Matrix community

[HammyHavoc]

In the spirit of decentralization and open source (as per https://owlplug.com/), it would be nice if there was a Matrix protocol-based community that also used a Discord bridge to join the two together. Running a FOSS project whilst simultaneously pushing Discord has always baffled me.

[DropSnorz]

Thanks for your suggestion. I chose Discord few years ago mainly because the music and developer community is already very active and well-established there. For real-time collaboration, feedback, and connecting with other musicians, Discord just made more sense at this point.

I like Matrix approach, but I don't have the time to boostrap a matrix server + Discord bridges. I prefer to delegate security, running fee, observability and maintenance to Discord for now, at the cost of a low data privacy.

That said, I do keep an eye on Matrix adoption and future Discord bridges improvements.

[HammyHavoc]

That's valid for sure! :- )

For me, the privacy isn't so much the concern here (this is a FOSS project—what's worth being secretive/defensive about?), it's more the lack of long-term availability of information and discoverability (solutions not indexed on search engines—Discord is weirdly secretive considering that, huh? lol!).

That and the other major thing for me is that Discord isn't available in some countries, like China, which has a pretty significant electronic and rock scene (it's actually awesome as I've been beginning to discover), to the point that some people move there from the West to be musicians these days (surprising, I know! Currently mixing and mastering a record for a British expat who moved there). At least you can say with Matrix that you can also automate exports of archives of chats for posterity and for people to find easily via say GitHub Pages or whatever too. That's a big thing I lament heavily about IRC channels that aren't archived anywhere—all that incredible insight and hard-won info is just gone.

Other gripe I have is that Discord is woeful for finding information or tips (search is horrible lol!), IMO, and my heart absolutely sinks when being directed to Discord, despite it all being in my Matrix client via my own bridges. It's just so weirdly clunky and convoluted.

You might wanna dig into Matrix a little more—a room/group/space/whatever can be federated with other servers, it isn't like the "server" concept on Discord unless you ignore the federation aspect and specifically want to keep it centralized to one homeserver and insist on people registering on your server as opposed to connecting via others, and federating via others, ergo you can bring bridges in through other people who know what they're doing. Although tbh, if you make a compelling enough case, you might not even need to bridge Discord into it, seen that happen before where people just say "yeah, fuck it, we're switching to Matrix, see you there, or not."

Yeah, Discord moan-fest for sure, but I feel like there's a lot of people who don't realize it's increasingly been the go-to for a bit. The EU pushes it (and all the gov, healthcare, emergency services et al use it), NATO uses it for comms, hundreds of millions of people publicly on it (not including the governmental stuff as they're not public users for obvious reasons). Lots of universities using it too (guess what creatives in and post-academia are heavily using as a result). It's the open standard people are coalescing around. DMA means EU is strong-arming Meta into supporting Matrix for interop too: https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/06/security/whatsapp-messenger-messaging-interoperability-eu/

Not announced it yet, but I'm playing around with an open hardware prototype of a Matrix Eurorack module currently, so people can send and receive MIDI, CV and audio (amidst other things lol!): https://hammyhavoc.github.io/matrix-protocol-eurorack-module/

Here's a little food for thought. IMO, the value of a community is in the who and the collective knowledge it has, not the platform or app. All this stuff built on third-party infra eventually comes to an end one day, be it biz, malicious intent, economic realities, tastes changing et al. Pushing more creatives to support it will mean big things much sooner.

As you were! :- ) Just felt like I had to seed the idea and spark the convo about this stuff. It's for sure worth exploring more. I'll be dishing out some hardware prototypes later this year if you or anyone you know is into the idea of taking it for a spin.

P.S. Love OwlPlug, think it's super cool.

P.P.S. Whilst dev stalled to prioritize Matrix 2.0 protocol dev, there's a P2P prototype being developed for using Matrix device-to-device with each device essentially behaving as its own homeserver; even work on homeserver-less P2P via WAN too. Long-term, portable identities and not depending on a specific server being available forevermore is a dev goal (decentralization as deeply as possible obviously being the crux of why this whole thing makes sense). More devs are definitely wanted as that's what holds back the pace of dev (lots of people want lots of different stuff, but never enough hands on deck).