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.
matrix.org hosts the reference server but anyone is free to host
commercial or personal ones like I do (then called homeserver).
(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.
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.
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.
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.
Federation is not for load-balancing or redundancy, at least not
primarily. It's so that there can multiple servers in the ecosystem to
chose from. You might trust server A more than B, or server C could
offer better services for a fee.
Best regards
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