Am 16.06.21 um 14:25 schrieb Lex Trotman:
On Wed, 16 Jun 2021 at 20:15, Thomas Martitz kugel@rockbox.org wrote:
Am 16.06.21 um 11:30 schrieb Lex Trotman:
Thanks Thomas but unfortunately you have given me even more questions that the Matrix site doesn't answer (that I could find) :-S
There seems to be some misconception. Matrix is a federated protocol. That means that there is no single instance that is the "host" of a #geany matrix channel.
Anyone can open such a channel, and it will propagate to any Matrix server that "owns" clients that participate in the chat, and all of those servers have the entire history.
So how does a server get clients? Or perhaps its more how does a client find a server? If I want to join a channel what do I do? Who runs the servers?
You register your Matrix account on a server of your choice.
Yes, but how do I find a server or servers and how do I choose? With IRC at least all that happened in the background.
Most clients offer to register an account at matrix.org by default, so just do that if you don't really care.
Hm? With IRC we used a single server that is now hijacked, otherwise we wouldn't discuss.
matrix.org hosts the reference server but anyone is free to host commercial or personal ones like I do (then called homeserver).
Expecting users to run a server to get support is unreasonable, and I won't run one, so lets keep to what clients can do.
Nowhere I implied that I expect users to run their own server.
But not everyone is new to Matrix, some users may already have accounts on non-matrix.org servers or even their own, and they can participate just fine as well.
(There is a reference server side that is FOSS and there are a number of competing implementations as well, for example in Rust).
You can register within the clients, for example on https://app.element.io/, and then you can readily join all channels over the world.
And if that server goes away I'm stuffed?
Make a new account on a different server. You will get the chat history downloaded to your new account.
So its like IRC in that all conversations on the #geany channel are mixed together. But unlike IRC the servers maintain the history?
Yes, it's a flat chat. From my past experience with #geany on irc (which is very low traffic) that's good enough.
It is the only reason it might work, but it would still make replying to questions messy and conversations all mixed up.
I only know Rocket.Chat (https://rocket.chat/) that allows for sub-threads in channels. We use that at work, and that feature is sometimes nice, but the UI is not great (sub-threads are in a tiny window on the right) so I often want to avoid sub-threads.
Sigh, how often is a useful feature killed by a bad UI :-S
So there is no action required to keep the channel alive, as long as there are participating (even if idle) users.
How does the "federation" handle loss of servers? Are there IRC like net splits? Or does it handle it all better?
When a server goes down then users that have their accounts on that server cannot participate anymore. Other users are not affected. When the server comes back online it fetches the missing history of what happend during the downtime.
Which comes back to the question of how to find/choose a server.
Again, most (if not all) clients default to "register a new account at matrix.org", if you explicitly want a different server use Google, but matrix.org is OK (runs FOSS software and communicates openly).
Best regards