Re: [Tools-discuss] Trial chat services: matrix and zulip

[Matthew Hodgson <[e-mail]>]

On 01/10/2020 16:47, Carsten Bormann wrote:

> On 2020-10-01, at 16:25, Robert Sparks <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> matrix-trial1.ietf.org.
> OMG what is that riot-bot and why does it have to bother me with loud fake music.

Apologies: this was a config error - riot-bot is an old and clunky 
"welcome bot" that we retired months ago, but apparently the sample 
config for Element is stale and so it got accidentally pulled into this 
trial deployment.  The config is now fixed.

In other news, I'm the project lead for Matrix and we're super excited 
that IETF is trialling a deployment.  Folks at IETF-101 in London might 
dimly remember me doing a lightning talk to explain the project's 
mission, which is to provide an open standard for decentralised pubsub, 
with E2EE and decentralised message history.  It's like a more realtime 
version of NNTP, with open federation, freeform data, E2EE and byzantine 
fault tolerance.

The protocol currently evolves using an open governance model under the 
aegis of The Matrix.org Foundation (a UK non-profit; 
https://matrix.org/foundation); with the spec itself living at 
https://matrix.org/docs/spec and the various proposed spec changes in 
flight at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals. Once the biggest 
remaining bits of Matrix are resolved (hierarchical groups, threads, 
extensible profiles and extensible messages) then we hope to snapshot 
the standard for the longterm within a dedicated independent standards 
body such as IETF, assuming interest.

Matrix itself is a global open network of about 22M users spread over 
 >50K instances, ranging from the French govt to Mozilla, Wikimedia, KDE 
and countless smaller/personal servers.  We're also in the process of 
natively bridging Gitter into the network 
(https://matrix.org/blog/2020/09/30/welcoming-gitter-to-matrix).

Finally, in terms of clients: https://matrix-trial1.ietf.org is an 
instance of Element Web (a flagship client we build as 
https://element.io, the startup the Matrix core team formed in order to 
fund Matrix) - but there are *many* alternative excellent Matrix clients 
out there if Element isn't to your taste, e.g. weechat-matrix for TUI, 
or the incredibly light-weight Hydrogen client (alpha at 
https://hydrogen.element.io).

We'd love for the trial to be successful, and are very happy to 
tweak/fix/build things based on any feedback folks have.  For instance, 
the a11y support in Element is entirely thanks to Mozilla's feedback.  
The whole project is open source (Apache licensed) and we also very 
gladly accept contributions (e.g. all the i18n in Element was a 
community contribution).  There's currently some major work going on 
with improved groups, notifications and threading which hasn't landed in 
mainline Element, so if we need to hustle to get that merged so you can 
play with it please yell loudly and let us know.  I'll be hanging around 
in #trial1-feedback:matrix-trial1.ietf.org to answer any feedback, or 
you can find me at @matthew:matrix.org.

thanks,

Matthew

-- 

Matthew Hodgson
Matrix.org