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
