convos VS matrix-rust-sdk

Excellent idea! You'll have a mature, open standard protocol under the hood, with no vendor lock-in, excellent extensibility, and great modern frontends like The Lounge (https://thelounge.chat/) or Convos (https://convos.chat/) to choose from (and you can choose).

And UnrealIRCD still rocks. For a quick-and-dirty setup I've deploy ng-ircd but Unreal has always been my go-to for anything serious. If nothing else it can be useful as a backup or internal platform during the rare events that Slack or Discord are having an incident. The common complaint is a lack of channel back-log but it can be front-ended with TheLounge [1] or Convos [2]. I personally prefer to handle that with gnu screen or tmux and WeeChat [3].

[1] - https://github.com/thelounge

[2] - https://github.com/convos-chat/convos/

[3] - https://weechat.org/

For the other layers one can front-end IRC with TheLounge [1][2] or Convos [3][4]. TheLounge only persists history in private mode meaning that users are created in that front-end and chat messages are in Redis. For small networks or groups of friends this is probably fine.

Notably missing is voice chat. I use the Mumble client [5] with the Murmur or uMurmur [6] server which is light-weight enough to run on ones home router. I use it on Alpine Linux, works great. It's not a shiny and attention grabbing as Discord but probably fine for everyone else. For people to create their own voice channels would require the full-blown Murmur server.

[1] - https://github.com/thelounge

[2] - https://thelounge.chat/

[3] - https://github.com/convos-chat/convos/

[4] - https://convos.chat/

[5] - https://www.mumble.info/

[6] - https://github.com/umurmur/umurmur/wiki/Configuration

FWIW TheLounge [1] and Convos [2] can front-end an IRC server giving it much of the look of a modern client and also chat persistence when using TheLounge in private mode. The trade-off in my opinion is scalability. With a bog standard IRCD I can handle tens of thousands of clients per node. Adding web persistent chat adds memory usage.

[1] - https://github.com/thelounge https://thelounge.chat/

[2] - https://github.com/convos-chat/convos/ https://convos.chat/

IRC is a mature, extensible, open protocol, with a wide variety of server and client implementations to suit many use cases, servers can be self-hosted and federated, and modern web-based clients like The Lounge or Convos offer a user experience equivalent to Discord, Slack, etc.

Standard IRC with a web interface like The Lounge or Convos

And there are some great web-based clients like the Lounge and Convos that offer an equivalent UX to Discord or Slack, are open-source, self-hostable, and based on a mature, reliable, and extensible open protocol.

Take a look at convos to see if it fits your needs: https://convos.chat/

There are web front-ends to IRC that can mitigate message loss without having to run bouncers. Convos [1] and TheLounge [2] come to mind but there are others [3]

[1] - https://convos.chat/

[2] - https://thelounge.chat/

[3] - https://www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi/irc_technology_news_from_th...

Yep, a good example is the element X rewrite

They use Jetpack on Android

https://github.com/vector-im/element-x-android

And SwiftUI on iOS

https://github.com/vector-im/element-x-ios

But both use the same underlying Matrix Rust SDK

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk

So they share the core part of the app between platforms, but everything user facing is native

The one place eyebal is already being used is matrix-rust-sdk, mostly for bits of the API that act as a model for specific UI parts in apps built on top of it. A part of those APIs is also using observable vectors from eyeball-im, which I didn't mention initially because it's not as well-documented and polished.

Hello everyone, I am finally making it to all of the great talks about Matrix from FOSDEM 23, and one thing that seemed like an obvious thing that could be built on some of the new projects works (matrix-rich-text-editor, matrix-rust-sdk) is a collaborative (multi-user, live edits) document tool built ontop of rust. That said, I haven't seen any project doing this yet. Does anyone know of one?

Another important piece of the ecosystem for which Rust was used is the SDK. This new SDK was used to write the newest mobile client - Element X. The current Element client will also see its cryptography implementation being changed from Javascript to Rust, this was also made possible by the new Rust based SDK.

Let's say I'll switch as soon as they start using Sanakirja. They're partially right in their analysis of Sanakirja, but their comments are more about the lack of expressiveness of the unsafe keyword in Rust than about Sanakirja itself. I'm preparing a blog post about my dream version of unsafe.

>Well I care, that does not mean that you have to care.

The point I'm making is that the protocol being implement-able by yourself or grabbing a lib from someone else is moot, since you will 9 times out of 10 use a library.

>Again, look at the lack of client diversity for Matrix and tell me that you do not think that there is at least some correlation in terms of the complexity of the protocol.

The problem is not client diversity for Matrix - there's plenty of them. The problem is that Matrix is more than displaying a log on a screen, and most of the clients are frankly abysmal and could use a trained UI/UX owner.

>last I checked it meant using either Python or Go

The Rust SDK has worked well for me, although I can't state how close it is to Python or Go's libs. That said, I know I'm certainly not the only one using it.

The Rust lib could be wrapped into other languages (e.g, Ruby) if there's not a good SDK for that language. I don't really consider this to be an issue, especially considering the Rust SDK is maintained by the Matrix org themselves.

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk

>Add to this that the more mandatory features you have and keep adding

Don't maintain your own bespoke library and you won't have to. :)

>But I am not going to behave as if images, reactions, code blocks, threads, end-to-end encryption, voice calls, video calls, etc. do not come at a cost.

They do come at a cost, but that's the price of admission for what people expect from modern chat systems. I'd rather live in 2022 than 2004, and I grew up on IRC.

I'm not entirely sure what I plan to use Rust with at the moment, however my first project so far has been to write a Matrix bot using the matrix-rust-sdk library :)

Just for everyone else reading, the modern Matrix Rust stack referred to here is the matrix-rust-sdk: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk

The current way we're approaching this is to split the reference E2EE implementation into its own rust crate (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/tree/master/ma...) which can be used with any SDK (e.g. we're almost finished embedding it into the Kotlin matrix-android-sdk2 client)

Separately, there's also the overall matrix-rust-sdk https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk for clients to use as a "full fat" Matrix client SDK - as used by Fractal Next (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/fractal/-/tree/fractal-next) etc. We might end up using this in Element too in future (especially in Element iOS, where a Swift UI + matrix-rust-sdk backend could be quite a cute next generation architecture).

So while the first generation reference Matrix SDKs (matrix-js-sdk, matrix-ios-sdk and matrix-android-sdk) were completely independent implementations, each with their own bugs and increased audit surface, we're hoping that matrix-rust-sdk will simplify this a lot in future.