status-desktop VS Synapse

In the meantime, desktop already exists but it's just at the finish line w.r.t. good enough feature set and performance to launch broadly. Go check it out at https://github.com/status-im/status-desktop. This recent tweet also highlights some of the massive performance improvements the desktop team is focused on (which will also immediately be available to the mobile app): https://twitter.com/ethstatus/status/1662857323889524739

The application consists of the combined efforts of the Status organisation and community contributors, you can follow our development at github.com/status-im/ — you're welcome to contribute as well! If you're running into any bugs, we'd love it if you could file an issue in our mobile or desktop repositories.

For those looking for a no-censorship-ever-of-any-kind alternative, consider Status:

https://status.im/get/

If you don't need or want a crypto wallet or dapp browser, then simply don't use those parts of the app.

Relevant specs:

https://specs.status.im/

https://rfc.vac.dev/

Relevant repos:

https://github.com/status-im/status-react

https://github.com/status-im/status-desktop

There are trade-offs, for sure: since there's (deliberately) no integration with contacts lists (address books) of the OS or other apps, your social circle probably isn't using the app already, or in any case isn't discoverable.

The public chats facility has turned out to be too spam-prone for "well known" / advertised chats, e.g. #status. However, if you create a public chat that has some unguessable component (e.g. #myfriends-a9e72ab5) and you share it with friends (even lots) in a reasonably private context, then the chances of it being spammed are quite low. Note that public chats, while "public", are still E2EE, using the chat's name as the basis for a symmetric key.

1-to-1 and private group chats are highly secure; the latter have a max size, and depending on their size and your device, sending messages can be a little slow.

Creating a robust alternative to the existing public chats facility has involved a lot of work: the forthcoming Communities features provides a discord-like facility whereby founders/admins of communities can take advantage of various mechanisms for moderation and governing membership. The Communities feature can already be enabled in advanced preferences of both mobile and desktop apps, but note it's a WIP.

The moderation mechanisms for communities don't undermine the no-censorship principle of Status because:

(1) Any user can create a community.

(2) A community's rules are managed by those with a stake in the community, there's no override by Status-the-org nor anyone else.

(3) The underlying nodes of the network form a decentralized p2p network, i.e. there's no central actor/authority that controls the flow of messages.

Re: (3), running a Status node should be easy and incentivized.

The "incentivized" aspect is a challenging problem and not solved yet. Long story short, engineering an incentivized decentralized messaging network (not a blockchain!) is harder than incentivizing a blockchain network.

That being said, the "easy" aspect isn't too difficult to solve, sneak peek:

https://github.com/status-im/status-node

Finally, with pertinent laws and regulations in flux across the globe, there could come a day when binaries aren't readily available (from app stores, GitHub, etc.), but thankfully there's always `git clone` and `make`.

Disclosure: I'm a core contributor at Status.

My only big issue is that it does talk to googleusercontent.com. Not sure how that can fit with privacy. Heres the github issue.

Current numbers re: adoption were discussed in Status' most recent Town Hall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98wsQe6hHHs&t=365s

As for dev support: Status has teams of full-time devs working on various projects related to the mobile[1] and desktop[2] (beta) apps, as well projects that are related to the larger Ethereum ecosystem, e.g. nimbus-eth2[3]. Our teams aren't particularly large, but are working steadily to squash bugs and add/improve features. We also have teams dedicated to UX and design.

[1] https://github.com/status-im/status-react

[2] https://github.com/status-im/status-desktop

[3] https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth2

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