We've switched our chat to Matrix, and it's been a great experience so far. The Element client is real Slack competitor.

I have high hopes Matrix can disrupt all the chat silos out there.

> The Element client is real Slack competitor.

Do you miss threads at all? They're not perfect, but I find them better than interleaving conversations.

I'm one of those people that really dislikes threads in slack, so I'm probably the wrong person to ask!

One of my coworkers replies in threads about 70% of the time, when we're just sending individual messages to each other.

I wish I could force-inline other people's threads. I have no idea how they manage to get by with Slack.

Another coworker never closes any of the reminder messages. Most of their vertical space is not showing anything useful.

This is super cool to know! I was just looking for a more scalable way to implement real-time communication for a hobby project https://lo.fish, an event space creation platform similiar to gather.town and sococo. (Right now the plan is to turn it into partially a Matrix client && open-source a community version of it in the end of this month!)

Before stumbling upon Dendrite I was thinking about reimplmenting the backend in Elixir.

I have some exposure in both Go and Elixir. So am quite curious what are the list of things the Matrix team had gone through before deciding to re-write Matrix in Go instead of Elixir. Hmm perhaps one of the main reason was that Go has a much bigger ecosystem than Elixir? I always had the impression that writing a decentralised system in Elixir would be more straight-forward. Or perchance there are other more pragmatical aspects of things to consider?

(I'm compeletly new to this so any thoughts on it will be appreciated!)

I'm much more excited at this point by conduit, dendrite is cool, but the goal of federation should be easy to install, easy to run, cheap to run. Requiring kafka isn't cheap or easy.

Dendrite can be built and run as a single binary. Kafka is only needed if you want to run the microservices as separate processes.

which is why dendrite, in monolith mode, runs their own kafka replacement called naffka

naffka is just a library so you don’t even see it :)

Tangential, but when we use "free" Matrix, who is paying the bills? And how far can free Matrix reach the online billions?

Matrix is an open network like Email or the Web. So if you use a "free" server, it means you've selected a public server like matrix.org or privacytools.io or whoever. These servers are hosted philanthropically for the benefit of the overall network (e.g. Matrix.org's hosting is paid for via Patreon: http://patreon.com/matrixdotorg).

If enough organisations run their own servers and make them available to their users for free, then you could indeed support the online billions. Instead, much like email, we already see a mix of free services (the equivalent of hotmail, gmail etc) and paid services (the equivalent of g-suite, protonmail, etc).