this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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"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 can’t wait to see what you’ll develop in response!
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
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Furthermore, this blog post has outdated information and many of their problems with Matrix are fundamental for federated protocols.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.
Could be the result of repetitive strain injury, I'm not judging
Yup, I don't think that's the main argument, more a warning like "well if you normal folks were expecting anything else, that's how it is and can't be changed"
Though that's flawed/incomplete, and an essential reason for incompatibility between implementations
That's my main issue, really. Basically, there's no end in sight to the problem of inconsistent messages that can take minutes/hours/days to be delivered: Matrix just isn't dependable for instant communications, by design. This rules it out of a ton of very significant and practical real world use cases and expectations. That's not a system you can think typical modern users (used to their messages being either delivered instantly or not at all) to trust and to like once faced with these issues, not just once, but repeatedly. It is us, the world, being told again "Blockchain will solve all problems of centralization", with a crowd of enthusiasts blinded by the hype embarking (taking hostage) their less savvy peers while the people being the steering wheel have no idea how to bring the car home. And worse, those people behind the steering wheel being in denial (or malicious, or incompetent), will keep telling you to just trust them, and that the problem is solved already while the evidence points in the other direction.