mjolnir VS LeetRooms

Ah, for a moment, I thought this was about the [Mjölnir project](https://github.com/matrix-org/mjolnir/) in Matrix-land.

I'm running a small (at the beginning it was completely public, now I'm keeping an eye on registrations) homeserver with synapse for a few years - I really like Matrix on a conceptual level and I'm happy that it exists even through it's not perfect it works pretty well mostly. I don't want to be too harsh because it's the best decentralized alternative for chat at the moment and it's open-source and there is a lot of progress but damn' it was a pain in the ass to run that server... we solved our problems mostly with throwing resources and memory on the problem... it's a nice tour de force if you want to learn about debugging distributed systems but it's nothing to install somewhere and just keep running.

synapse is quite a mess and there are a lot of hidden footguns if you just run a server - this is just the tip of iceberg to keep the postgres database somewhat sane: https://levans.fr/shrink-synapse-database.html - lot's of other issues in the issue-tracker where you can just scratch your head.

bridges are all subtly broken - the xmpp bridge is horrible and broke in so much interesting ways that I'm not going to touch it ever again - telegram works okay most of the time, irc-bridge also have some warts - but it's easy to criticize from my chair and probably unfair to talk so negative about it here but it's often buggy and broken for edge-cases - it works most of the time pretty okay but it's quite a mess and difficult to debug things.

moderation/spam/etc.pp is all hackable but it's all mostly quickly hacked up nodejs code that at least for us exploded in all kinds of interesting ways. https://github.com/matrix-org/mjolnir writing 3tb of logs in a few weeks and heating memory like crazy for instance. It's all complicated and there is no simple ui for anything.

So it's powerful but requires quite a bit of dedication and patience to get right. It's a full blown distributed system and often state is all over the place and once you make a mistake it's difficult to get right.

But there are so much promising projects that I'm confident that these issues will be resolved and it will only get better but in my experience it will break badly on all kinds of edge-cases - the mentioned xmpp-bridge created usernames that can't be deleted via the http api for instance. someone bridged 1000 channels via our telegram-bridge and there is no code to remove those channels - you have to code something up in python for yourself. irc bridge kicks you after 30 days idle because they can't handle the connections - freenode (before the takeover) said it's not them - maybe single threaded nodejs is not such a good idea for that.

Could I do it any better and delivering? Probably not. But except some adventure and if you want to deploy it for an org carefully test any assumptions you take for granted. It's cool but it's also kind of quick'n'dirty in a lot of ways. Still better than anything else I'd use it over any megacorp messenger anytime but maybe don't switch your family yet.

Moderation tools are slowly improving, but definitely still don't fit all use cases, and it's very unfortunate they don't come natively with synapse. I'm the lead admin of a Matrix ' Space', and our main room now has over 6,000 users (80%+ are inactive or barely active). We use mjolnir(https://github.com/matrix-org/mjolnir) to ban and redact users/servers/messages across all of our rooms, which has been a godsend since I used to have to redact all the racist/gore myself message-by-message. It's still reactive instead of proactive, but I'm hoping these tools will mature in time.

LeetRooms is a Chrome extension that I created to add a multiplayer experience to LeetCode. You can see events in the chat like when people submit a problem, correctly solve a problem, finish a room, etc. Also, the scoreboard lets you see not only how fast people solved a question, but you can also click on an accepted solution to view their code! There are lots of options to customize your room too, like selecting specific topics to practice, filtering problem difficulties, and setting a room duration. One of the most difficult parts of it all was trying to make it feel like a native LeetCode experience. From the design, to the usability (being able to resize and hide the side panel), to the actual functionality (detecting submissions and accepted solutions), I wanted it to feel seamless. That's also why I don't have any plans to support the old UI. It would be a complete rewrite. Check it out @ https://leetrooms.com. It's also open source, so if you run into any bugs please open a GitHub issue! And yes, binarysearch.com was a big inspiration for this project.