this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
844 points (97.4% liked)
Memes
45608 readers
1093 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm still not entirely sure what problem Sup is trying to solve. Matrix already exists. Matrix supports E2EE through the signal protocol, as well as native federation, and it bridges to almost any existing chat service. Matrix is inherently less secure, overall, than Signal, but I don't see how Sup would fix this either -- for that I'll have to wait and see. As for using one's fedi account to sign-in, that's mostly just up to supporting OAuth, and not some feature that would be unique to the app.
How is matrix less secure? If you don’t mind me asking.
It's harder to maintain security due to more complexity of federated systems and Matrix does not have as much global security community looking at it as Signal has.
I guess that’s a fair assessment. A counter argument on that statement could be safer due to the smaller user base since it is not as on the radar. Or that the various implementations could be more secure since there are multiple choices in server deployments in a few different languages even. That being said synapse is definitely the most dominant by a wide margin.
I point you to this thread, and this thread for explanatioins from those who are more knowledgeable on the topic than I.
What I don't like with Matrix is the load it puts on the server. It basically copies 100% of a room content to any server having one or more users registered in the room.
So if you're on a small server, and one user decides to join a 10k+ large room, your server may collapse under the load as it tries to stay in sync with the room's activity. This is deterrent to self-hosting or family/club/small party servers.
XMPP, on the other hand, has proven to be highly scalable, has E2EE, federation and some bridging services.
The only thing XMPP does NOT have is a single reference multiplatform client with all basic features for 2023 (1:1 chat, chat rooms, voice/video 1:1, and voice/video conference) than anyone can use without wondering if the features-set is the same as the persons you're talking to.
And while we're there: I'm not even sure I want a messaging account linked to any of my Fediverse accounts...
Retroactively?? I'm sure that one could configure this to not be the case... no?
"Collapse" meaning what, exactly? Do you mean run out of storage from the volume of content, or that processing all the messages is too taxing?
How does it scale differently than Matrix?
Out of curiosity, why do you say this?
Years back, I setup a Synapse's server on my personal server (Yunohost). At some point, I joined the "big" Matrix room. Bad idea: RAM and CPU usage went through the roof. I had to kill the server but even that took forever as the system was struggling with the load.
But don't just take my words for it:
https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/7339
Last comment is from less than one year ago. I was told things should be better with newer servers (Dendrite, Conduit, etc.), but I've not tried these yet. They're still in development.
The Matrix protocol is a replication system: your server will have to process all events in the room one or more users attend(s) to. There is a benefit to this: you can't shut down a room by shutting down any server: all the other ones are just as "primary" as the original. Drawback: your humble personal server is now on the hook.
XMPP rooms are more conventional: a room is located on one server. That's an "old" model, but it scales.
https://www.ejabberd.im/benchmark/index.html
That's for the host. For other attendees, it's much lower.
I don't think I atteld any public room out there with 3k users, so I can't report my first hand experience, this is the best I found. But I never had to check for load issue on a small server (running Metronome and many more services).
I don't use the Fediverse the way I engage with individual people. If I want a closer relation with someone, I don't want to be bound to yet-another-messenging system, let alone on multiple accounts
And another reason is I may not want to be bothered by people I don't know, regardless how much I could appreciate reading and/or exchanging with them in the Fediverse.
Ignoring or declining requests from strangers can leave a lot to interpretation and then frustration. Remove the button and no one is tempted to press it the be disappointed with the outcome. Less drama.
And that's only considering well intended people.
But these are my humble 2cents.
It appears that issue is closed as per this comment:
So pehaps this issue that you are describing is now fixed?
This only scales so long as the single server is able to keep up with all of the requests. In the replication, as you have described, all the instances sort of act like load balancers -- they spread the individual requests, and concentrate them into single links between the instances.
I think I see what you are getting at with this. Would it be like, for example, if your Lemmy account is also tied to Matrix, then someone on Lemmy could send you a request to talk on Matrix? Granted this could already be assumed to occur if one uses the same username for all of their accounts, but it could possbily be more of an issue if it was more directly integrated. That being said, I'm not sure how realistic this scenario would be since the Matrix protocol is completely independent of Activity Pub. The only connection between accounts that I can think of is OAuth.
Room replication is not as big of a deal for server as it seems. But as server admin I can say Synapse is terrible at garbage collection, the database keeps growing and growing if you don't make your special scripts to clean it.