This isn’t a case of NIH; France has adopted Matrix for the project, which is a lightweight fork of Riot.im combined with a large private federation of Matrix servers. The whole thing is open source (although not public yet, as it is very early days) and open standards based. At Matrix.org we’ve been providing some support to them :) It’s very exciting to see open government projects which actually grok open source and open standards.
Not really - the protocols are very different. Matrix is a way of replicating conversation history over a mesh of participating servers; a bit like a bunch of Git repositories constantly pushing commits (messages) to one another. XMPP is much lighter weight and builds on simpler message passing and pubsub primitives. You can use both to build comms systems, but they take opposite engineering and governance approaches on almost everything.
> a bit like a bunch of Git repositories constantly pushing commits (messages) to one another.
Why would you need to do that? Why not just give every message a timestamp, make sure they get sent, and sort the messages on the receiver side? If you're really concerned about message order, you could give every message a unique id, and send out the id of the previous message with every message, and improve your sort function accordingly.
Absolute timestamps cannot be trusted in a byzantine environment, so we do precisely as you suggest - messages are transmitted with pointers to the previous message(s) in the room message graph, so you get a partial ordering within the room (just like git). We also sign the messages into a merkle graph (like git) to stop the shared datastructure being tampered with.
For all the hate XML gets... it's not that bad. Certainly not worth switching protocols for. Main problems with XMPP is a divided ecosystem where different clients and servers support different features, and that multi-client encryption is severely flaky.
I'm the project lead for Matrix. Failing that, on the French side there's been some press where they've confirmed the system is built on Matrix & Riot (https://www.nextinpact.com/news/106463-la-france-travaille-a..., although it's behind a paywall), plus others have spotted the Github repository too.
That's great; this other article I read about this kept mentioning Telegram and how Macron used that during his campaign, so this is much better than I expected :)
yes, the point of the project is to provide a secure and self hosted (yet interoperable for intra- and inter-government purposes) alternative to Telegram for state comms :)
What would appear in a lightweight fork of Riot though?
Do you just remove a lot of the fluff to make it a bit more accessible for the public/general consumer?
you simplify the ux (eg autodiscovering the right homeserver); hook it up to directory services and/or SSO; simplify the e2e crypto UX; change the logo and branding, and have a basis to build on for whatever future custom features they need.
This sounds great! I am looking forward to running it.
But I also need an admin panel to lookup user ip addys from the past 36 hours,
ability to assign moderator user roles who can see other user's ips, ban ip addys, subnets, hostnames and cidrs easily.
Love to have some other needed admin options and run this! A stun / turn server to hide other user's ip addys and such as well, interception of images posted so they are scanned, exif stripped and hosted temporarily rather than giving the hoster everyone's ip info.
Stuff like that.
I guess blocking users from joining the huge main matrix channels through our server would cut down on the ram / processing needed..
I wonder if something like https://access.watch could hook into this, or if it needs something all in it's own language or what. Looking forward to this system growing.
were doing exactly that at the place i work at, riot has too many settings and can be quite hard for a "normal" user (someone who is used to slack for example).
would love some kind of integration with openid connect though, since that would enable us to easier integrate with our AD. of course we could make that ourselves but we dont have the manpower right now.
It has (or at least had, when I ran a server) support for CAS. JASIG CAS isn’t that difficult to set up against AD, I think Shibboleth has a plug-in that implements the protocol too.
Really? We are looking to use it for some of our work but are aware that the UI/UX esp around keys is a bit messy. Would be great to see how your simplifying it.
The lightweightness here referred to the complexity of the fork - i.e. it's not an attempt to entirely rewrite Riot, but instead a reskinning and UX simplification exercise. The intention is to be able to keep merging in updates from Riot proper (and indeed to port stuff back into Riot).
Agreed that Riot itself uses way too much RAM though - but we have some massive improvements on the horizon there; by lazyloading user data on demand rather than preloading it up front, we can improve RAM usage by ~5x. This work is happening over the next month or two (modulo GDPR).
Meanwhile, you can always use a desktop client; Nheko, Fractal and Quaternion are all looking increasingly good :)
We're participating on the periphery of the MLS discussions, mainly to try to encourage the MLS team to consider and support decentralised use cases.
At the moment there's a temptation to go for a simpler approach which assumes there's a centralised sequencing server which solves all the races you otherwise get (and which have plagued us in Matrix whilst implementing Megolm). However, assuming a centralised focal point for each group conversation kills the whole point of decentralisation, so we're trying to ensure it's not designed out.
