Sixteen Next Generation Internet (NGI) projects are pleased to announce the transition to Mastodon and PeerTube, two European open-source platforms, for their communication and content-sharing needs. This strategic move aligns with NGI’s commitment to fostering an Internet that embodies European values of trust, security, and inclusion.
“Utilising European-developed platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube enhances digital sovereignty, ensuring that Europe’s digital infrastructure is built on values of openness, collaboration, and respect for fundamental rights. This transition marks a significant step toward a more human-centric Internet, reflecting NGI’s vision for a trustworthy, open, and inclusive digital future,” NGI writes on its website.
It’s somewhat funny how most Lemmy mods seem to discuss things on Discord or Matrix, rather than Lemmy (based on the chatter, though I am not a mod here so what do I know, really?).
Anyway the article itself is awesome news, though odd that accepting the cookie policy took almost a minute, and a bunch of stuff does not render well in my Firefox on Android web browser (switching to Landscape rather than Portrait helped). I also found the table layout to be highly confusing - does every one of those projects use [email protected], bc that’s normally what those lack of border lines would mean, or does only NGI Zero Commons Fund use it? Either way the meaning isn’t clear at all, but there are so many problems with that site that it could just be another html rendering mistake.
Most of the time we need real-time chat (Mods on Discord) or real-time secure chat (Admins on Matrix).
My instance uses a self hosted XMPP for mods/Admins to communicate quickly, which works quite well.
Matrix is essentially secure XMPP.
For fast and secure communications, I’d expect Fediverse mods and admins to be using it, as it doesn’t take much more to set up and use than less secure XMPP variants, and lines up with the ActivityPub worldview.
But I guess people go with what they know, and some people know standard XMPP or Discord.
XMPP has quite good encryption nowadays, and at least according to our sysadmin, it’s quite a bit lighter on system requirements. I think there was also some concerns about the matrix foundation being pretty corporate oriented.
Problem is most of the clients don’t have support for it
Matrix has absolutely bonkers resource requirements relative to the end user experience it delivers, and can be much more complex to deploy. Some of that is intrinsic to federation or to its protocol; some is related to Synapse specifically. I’m not sure whether competing server implementations will catch up before Synapse gets a rewrite in a more performant language, but I’m eager for one or the other to happen.
I admin a public Matrix server, so I’m not by any means against the product, but IMO there’s a reason it hasn’t meaningfully displaced XMPP yet.
Synapse is a mess, which is why Element is looking to eventually drop it for Dendrite. There’s also Conduit.
Are Dendrite and/or Conduit feature complete/comparable yet?
Not yet, but Conduit is fairly close if I’m not mistaken.
The problem with XMPP is its encryption UX is dreadful, Matrix got it right with comparing emoji to verify. Also Matrix, despite everything does try to keep its encryption up to date and so all the clients try to follow suit, the same cannot be said for xmpp