matrix rant
the development of matrix does not keep up with walled-garden alternatives and i am upset about it
i think this is due to an over-reliance on the (naïve) constructs that matrix has created to improve on the IRC experience, and attempting to extend them past their limits to create something more Discordian / Slack-esque
here it is in microcosm: MSC 1769 - “Extensible profiles as rooms”.
Profiles are currently limited to display names and avatars. We’d like users to be able to publish arbitrary data about themselves instead.
to achieve this, they propose that a user’s profile is a room that you can join or peek into, and read state events, room data, etc
that seems like a cool (maybe clever) way to make it work with the Matrix Way Of Doing Things :)
the problem is that every feature is implemented as this least-disruption hack patch and you end up with a mountain of tech debt and overcomplicated specification, imo
anyway, here’s what I want to talk about: someone suggests:
It would be nice if some of the fields (e.g. phone number, address, email, etc) would be private.
a pretty normal feature, right? trivial for something like XMPP (as the server, you just consider who is doing the IQ-get for the vCard and have a different one) or Discord (the central server knows about the person’s friend list and can just … verify your auth)
and in reply, they get:
I wonder if this could be achieved with multiple profile rooms, and only inviting “contacts” to a more private one.
i think this really underlines the, like, issue here. it’s constant shoehorning of simple chat application features into Matrix and it involves disproportionately complex technical gymnastics to fit them in
an invite-only room would be non-peekable, and a client would need to know about this part of the Matrix spec, auto-invite contacts to the private profile room, and have proper ACLs set up for if a user wants their profile writeable by others or not, etc etc
joining a room is also Slow (you have to do backfilling) and Noisy (joining that room emits a state event to everyone in the room) - which aren’t really qualities you would expect out of “i want to read my friend’s profile”
with the first-principles nature of “everything is a room” and “everything is an event”, you end up with the Weird UX that we have in Matrix today, where Spaces feel kinda janky (they’re getting better but I have a weird homeserver/client issue where i am Literally unable to list every room in a space) or group VoIP is out-of-band (Element Call is cool though i’m excited)
because of the complexity of Doing Anything, development is glacial. the original proposal for extensible profiles, “SPEC-93”, is from 2015!
anyway it’s still the least-bad communication solution we have for a certain subset of problems so I am a matrix user but i don’t think i’m happy about it
anyway I hope you enjoyed my rambles
matrix rant
@charlotte this compresses to "moxie was right" very efficiently
re: matrix rant
@charlotte this isn't sports teamism, it's just the facts: your tweet criticizing matrix's inability to evolve beyond the crystallized/ossified models they chose early on is precisely the thing that moxie's now-famous blog post called out. you're just echoing what he already said. it has nothing to do with signal, really, just that federated systems get stuck. (his answer, of course, is making a non-federated system, but that is neither here nor there.)
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re: matrix rant