Highlights include Sliding Sync (instant login/launch/sync), Native OIDC (industry-standard authentication), Native Group VoIP (end-to-end encrypted large-scale voice & video conferencing) and Faster Joins (lazy-loading room state when your server joins a room).
I have to say “Element X” is a very unfortunate name choice …
Jesus just go back to calling it Riot.IM the name keeps getting stupider and more corporate.
Matrix has had a bit of trouble penetrating the enterprise market, which is where the real money is. Hence the corporate-speak rename.
I mean, they haven’t had that much trouble. Last I checked they had portions of the French and German governments using Matrix as a secure messenger. (To be fair, those both came after the rename.)
It is just a codename, Element X is going to be just Element once it replace the old one.
I wanted to try Element X but apparently my self hosted server is not compatible.
Ah there is a solution for it https://github.com/matrix-org/sliding-sync I guess I could try to install it.
Yeah I was able to install sliding-sync on Dendrite without issues. A bit surprising that I didn’t see any guides made for it yet.
Anyone know how to get a self-hosted synapse server updated to support all this?
Yes, I’m confused by the released messaging. It feels like there may be a new server requirement. Search this page for Synapse https://element.io/blog/element-x-ignition/ to see the link to the guide.
“Sliding sync” is Matrix’s own admission that the protocol is too complex and taxing on clients to be practical, and shifts the burden further onto already overwhelmed servers for what’s essentially bouncers marketed as new tech. And it’s still a mess.
I won’t need to develop anything in response, because an open-standard (IETF) protocol for federated instant communications already existed long before Matrix, and as far as I can tell, from my experience of having administered XMPP and Matrix servers for hundred of users, nothing about Matrix, its design and its implementations makes it more desirable, more reliable, more resilient or more “future proof” than what XMPP came-up with a decade earlier.
And I am aware that I sound like an old man yelling at clouds, I take comfort in the fact that more and more technically-versed people who look behind the marketing and buzz get to see what I know from experience: https://telegra.ph/why-not-matrix-08-07
I think most of the criticism on Telegraph regarding how Matrix handles rooms and events are addressed by the work behind linearized matrix: https://www.qwant.com/?l=en&q=linearized+matrix+messaging&t=web
Is their shift key broken?
Furthermore, this blog post has outdated information and many of their problems with Matrix are fundamental for federated protocols. Good luck removing an email sent to another server, for example. JSON form is very well defined.
I can agree with the problem of DAG complexity building up, sure, but that is a tradeoff.
Admitting problems and improving/replacing your protocol is good, you make it sound like a bad thing. I mean you could argue that they should have started with this, but imo better late than never. From what I’ve seen this will take load off of the client AND the server, because both don’t have to sync thousands and thousands of events anymore. It basically looks like an indexing/caching layer between client and server, which is standard practice to make things go faster, especially for thin clients.
Admitting problems and improving/replacing your protocol is good, you make it sound like a bad thing.
The only bad thing about this is that we’ve been at it for 10 years. If you’ve been following Matrix long enough, you’ve witnessed “the next big thing that will solve all problems” being promised every year. Matrix funding relies on hype, and I’m somewhat ok with that, so long as users and hosts are not taken hostage of empty promises. My first hand experience of Matrix X is that we are still far from what’s being advertised.
edit: adding a missing word “thing”
I really don’t get this attitude. It’s not like global decentralized instant messaging with all the usability, bells and whistles of centralized services is an easy problem to solve. And no one is selling anything, not to regular users at least. If you thought that this would be a straight forward path to a finished product then idk what to tell you, that’s not how this works.
I wish the whole project was a little bit more clever with its names. Matrix and Element are not unique enough names and can cause a lot of confusion.
I like the project though and still hope it continues to succeed.
love to see it
