This Year in Matrix

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • SurveyJS - Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App
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  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • Element

    A glossy Matrix collaboration client for the web.

    This was truly a great yera for matrix.

    But I have a great pain with that bug: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/469

    Everytime I’m fighting with myself to not be sarcastic when speaking about this issue, but I want to say I have hard time believing that Element could we a main communication platform for anyone without this being fixed. It drives me mad, and I have just two people to communicate with!

  • matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

    🐳 Matrix (An open network for secure, decentralized communication) server setup using Ansible and Docker

    Have you seen this repository[0] that automated most of the configuration? I have a similar goal to you (get family off of Google Chat), and I was pulling my hair trying to manually set things up. Now the hard part of getting them to migrate...

    [0]: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

  • SurveyJS

    Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  • mjolnir

    A moderation tool for Matrix

    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.

  • matrix-doc

    Discontinued Proposals for changes to the matrix specification [Moved to: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals]

    This would be MSC 3189 [1]. It is just a draft for now. So expect it to be shipped to clients in 3-6 months(?)

    [1] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/3189

  • element-android

    A glossy Matrix collaboration client for Android.

    I can second this, I love getting the opportunity to answer quickly from my mobile (I type [actually swipe] faster on mobile). It's also amazing how the push notifications clear when read somewhere else, this is not to taken for granted, it's not implemented on most other chat apps and it's a huge advantage of Element imho, sometimes it's buggy¹ but it's easy better than not having it and only Telegram is better in this regard from my experience.

    1. https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/issues/4147 and also some other

  • conduit

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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