Comment on Best approach to selfhosting Synapse (Matrix)?

• sxan@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  The problem is the design is Matrix itself. As soon as a single user joins a large room, the server clones all of the history it can.

  I mean, there are basically two fundamental design options, here: either base the protocol over always querying the room host for data and cache as little as possible, or cache as much as possible and minimize network traffic. Matrix went for minimizing network traffic, and trying to circumvent that - while possible with cache tuning - is going to have adverse client behaviors.

  XMPP had a lot of problems, too, though. Although I’ve been told some (all?) of these have been addressed, when I left the Jabberverse there was no history synchronization and support for multiple clients was poor - IIRC, messages got delivered to exactly one client. I lost my address book multiple times, encryption was poorly supported, and XMPP is such a chatty protocol, and wasteful of network bandwidth. V/VOIP support was terrible, it had a sparse feature set, in terms of editing history, reactions, and so on. Group chat support was poor. It was little better than SMS, as I remember.

  It was better than a lot of other options when it was created, but it really was not very good; there are reasons why alternative chat clients were popular, and XMPP faded into the background.

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  • poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    You must have last used XMPP more than a decade ago, since none of these issues still exist (except on Pidgin which also hasn’t been updated since a decade).

    And XMPP is also not a “chatty protocol, and wasteful of network bandwidth” at all. In fact it is using significantly less bandwidth than Matrix and works on extremely shitty connections. It is basically the exact opposite of what you say.

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