Posts tagged with matrix
This blog post was originally a wall of text on GNOME’s Discourse to discuss how we want our instant messaging to look like.
I’ve come to talk with you about instant messaging platforms and peaceful coexistence. This is a pretty heated issue, so I count on everyone to keep the conversation constructive so we can shape our future platform together in a positive way!
This blog post was originally a wall of text on GNOME’s Discourse to discuss of the impact of IRC on GNOME’s community safety.
First, of course, we know that despite what the spam indicated the spam did not actually come from Libera Chat teams. It comes from imbeciles who obviously wanted to give Libera Chat a bad image by flooding all sorts of disgusting messages.
Like many, I started my involvement in the GNOME community as an end-user. Eventually, I wanted to give back to this project I loved. I wanted to see both the project and the community strive. We already had and still have many excellent developers who work hard to implement the vision of our talented design team. Those are not areas where my contribution would make a difference. I started helping with translations. For this activity I have regularily been chasing maintainers for string freezes, or to ask for explanations when strings didn’t make sense for me.
This helped me to blend in, meet the more general community, and finally take interest in higher level issues such as our infamous chat platforms split. I have a very strong interest in people, groups of them, ethics, how software impacts them all and how proper governance can help to achieve goals.
The Matrix protocol is full of concepts sometimes hard to grasp. In this post I’m going to try to cover how it’s used in the context of messaging, how close to e-mail it can feel, and how decentralisation is achieved in the open safely. For the sake of simplicity and ease of understanding I might lie to you sometimes: this post is aimed at non-experts.
Matrix is a protocol to describe interactions between several entities. It can be used for many things, but its most popular usage right now is for instant messaging. Two people can have a conversation, but there can also be much larger conversations with many people participating at the same time.
This post follows an introduction to Matrix with e-mails, where I explain that Matrix is a federated system.
Federation can be either public or private. A public server can communicate with any other server, except the ones which are explicitely avoided. Meanwhile, a private server can only communicate with a selected list of other servers.
When we deployed our Matrix instance for GNOME, we were really used to IRC. We did not think through all the ways people would use an account for, and left registrations too open. As a consequence, many people created an account on our instance because they like the GNOME Project, and started using it as a personal account.
Now that we are more experienced with the difference between an organisational account and a personal one, I would like to walk you through the differences between the two, why segregating activities can be useful, and finally how to migrate data from an account to another.
I self-host a few services. It’s easy to put services online, but self-hosting properly in the long run is difficult. A part of self-hosting properly is having backups and monitoring. In this article I’m going to show you how I make sure to get off-site backups, with a Raspberry Pi at home pulling data from my VPS. There’s room for improvement, and if you have constructive comments on how I can do better I’d be happy to hear them!
The threat I’m working against is data loss. It can happen because my VPS gets hacked, in which case I want to destroy the VPS to prevent it from bein exploited further without having to think twice. If my data is leaked, I don’t want the additional burden of not having access to it myself
This blog post was also posted as a wall of text on GNOME’s Discourse to share the results of the survey with the broader GNOME Community.
The topic of our Instant Messaging platform of choice is quite old. In May 2021 I covered the history of IRC and Matrix in the GNOME Community.