Comment by mhitza

8 hours ago

Can someone that uses Matrix compare it to Zulip? Which would have been my "obvious" choice.

Is it functionally comparable, discussion threads and all? Or is it much closer to something like Discord?

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mhitza

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Arathorn  7 hours ago

Matrix is a decentralised encrypted chat protocol on which you could build something like Zulip, except decentralised and end-to-end encrypted.

Element is the actual app being trialled here, which feels more like Slack and/or Signal than Zulip. The point is that you get something you can selfhost while also interoperating with other deployments… while also encrypting the data end-to-end with Signal protocol.

  • tabbott  30 minutes ago

    I'm sure you could do some of Zulip's features on top of Matrix.

    But for what it's worth, as Zulip's lead developer, every time I'm looked at whether we could have built Zulip on top of Matrix, it just feels impossible to me. And a big part of it is the architectural decisions Matrix made to support a decentralized E2EE social network, which are not required for a self-contained chat system like Zulip or Slack (which can still be bridged with other chat systems). Permissions enforcement, performance, and lots of other details really benefit from the more focused goal, where we've explicitly decided we're not building a generic distributed network architecture and are not competing with WhatsApp.

    That said, I think it's great that we have multiple OSS chat systems with different strategies that are targeting different collections of niches!

    I will never understand why so many organizations entrusted the communications fabric of their organization to Microsoft and SalesForce Cloud services over the last decade. If an organization can succeed in escaping Teams or Slack to Element/Matrix, that's great, even if it's a use case where Zulip would be a better end-user experience for their requirements.

  • pm3003  7 hours ago

    Federation can feel like "just a feature" but the E2E encryption (also in group chats) is a reason for Matrix to exist and a big reason why it's so slow.

    • ezst  6 hours ago

      It's so slow because it's so badly designed as a protocol, E2E isn't really the problem (the slowness is roughly equivalent for non-encrypted rooms)

    • dpc_01234  6 hours ago

      "Slow" in what sense? Development? Because I self host a Conduit server and I don't ever notice messages being slow. It would be hard to notice anyway, as in a group chat people usually take some time to type in their responses.

      The sync between large groups used to be slow because of amount of data, but Element X and "sliding windows" were rolled out to help with it.

      AFAIK, the public Matrix server used to be slow because of a heavy load (I think), but on my self-hosted instance that's not a problem at all.

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  • solarkraft  5 hours ago

    > on which you could build something like Zulip

    I hope that at some point a focus of the Matrix project will become why this isn’t being done. A better developer experience would supercharge the ecosystem, IMO.

    Matrix should be the default for anyone building a chat app, but for some reason it’s not.

andrewaylett  7 hours ago

They are different, and the biggest reason is (I suspect) that a Zulip workspace is self-contained while a Matrix server is able to federate with other Matrix servers.

Other European institutions are also adopting Matrix, so federation may turn out to be an important feature.

Macha  7 hours ago

Matrix has threads. So does discord, but discords UI around them basically renders them functionally useless.

Anyway, the first goal listed in this project was to move to European sovereign solutions so Zulip failed at the first hurdle.

Given the (lack of) speed of European bureaucracy, this is likely more a reaction to the US sanctioning the ICC than the more recent Greenland saber rattling, but you'll probably see more of this in the future.

  • JuniperMesos  4 hours ago

    I wouldn't say Discord threads are useless - I do wish the UI made them more obvious, but I'm in many discord chats that use threads all the time.

    Matrix has threads in a sense, but in this very thread the project lead is talking about how the new, ostensibly less buggy and more performant flagship client does not yet fully support them.

  • pseudalopex  7 hours ago

    > Anyway, the first goal listed in this project was to move to European sovereign solutions so Zulip failed at the first hurdle.

    Element Creations Ltd and The Matrix.org Foundation CIC are UK companies.

    • Arathorn  7 hours ago

      Element Software SARL and Element Software GmbH however are not. In practice I believe it's Element Software GmbH providing the European Commission deployment of ESS. (Both are owned by the UK topco, but at the current rate we might flip one of them to be the topco instead).

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