The Signal Server repository hasn’t been updated since April 2020. There are a bunch of links about this here but I found this thread the most interesting.
To me, this is unforgivable behaviour. Signal always positioned themselves as “open source”, and the Server itself is under the best license for server software (AGPLv3 – which raises questions about the legality of this situation).
Signal’s whole approach to open source has constantly been underwhelming to say the least. Their budget-Apple attitude (secrecy, i.e. “we can never engage the community directly”, “we will never merge/accept PRs”, etc) has lead to its logical conclusion here, I guess. I have been somewhat of a “Signal apologist” thus far (I almost always defend them & I think a lot of criticism they get it very unfair) but yeah I’m over Signal now.
I have a lot of thoughts about this but don’t really have the time to reply.
All I’ll say is that I hope you’re following Element’s progress with Dendrite closely. I host my own Dendrite server and it is much more reasonable in terms of resource usage versus Synapse, and it hasn’t even had any resource optimisation features implemented yet.
While Dendrite is better in many ways, AFAIK it does not solve the fundamental architectural problem of immutable and permanent history room metadata. As a result of that, database storage use is growing indefinitely (easily into the hundreds of gigabytes) and there is no real solution to that anywhere in sight. In addition I think it also is a massive privacy issue, as this immutable and permanent history room state data is synchronized across any server that has a member joining a chat. Yes I am aware that this is a “feature” of matrix, but IMHO a really bad one and resilient federated rooms can also be implemented in different, less over-engineered ways.
This is terrible.
Matrix evolved evolved in a very messy way, starting without encryption and hacking it in later on, and now it’s even trying to become P2P. I expect more serious privacy-breaching “features” to come out over time.
Not really, that was a feature that was there from the very beginning and Matrix also openly advertised this. The problem mainly comes from people projecting their wishes onto them and the Matrix team (for commercial interests/ego I guess) not vehemently denying that privacy is mostly an afterthought in the system’s design.
I’m keeping an eye on Dendrite. I’m not convinced go is the best language for server software, as it suffers many same pain points as Python (eg. GC pauses), but it looks like a neat progress. In fact i’m going to try dendrite very soon when i have some time.
Element on the other hand i would just put in the dumpster because it’s full of everything that’s wrong with web applications. 9MB initial loading just for a simple chat application, seriously? Several seconds of latency just to switch chatrooms? Seriously it’s 2021 folks, how can anyone be happy with such mediocrity and then complain why noone is using Element…
Just found gomuks which appears to be a lot better for desktop/laptops (not mobile). I will try it out and see…
So i just tried gomuks and it’s a pleasure to use! Room switching is instant (compared to 5-15s on Element) and it took just a few seconds to compile. Only downside is it was designed for dark theme so contrast is really bad on light background.
Element the client is garbage, I was talking about Element the organisation formally known as New Vector, who develop and maintain the Dendrite homeserver
thanks i had no clue they were renamed