But Matrix is mostly built around chat rooms, not feeds like Twitter. I would assume any new system would take some parts of Matrix and some parts of ActivityPub but not the entire thing.
We built Matrix to synchronise any kind of comms data - we just call the primitive a “room” rather than (say) a “pubsub topic” or whatever more general term. You can absolutely build microblogging on top of Matrix; there are already a few toy examples already.
I was looking into building something on top of SecureScuttleButt, but didn't like some of the opinionated choices in it (same goes for ActivityPub). Looking at Matrix spec, the two seem to be somewhat conceptually similar, and Matrix seems to cover my needs. Never even thought to consider it before, but it might actually be a really good fit!
I'm considering launching a couple matrix instances this month,
any chance there are ways for me to dub a few users as moderators and give them the ability to silence / kick / ban users by ip, hostname, ip subnets and cidr?
I'll be looking into whatever bridge things there are for combining matrix with some microblogging, that would be a really perfect fit for 2 of the projects I've had on the idea shelf this year.
If it can connect with wordpress / buddypress for logging / blogging things from chat by user, that could prove interesting for some uses indeed. Of course if it connect to mastadon or anything else similar that could work too.
It's been a while since I've checked in on Matrix and what's new. I'd love to find someone who knows the code and could help me mod it a couple hours a month for a reasonable fee.
I should emphasise that microblogging in Matrix is pretty early, but we built the protocol to be able to scale for it. There are some very basic bridges to Wordpress and Mastodon etc but they could be way more sophisticated.
Moderation has improved loads though - https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation/ has the details. You can't ban users via IP though (unless they're on your server), as otherwise it's a massive privacy leak to expose IPs.
Very impressive progress on the moderation additions and the documentation is excellent (compared to my expectations for open source stuff especially!) - I can tell there is forward thinking and flexibility is being baked in.
Really glad to see this, I've been searching hard for a chat system replacement, and now it seems this might be it. With the ip addy api thing, if I can get someone who knows the code enough to help me use that to ban / block (on our own server) or bridge it to iptables, access.watch or something similar - this may be our future.
As far as a bridge to WP being basic at the moment, that is just fine, all I need is a way to port conversations from a certain room to posts, pages or whatever into WP and the rest can be handled from there later.
Once you strip the perceptive differences from the UI isn't twitter just a bunch of chat rooms and private conversations that update less 'live' than you'd expect a chat room to do.
I wrote a toy twitter clone using a discord server as a data source and it worked pretty coherently
what i think jack/twitter is moving towards is a model thats catering to the direction the youth are headed, with twitters implementation of topics, its akin to discords (gamer chat app) interest servers
Agreed (I'm a matrix user myself). When I saw the thread I was confused about what exactly (if anything) he wanted to achieve that couldn't be done with matrix. I'd be surprised if he wasn't familiar with it already.
Perhaps it's largely about branding/development control? I imagine it looks better to investors to say "we're making this new thing" rather than "we're gonna use this other thing that we don't own".
I stumbled upon Matrix the other day. The reason I passed it over was it sounds like all discussions happen in rooms, which made me think Matrix is basically chat room software. Is there a way to have a public discussion on Matrix with the entire user base like Twitter?
“Rooms” in Matrix are more a space in which you persist arbitrary data rather than a literal chatroom. They can absolutely be world visible and used to create per-user timeline or per-tag timelines as you need for microblogging.
There are lots of different ways of skinning it. One we've thought of in the past is to have a room per sending user, and have the members of the room be that user's followers. The rooms are of course publicly visible to allow everyone else to follow along too. You the need some mechanism to index the messages based on hashtag etc, but that could just be a search engine - or possibly copying/referencing the messages from per-hashtag etc rooms.
I highly doubt that Twitter approaches the Matrix Foundation with a "we have demands, you kneel to our will for our blessing / funding" and gets anything less than resounding applause.
The developers behind Matrix are currently funded from cryptocurrency money to the best of my knowledge.
at least with regards to identity management, twitter seems to favor a blockchain idea, which could actually simplify user management and make obsolete the need for home-server identifiers, 3rd party ids etc
I suspect you're confusing the protocol (which can scale fine) with the Synapse implementation (which was never written for performance in mind). The protocol itself should be fine for twitter-size amount of messages however, and there are more performant implementations in the works.
Rather than building a new initiative from the ground up, we hope there’s some opportunity to join forces on this.