Beyond the general idea of Matrix itself, a nice snapshot of all the stuff currently happening in the Matrix ecosystem right now is the This Week In Matrix blog series, which goes out every Friday. This week’s one is at:
https://matrix.org/blog/2020/08/21/this-week-in-matrix-2020-...Some of the stuff I’m personally most excited about right now is Hydrogen (https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web): a super lightweight web client which heavily leans on indexeddb for storage and so minimises RAM. My primary account has 3000 rooms and about 450K visible users - on element-web this uses 1.1GB of RAM, but on hydrogen it uses 14MB :) We’re also looking at glueing E2EE into Hydrogen via the crypto layer of matrix-rust-sdk, which could be a massive win in terms of reusing and auditing a robust safe implementation for the Hard problem of encryption, rather than implementing it from scratch every time in every new client.
Dendrite (go server impl) progress is also very promising - we’ve been focusing on it (at last!) since the beginning of the year, and going to enter beta in the next few weeks. A typical small/medium live server is currently using 57MB of RAM (rather than synapse’s ~500MB). We haven’t started optimising yet :)
Synapse has also finally come of age - the whole codebase has almost been switched to twisted/asyncio rather than twisted deferreds, which both speeds things up a bit but also gives us way better visibility on profiling for future perf work. Almost all bits now scale horizontally (apart from the master dispatcher process). Synapse isn’t going away - we see Synapse and Dendrite coexisting much as Apache and nginx coexist today.
Conduit is also super exciting as an entirely community developed Rust homeserver, which currently runs ~10x faster than either Synapse or Dendrite (but doesn’t federate yet, or scale horizontally). It’s really fun to see an indie FOSS server implementation properly take off :)
Finally, P2P Matrix is coming together well - compiling Dendrite to WASM and running it clientside, using Yggdrasil currently as an overlay network to tunnel through to other P2P nodes.
In short: the Matrix ecosystem is in a fairly healthy place right now - the next gen of clients and servers should be incredible :)
Some of the stuff I’m personally most excited about right now is Hydrogen (https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web): a super lightweight web client which heavily leans on indexeddb for storage and so minimises RAM. My primary account has 3000 rooms and about 450K visible users - on element-web this uses 1.1GB of RAM, but on hydrogen it uses 14MB :) We’re also looking at glueing E2EE into Hydrogen via the crypto layer of matrix-rust-sdk, which could be a massive win in terms of reusing and auditing a robust safe implementation for the Hard problem of encryption, rather than implementing it from scratch every time in every new client.
Dendrite (go server impl) progress is also very promising - we’ve been focusing on it (at last!) since the beginning of the year, and going to enter beta in the next few weeks. A typical small/medium live server is currently using 57MB of RAM (rather than synapse’s ~500MB). We haven’t started optimising yet :)
Synapse has also finally come of age - the whole codebase has almost been switched to twisted/asyncio rather than twisted deferreds, which both speeds things up a bit but also gives us way better visibility on profiling for future perf work. Almost all bits now scale horizontally (apart from the master dispatcher process). Synapse isn’t going away - we see Synapse and Dendrite coexisting much as Apache and nginx coexist today.
Conduit is also super exciting as an entirely community developed Rust homeserver, which currently runs ~10x faster than either Synapse or Dendrite (but doesn’t federate yet, or scale horizontally). It’s really fun to see an indie FOSS server implementation properly take off :)
Finally, P2P Matrix is coming together well - compiling Dendrite to WASM and running it clientside, using Yggdrasil currently as an overlay network to tunnel through to other P2P nodes.
In short: the Matrix ecosystem is in a fairly healthy place right now - the next gen of clients and servers should be incredible :)