Open protocol for decentralized communication [matrix] seeks sponsors to continue development

The open protocol development team for decentralized communication [matrix] recently announced a reduction in sponsorship of the development team by the main sponsor by more than 60% and calls on the community to help sponsor further project development.

The [matrix] protocol itself and the Synapse server are already in a stable state, ready for use in operational configurations. For example, in our company, he fully replaced eJabberd, Slack and Skype for internal corporate communication and has been working steadily for more than six months. You can read more about the Matrix protocol on the official website and in the article “ Matrix - everything arrives in the regiment of chats ”.

The Synapse [matrix] server in conjunction with the Riot Matrix client allows you to quickly pick up on their servers a full-fledged alternative to commercial services like Slack and HipChat with the implementation of all the necessary functions.

At the same time , a federation (federation) is fully implemented , which allows you to seamlessly communicate, organize common rooms for communication to users of different servers, make video and audio calls.

In the client of Riot all modern functions of instant messengers are available:

• personal and group messages;
  
• sending images and files;
  
• paste images to chat directly from the clipboard;
  
• end-to-end encryption;
  
• notifications about typing and reading, in group chats with a large number of participants clearly shows which of the participants read to what place;
  
• storing the entire history of communication and files on the server;
  
• group audio and video calls based on WebRTC;
  
• flexible configuration of moderators, access to history after entering the room and user rights in the rooms;
  
• bots support in different programming languages;
  
• the possibility of guest access to the rooms for viewing history and communication without setting a login, the generation of static pages with room logs ;
  
• full-featured web-client that allows you to log in and start to communicate, get access to the entire history of communication from any place;
  
• mobile clients for Android and iOS with push-notifications and very economical battery consumption;
  
• desktop clients for Windows, Linux, macOS (so far, unfortunately, it works on the basis of Electron like Slack and Skype, but in development there are full-fledged clients based on Qt, Gtk, console clients , etc.).
  

More detailed reviews of Riot in English:

• Slack no more. Why you should use Riot.im and Matrix.org
  
• Yet another messaging platform: Why Riot?
  

In addition to Riot for Matrix, many other clients are being actively developed in various languages ​​and for different systems, a library for libpurple (Pidgin) , and the server part has already been implemented with several options in different languages .

At the same time, it is not necessary to install your Matrix server, you can simply create an account on the main Matrix.org server and use all the features through it.

The protocol also allows you to organize bridges to many other networks such as IRC, Gitter, XMPP, Hangouts, Skype, Facebook, RocketChat, Slack, Telegram, Twitter, and many others to conduct all communication through a single server and client. Now, for each gateway, you need to launch a separate matrix-puppet-bridge daemon, but the active development is the matrix-puppet-server gateway server , which will allow one daemon to organize gateways to all networks at once for several users.

Moreover, the bridges in Slack, Gitter and IRC in the Riot client are already working right away, without having to install something on your server.

On the basis of [matrix], they also implemented a demo-version of a virtual reality interface that runs in a browser to demonstrate the capabilities of the protocol and modern technologies.

As a result, the [matrix] project is a good free alternative to XMPP, Slack, Skype, Viber, WhatsApp and the rest of the new-fangled messengers, and in the future will be able to combine all these messengers in themselves through bridges to communicate with everyone through a single protocol and one application .

The [matrix] protocol is not the only open protocol for instant messaging, there is also Tox, Ring, Signal, XMPP and many other alternatives. But:

• Jabber with the XMPP protocol is full of numerous XEPs, the normal implementation of which is still lacking in most Jabber clients. For example, there is still no Jabber client with normal synchronization of the history with the server (XEP-0313: Message Archive Management / MAM), multi-user chats / conferences have unresolved problems with the delivery of offline messages.
  
• The Tox and Ring projects are aimed at encrypted P2P communication without a central server, which leads to unsolvable problems with cpu consumption, traffic and battery, history synchronization problems on different devices and many other serverless communication problems.
  
• The Signal protocol in comparison with Matrix looks less promising, more about this can be found in the article Encrypted messengers: Why Riot (and not Signal) is the future (English).
  

As a result, promising opensource alternatives [matrix] today simply do not exist, so the developers believe that the future lies in the [matrix] protocol.

Since the appearance of the call for sponsorship, the project has already collected more than $ 2000 donations per month, which was reported in detail in his blog , which gave the developer confidence in the future and prospects for the further development of the project. But this amount is still not enough for the full payment of the work of the team for the full working day.

You can sponsor the development of the project through the following services:

• Patreon ;
  
• Liberapay ;
  
• bitcoin to 1LxowEgsquZ3UPZ68wHf8v2MDZw82dVmAE;
  
• Contact the development team through a blog article .