Genuine inquiry . Maybe I am not experienced enough with the various federated platforms but I am an avid user of matrix, and have dabbled in lemmy. From what I have seen is federation is on the path to decentralization but not fully there. It creates fiefdom, little kingdoms . Great yes you may find one that suites you better, but users now can end up isolated to their island, switch island sure but now you are isolated for the previous island and maybe others. Its stupid. On matrix you need to know the other island(server) to even find its rooms(communities). Some rooms block users from one server while others block users of other servers. You either have to run multiple accounts or accept the limits. Add in you are at the mercy of your home server, you can lose your account have it immitated, and more. The performance is horrible not sure why, but content is slow to update and spread. Matrix has the problem because of its design most people are on the matrix.org server and so the point of federation is largely lost. They are moving to p2p where it seems the solutions for federation now dont apply.
Anyway why is federation not stupid? Are these problems only with Matrix? Cause I look at lemmy and it seems far worse.
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lel you knew where I was going with it
Privacy actually is something the closeted conservatives are gung-ho about compared to other people, and the whole phenomenon of decentralised socialist internet being pursued by right wingers fascinates me a lot. This is not me dividing people into groups, but a general discourse I have observed over many years of using clearnet, the different IM protocols and the Tor and I2P darknets.
Matrix enjoys its popularity because of one reason, being centralised with matrix.org server, which is ironic since Matrix advertises itself as highly federated. It shows us in a way that the world is not ready for decentralisation, and it will always act as an obstacle compared to a default centralised communication medium. This is something I really want to push through as a debate among people, Moxie has been pushing hard on Signal staying centralised as well (not considering Moxie as merit worthy, but Signal being merit worthy compared to WhatsApp and the like).
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I recently tried Conduit.rs and was pleasantly surprised and would recommend it over Dendrite. Although the fundamental problem of ever increasing database storage space with the Matrix protocol remains a problem there too.
As for (some) right-wingers being self-destructive… that is easy to explain: there is no (in their eyes) trustworthy leftish political project that is not going to evolve in administrative over-reach and high mandatory expenses. This is actually a mostly correct observation, as the majority of people involved in leftist politics are intrinsically self-interested to push for such a society. But if you want be able to make your own decisions (even if they harm yourself) and not be reduced to some sort of wage-slave due to well-meaning but mandatory fees/taxes for insurances and social services, then the right wing parties seem like the better choice.
Ultimately that is of course a wrong choice as the big-business driven right-wing parties are intrinsically self-interested to push for an economically oppressive system where in theory you have more self-agency but in reality most people end up so poor that they can’t exercise this freedom.
Therefore I think most of these right-wingers would be quite ok with an Anarchist society, but it is a hard sell as it completely goes against their political instincts.
Poor people, backfire theory working against them and they will not listen even if told to self critique. Self critique ability is what made me accept socialism so deeply, I feel.
matrix.org is becoming massive, and the costs keep piling. I personally think there should be a list of servers to choose from, where Matrix officially allows and manages distribution of users to make for easy federation, lowered load per server and lowered latency and load issues for client end.
Although this is not exactly done by XMPP either, which they should IMHO, what does exist are server lists by 404 city or snopyta. Servers in that case should also be made to fulfill strict compatibility and feature support equirements.
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Too many FOSS projects suffer from this problem of a gatekeeping design for newcomers. This also flows into UX. When you try to solve these problems, those people crawl out of the woodwork claiming “security/features > some <slur> UX change”. When UX does not improve, they would sit silently and blame it on people not finding things easy, and tell them to git gud.
Lemmy and Mastodon are growing massively, and so is Matrix, proving an easy UI and easy signup allows platforms to get accepted well by masses. XMPP is here since 2 decades, I use it daily and I am in a bunch of groups, and I see problems all over the place.
or Matrix could just solve p2p really well. The matrix.org situation has been mentioned by the p2p dev as motivation for p2p. The side benefit is matrix p2p solutions should work for other projects.
Lately Synapse has been pretty light on resources, and performant, and being actively developed reference implementation has its perks. Hopefully Dendrite, Conduit, et. al. will catch up, but Matrix in general is not as lightweight as XMPP, due to former’s focus on being able to evade censorship
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With user joined to ~30 rooms with ~200 users (average), and none of them is of the order of Matrix HQ, following is the
ps auxoutput (sixth column is RSS, physical memory in use in KiBs) on a 4G RAM VPS (2 cores), which also hosts XMPP, gitea, fossil-scm, et. al. services. I used to run it all by itself on 2G RAM VPS, but consolidated ~2 months ago:postgres 29897 0.0 3.7 191284 153736 - Ss 2Jul21 28:15.26 postgres: synapse synapse 127.0.0.1(5828) (postgres) postgres 37308 0.0 3.7 191284 153264 - Ss 2Jul21 27:54.09 postgres: synapse synapse 127.0.0.1(16807) (postgres) synapse 45418 0.0 9.0 1246748 375220 - Ss 2Jul21 2264:01.80 /usr/local/bin/python3.8 -m synapse.app.homeserver --daemonize -c /usr/local/etc/matrix-synapse/homeserver.yaml postgres 45433 0.0 3.7 191284 153096 - Ss 2Jul21 28:21.45 postgres: synapse synapse 127.0.0.1(12404) (postgres) postgres 46529 0.0 3.7 191284 153644 - Ss 2Jul21 28:06.31 postgres: synapse synapse 127.0.0.1(31560) (postgres) postgres 47450 0.0 3.7 191284 153972 - Ss 2Jul21 28:16.65 postgres: synapse synapse 127.0.0.1(30342) (postgres) postgres 47929 0.0 3.7 191284 152948 - Ss 2Jul21 28:20.01 postgres: synapse synapse 127.0.0.1(8337) (postgres) postgres 48024 0.0 3.7 196404 153296 - Ss 2Jul21 28:22.18 postgres: synapse synapse 127.0.0.1(43996) (postgres) postgres 54977 0.0 3.7 191284 153656 - Ss 2Jul21 28:16.74 postgres: synapse synapse 127.0.0.1(8192) (postgres) postgres 55034 0.0 3.7 191284 153468 - Ss 2Jul21 28:20.01 postgres: synapse synapse 127.0.0.1(48984) (postgres) postgres 74852 0.0 3.7 191284 153328 - Ss 2Jul21 28:10.76 postgres: synapse synapse 127.0.0.1(44007) (postgres)Disk Usage (media) is 1.6G, and load average is ~0.33
It can be tuned further, but didn’t spend time on it so far. Although 2 years ago, I could not run it on 2G RAM VPS. Federation traffic kept DoSing the server, once you join any room. Lately, situation has improved a lot.
What censorship evasion are you refering to with Matrix internal or external?
The room does not live on one server in particular. So, if server A is blocked, then one can still participate in the same room through a different server B.
Signal’s centralization is a huge weak point proven with the servers crash a while back.
Wanting decentralized tech is more a libertarian vs authoritarian thing than left and right. I really dont want to pull politic politics into this though cause the tech politics alone is enough :-)
That is fine, I just like to present my unique POV that is not toxic. Shower thoughts, if you will.
Centralisation definitely is a weak point, considering how Pegasus works.
Pegasus compromises devices no?
It compromises using either SMS phishing links you click on, or zero days in common apps/software. It is easier to hack someone with zero days in centralised common software, which is why a WhatsApp missed voice call could get you pwned.