Enter the Matrix – A technical overview and guide to all things Matrix

What are the differences between Matrix and Jabber?<p>Jabber implemented a protocol with similar mechanisms several years ago, with a custom xml protocol which could also pass not only text but also rendezvous data for voip&#x2F;video calls and whatever else custom data you could codify.<p>Jabber has native protocol implementations for both clients and servers and can handle a reasonable amount of connections with ease. Clients are available throughout all platforms.<p>I&#x27;m asking this question because I believe the reason Jabber &quot;failed&quot; (read: didn&#x27;t catch as much as other closed alternatives like WhatsApp) wasn&#x27;t because of technology hurdles, because it was poised to solve the very same problem Matrix works against - which is &#x27;IM fragmentation&#x27;, but actually a lack of a proper plan to generate interest with its intended population.<p>I&#x27;d say work on your release plan and make your clients &#x27;tasty&#x27; and snappy, because technologically speaking, I believe Jabber has already solved all the technological problems Matrix strives for.... and it sadly wasn&#x27;t enough.

It is nice to see Matrix in HN: this project needs more visibility.<p>In a world dominated by Slack, which removes privacy&#x2F;history control from users and place walls, Matrix is the promise to have a better open scenario than IRC was.<p>I am crossing my fingers. I hope with all my heart to this technology to flourish.

Just a user, but I think Matrix needs to<p>- work on stability: the status quo is unreliable. Until this is solved it&#x27;s hard to recommend Matrix to anybody who is looking to use it for serious work<p>- disable signup on main server: this is a decentralized netword and the main server is overloaded already. It is overloaded so badly, that devs decided to turn off presence for as long as I can remember first seeing matrix. So even IRC is more usable in that regard because I know when I see a user they are online or they even have presence and an away message<p>There&#x27;s more but those are two issues I think should be dealt with urgently.

If matrix wants to be a thing it needs to get a good and native client for popular operating systems. Riot isn&#x27;t a good client.

Does E2E work now? Last time I tried, it did not. That was some time ago so things might have changed. It still is listed as &quot;working on it&quot; for many clients though.<p>To develop a new communication platform today without E2E as a core functionality is odd.

I really would like to have a single chat client. I have friends&#x2F;business partners on Skype, WhatsApp, FB Messenger, iMessage, Discord, Slack and (ze horror)MS Teams.<p>I wish I had a single app, be it on desktop and mobile, to use, with the combined feature set of all of those (filtered down to whatever my communication partner supports). I know: how dare I dream of such a magnificent beast?<p>What are the chances Matrix is turning into this?

From the FAQ:<p>&quot; Tox.chat looks to be a very cool clone of Skype - a fully decentralised peer-to-peer network. Matrix is deliberately not a ‘pure’ peer-to-peer system; instead each user has a well-defined homeserver which stores his data and that he can depend upon. &quot;<p>What&#x27;s the rationale behind &quot;impure&quot; decentralizing? Why not go fully decentralized like Tox does?

Can someone point me to a good comparison of Matrix, Mattermost, Zulip, Rocketchat, IRC and XMPP (say, Prosody) or explain what niche each fills if they are not competing.<p>Assuming for a small company with a dozen employees, all of whom sometimes work remotely.

Is this project affecting by the pgp sMIME issues in the news recently? (starting to learn this matrix thing, thanks in part to this nice synopsis posted in the article)

&gt; guide to all things Matrix<p>&gt; A device is bound to an access token and E2E encryption keys (which I’m not covering in this post).<p>This is far from &#x27;all things Matrix&#x27; then.

This is an exciting project but still needs a lot of work (particularly in making the faster, cleaner, and easier to install).