meshnet-lab VS matrix-bifrost

Most of the mobility testing has been performed either in the meshnet-lab[1] or the pineconesim[2].

As the original author of that documentation, it's quite entertaining to have it quoted back to me. :-) In any case the routing "prefers" links labelled as the internet when there is a tiebreak between two peerings between the same pair of nodes, i.e. you are connected to some other device via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth simultaneously.

And while it is true that Pinecone cannot necessarily always make the best routing decision based on public keys alone, aggressive queue management attempts to provide the best QoS for all flows and it scales very well because nodes maintain only a small amount of state about their position in the spanning tree and their position in the SNEK. Importantly, shortcuts can and often are taken when Pinecone switches to tree-based routing as the geometric distance to the destination on the tree is evaluated at each hop. Routing "by the SNEK" is used primarily to find the remote node and as a fallback in case the tree routing fails.

[1] https://github.com/mwarning/meshnet-lab

Lots of interesting stuff there - thanks :) We're using https://github.com/mwarning/meshnet-lab rather than imunes.net for network simulation currently, but will take a look.

Power usage is looking pretty positive so far; as long as we route the Matrix traffic over the routing topology rather than going full-mesh it should minimise radio usage (the main battery suck, other than screen).

For store-and-forward, honestly using P2P Nodes as intermediaries is an okay approach other than exposing metadata to them. Our plan in the longer term is to switch to loopix-style mixnets to obfuscate the store and forwarding, a la nym.

In terms of joining the network by deriving a private key from a passphrase... yup, that could be cute, although slightly terrifying in terms of the risk of weak passphrases :)

We're hoping to get the P2P network stable in the coming year (although we were also aiming for this year originally :P)

tbh Matrix was pretty green 5 years ago, so you probably didn't miss much. Thanks for considering a slidge-matrix bridge. On the Matrix side, we already have https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-bifrost as our main Matrix<->XMPP bridge, but it could definitely be better, and the more interop between open protocols the better \o/ :)

Unfortunately XMPP<->Matrix end-to-end encryption is a contradiction in terms. You have to speak the same protocol from end-to-end, otherwise you'd have to break the end-to-end encryption to translate from one protocol to the other. The closest you could get would be to run the Matrix<->XMPP bridge clientside alongside your Matrix client... but at that point you might almost as well be running a multihead messenger that speaks both Matrix & XMPP.

In terms of adding Matrix to MUCs; i believe we're working on it in Bifrost, which is in active albeit slightly sporadic dev: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-bifrost.

Matrix itself looks like it may be able to serve xmpp via this bridge

Yes, there is: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-bifrost/wiki/Address-sy...