hydrogen-web VS Synapse

Yes! See https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/releases/tag/v0.3....

I think you're right, the experience of element on Android isn't great, I use mostly the web app that seems to get more attention and doesn't feel as sluggish. But to bring some hope, I think this will change soon-ish. The Matrix ecosystem has been in kind of a MVP state for several years, the focus was more on the protocol/APIs and not so much on the performance that translates in user experience. But efforts are on the way to improve all of this, on the client side there are several projects working on other clients that might be more performant, including the company behind Element, they have a work-in-progress lightweight client https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web On the server side most servers run Synapse which is written in Python without much though for performance or scalability but there are faster/lighter alternatives on the way like Dendrite or Conduit. It also doesn't help that most accounts are in the same overcrowded Synapse server(matrix.org), overtime it should become more common to have more alternatives and people even running their home server embedded in their device.

It’s using normal Matrix olm/megolm double ratchet encryption.

To track the identity of who you’re talking to we can do TOFU and/or normal out of band Matrix verification as per https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/issues/518 - but this isn’t yet exposed in Chatterbox. We’ll get it added, as without verification you obviously can’t spot a MITM.

You can use this web app to access the chat. Join the #general channel. https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web

Hydrogen's installation process was pretty much exactly the same as Element, the github README was just a lot less specific and there is no config file so you have to edit the HTML directly to get it to point to your site instead of matrix.org by default.

> I'm rather convinced at this point that all of these people chanting "Can we just go back to traditional approaches!" have never built a web app of reasonable complexity, never used something like React, or have some sort of combination of FOMO and/or comfort in their long-held approach.

I've got plenty of React & front-end experience and vastly prefer a thin library on top of the DOM than something like React, also for large applications. React is ok if all goes well, but when you have to debug or profile something, all the complexity behind the scenes occludes what you are looking for. Most of the time, people want JSX so you need a transpiler. Also keeping up with changes in new React releases seems like a lot of lost time.

I've been building [1] without a transpiler and just a 600 lines template library (see [2]), and it has been such a breath of fresh air. The fact that there is so little code between you and the browser makes it very easy to see what is going on. Call stacks of max around 15 frames.

It sounds like you are comparing React to jquery code without components, and I justed wanted to highlight that DOM APIs have evolved since those days, and that you don't need a library like React to structure your code.

React has popularized good ideas in front-end development, like components, but I think the complexity cost of a virtual DOM is often underestimated.

1: https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/

Matrix's resource utilisation is improving very rapidly at the moment.

Dendrite is still in beta, and hasn't been tuned that much yet, but every release has had a substantial improvement. In other words, if you're not using today's release (0.3.5) you're on stale data. For context, dendrite.matrix.org (running 0.3.5) has ~5K users on it, and is in ~3K rooms spanning 162K users... and its RAM usage is stable at 488MB (occasionally spiking to 2GB during traffic spikes). This doesn't seem unreasonable at all for a chat server of that size. Meanwhile, Synapse has been steadily improving too.

On the client side, Hydrogen (https://hydrogen.element.io, https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web) is our next-gen client implementation, which gives you full E2EE, complete with backup (I have no idea what Durov is banging on about in the OP) - and uses 14MB of RAM for an account in 3,000 rooms spanning 350K users (i.e. my personal one). This is an 100x improvement on Element Web which uses 1.4GB for the same account, although there's also a lot of optimisation that can be done there too.

If I was going to criticise Matrix, I'd focus more on the fact that there are still a lot of papercuts on Element's UX which are holding us back. We're painfully aware of this though and are trying to fix as rapidly as we can.

it’s a entirely new codebase; probably best way to visualise progress is to look at the contributor graphs at https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web

What are you thinking of here? Synapse has supported purging room history since 2016: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/911, and configurable data retention since 2019: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/5815.

Meanwhile, Matrix has never needed the full room history to be synchronised - when a server joins a room, it typically only grabs the last 20 messages. (It does needs to grab all the key-value state about the room, although these days that happens gradually in the background).

If you're wondering why Matrix implementations are often greedy on disk space, it's because they typically cache the key-value state aggressively (storing a snapshot of it for the room on a regular basis). However, that's just an implementation quirk; folks could absolutely come up with fancier datastructures to store it more efficiently; it's just not got to the top of anyone's todo list yet - things like performance and UX are considered much more important than disk usage right now.

some context re the Matrix isses, long history apparently: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/14481#issuecomm...

Why not Matrix? Here's one reason: it has incredibly hard-to-debug edge cases, and plenty of bugs. One of my favourites is the one where people are kicked out of your room at random, which was reported a year ago[0]. It wasn't fixed, however, because the head of the Matrix foundation (Matthew) presumably didn't like the issue being posted on Twitter.

This is honestly really disappointing behaviour from a platform owner.

[0]: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/14481

> That doesn't make this situation any less bad to the rest of the community.

How is the community suffering here? Let's say Element adds a bunch of baller stuff to their versions over the next few months and then closes the source. Can't the community just fork the last AGPL version? You might say, "well then no one can take the AGPL fork and make their own closed-source business", but do you want them to? Even if you do, they still can with the existing Apache-licensed version, just like Element is doing right now.

You're arguing that Element will lose a lot of contributions, but TFA points out that despite being super open, the vast majority of contributions are still made by Element employees (which seems to be true [0]). It's not the case that Element is looking to monetize the (small) contributions of others, it is the case that others are looking to monetize the (huge) contributions of Element.

And besides, aren't the MSCs the core of Matrix? It's already super possible to build your own compliant client and server.

The situation is that Element needs money to keep developing the ecosystem. It would be cool if there were a big network of donors and contributions, but there isn't. You're essentially saying, "that's fine, go out of business then, and the community will keep developing the ecosystem", but that's not happening now, and it can still happen anyway with the Apache-licensed versions, which again people can still contribute to.

[0]: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/graphs/contributors