or simplistic text protocol between client and server, because otherwise the user's mobile connection won't be able to handle that traffic.
Matrix will have to change a lot of things before that scaling is easy.
This looks great. I've often thought the biggest issue holding back xmpp adoption is the lack of web clients. I'm convinced e-mail would be dead if it wasn't for webmail clients. People will eventually graduate to a native client that suits their needs but finding a client and installing it as well as finding a xmpp service provider is a much bigger initial hurdle than just trying out xmpp because a friend recommended you a service. I've been thinking about hosting my own xmpp server and I will definitely keep this project in mind if I ever make accounts for friends.
I can only imagine an engineer could see it this way. I found it rather confusing. I tried joining #debian and I kept getting "invitation" messages from some IRC bridge.
Reflecting a bit more, I think that if I stayed away from IRC it would have been less weird. Now I'm just wondering how the web client works. Do I trust my encryption to JavaScript?
And now after actually trying it out, photos and videos work pretty well. I can see this is a work in progress. So far so good, they just gotta hide all those public groups away somewhere. They could use a harsh critique from Moxie about real users I think.
Riot looks nice as far as I can tell. Is there any documentation, proper list of features, what kinds of bridges exist, how to use them etc? The info on riot.im seems really sparse.
It is a shame that nothing by the likes exists in the XMPP-sphere.
EDIT: As a side note: Daniel Gultsch from the conversations-fame is doing a great job by providing/developing a realy awesome XMPP client for android and pushing the standard forward.