Genuine inquiry . Maybe I am not experienced enough with the various federated platforms but I am an avid user of matrix, and have dabbled in lemmy. From what I have seen is federation is on the path to decentralization but not fully there. It creates fiefdom, little kingdoms . Great yes you may find one that suites you better, but users now can end up isolated to their island, switch island sure but now you are isolated for the previous island and maybe others. Its stupid. On matrix you need to know the other island(server) to even find its rooms(communities). Some rooms block users from one server while others block users of other servers. You either have to run multiple accounts or accept the limits. Add in you are at the mercy of your home server, you can lose your account have it immitated, and more. The performance is horrible not sure why, but content is slow to update and spread. Matrix has the problem because of its design most people are on the matrix.org server and so the point of federation is largely lost. They are moving to p2p where it seems the solutions for federation now dont apply.

Anyway why is federation not stupid? Are these problems only with Matrix? Cause I look at lemmy and it seems far worse.

          • lemm1ngsOP
            1·
            3 years ago

            or Matrix could just solve p2p really well. The matrix.org situation has been mentioned by the p2p dev as motivation for p2p. The side benefit is matrix p2p solutions should work for other projects.

        • Abbé
          2·
          3 years ago

          Anyway. hopefully the dendrite server can solve this problem, hosting that hog of server is costly.

          Lately Synapse has been pretty light on resources, and performant, and being actively developed reference implementation has its perks. Hopefully Dendrite, Conduit, et. al. will catch up, but Matrix in general is not as lightweight as XMPP, due to former’s focus on being able to evade censorship

            • Abbé
              2·
              3 years ago

              With user joined to ~30 rooms with ~200 users (average), and none of them is of the order of Matrix HQ, following is the ps aux output (sixth column is RSS, physical memory in use in KiBs) on a 4G RAM VPS (2 cores), which also hosts XMPP, gitea, fossil-scm, et. al. services. I used to run it all by itself on 2G RAM VPS, but consolidated ~2 months ago:

              postgres 29897   0.0  3.7  191284 153736  -  Ss    2Jul21     28:15.26 postgres: synapse synapse 127.0.0.1(5828)  (postgres)
postgres 37308   0.0  3.7  191284 153264  -  Ss    2Jul21     27:54.09 postgres: synapse synapse 127.0.0.1(16807)  (postgres)
synapse  45418   0.0  9.0 1246748 375220  -  Ss    2Jul21   2264:01.80 /usr/local/bin/python3.8 -m synapse.app.homeserver --daemonize -c /usr/local/etc/matrix-synapse/homeserver.yaml
postgres 45433   0.0  3.7  191284 153096  -  Ss    2Jul21     28:21.45 postgres: synapse synapse 127.0.0.1(12404)  (postgres)
postgres 46529   0.0  3.7  191284 153644  -  Ss    2Jul21     28:06.31 postgres: synapse synapse 127.0.0.1(31560)  (postgres)
postgres 47450   0.0  3.7  191284 153972  -  Ss    2Jul21     28:16.65 postgres: synapse synapse 127.0.0.1(30342)  (postgres)
postgres 47929   0.0  3.7  191284 152948  -  Ss    2Jul21     28:20.01 postgres: synapse synapse 127.0.0.1(8337)  (postgres)
postgres 48024   0.0  3.7  196404 153296  -  Ss    2Jul21     28:22.18 postgres: synapse synapse 127.0.0.1(43996)  (postgres)
postgres 54977   0.0  3.7  191284 153656  -  Ss    2Jul21     28:16.74 postgres: synapse synapse 127.0.0.1(8192)  (postgres)
postgres 55034   0.0  3.7  191284 153468  -  Ss    2Jul21     28:20.01 postgres: synapse synapse 127.0.0.1(48984)  (postgres)
postgres 74852   0.0  3.7  191284 153328  -  Ss    2Jul21     28:10.76 postgres: synapse synapse 127.0.0.1(44007)  (postgres)

              Disk Usage (media) is 1.6G, and load average is ~0.33

              It can be tuned further, but didn’t spend time on it so far. Although 2 years ago, I could not run it on 2G RAM VPS. Federation traffic kept DoSing the server, once you join any room. Lately, situation has improved a lot.

          • lemm1ngsOP
            1·
            3 years ago

            What censorship evasion are you refering to with Matrix internal or external?

            • Abbé
              1·
              3 years ago

              The room does not live on one server in particular. So, if server A is blocked, then one can still participate in the same room through a different server B.

      • lemm1ngsOP
        1·
        3 years ago

        Signal’s centralization is a huge weak point proven with the servers crash a while back.

        Wanting decentralized tech is more a libertarian vs authoritarian thing than left and right. I really dont want to pull politic politics into this though cause the tech politics alone is enough :-)