Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46682481

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

I think the key here is that you did try, you gave cooking and sports an honest chance, and it turns out that you're not into them. It doesn't feel like many people would put the effort in to really figure out if they _would_ like something that's initially uncomfortable or difficult. I think that's what the article is responding to - I read the overall thesis as "you might actually end up liking something that you don't like initially" rather than "you will like anything given enough effort".

It is interesting to play with though. Thanks for the reference!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992104

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

I have run a Synapse server for almost 8 years, by my reckoning. For most of that time I have been a $15/mo supporter.

For several years, I had been hoping Dendrite would be released, along with a migration path to get my users over there. Synapse's resource usage is not great. I do run workers in order to improve performance.

I'm waiting for an official migration path because I don't want to have to migrate my community again like I did when we moved from Slack to Matrix. It takes a lot of work just to move people over, and you always lose a couple people, which is a serious cost.

Early last year I learned that they had put that on ice due to money issues. So there wasn't much hope of moving to a lower-cost Matrix implementation without a lot of headache. This makes sense. Building a homeserver implementation while maintaining an older one is expensive.

For a year or more we've had quite a few blog posts saying that there's not enough money and that large organizations join the Matrix Foundation. This makes sense. Those organizations have enough money to keep it going, unlike my small monthly donation, which doesn't really matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.

It's been quite a while since we've seen a new user-facing feature, and longer since we've had a selling point (which I could use to answer the question "why should I move to Matrix?"). It makes sense to prioritize functionality over new features, particularly when you've got a limited budget. But we still don't have some features which are very popular in Discord and Slack, like custom react images; these are implemented in other clients, like Cinny, but not Element.

Last year they released Sliding Sync in Synapse, deprecating the Sliding Sync Proxy which I had been running to support clients who wanted to use Element X (a new client implementation). I personally haven't switched since Element X does not support Spaces. Moving Sliding Sync into Synapse saved me some resources supporting those clients. It was a little hard to tell when it was safe to remove the Sliding Sync Proxy; I had to track a couple Github issues. Matrix used to have a public roadmap, but it's no longer updated, so it's hard to keep up with the status of different features in development.

After that they released Matrix Authentication Service (MAS), which is an additional service to deploy that moves the internal authentication functionality out of Synapse and interfaces with Synapse using OIDC. I haven't deployed it yet. They say it will eventually get rolled into Synapse, so I'm intending to wait for that.

All in all, it does not feel like the things I want, and (assuming I'm not a completely unusual case) that the community wants, are high priority for the Element team. Donations the size of mine don't make a difference for their budget. They're spending what budget they do have on refactors like MAS, which don't seem to impact usability (though perhaps they do if you have a massive homeserver). They spend time and effort supporting new features which make Element X faster (Sliding Sync) but have not yet implemented all the core functionality (Spaces) so there's not much reason to move.

I concluded a few months ago that our interests are not aligned any more and stopped donating. I know I'm not owed anything for my donations. I donated to support a project which I was excited about. This announcement, and that RAM graph which I will never see on my own server, makes me confident in discontinuing my support.

I do not feel like Matrix/Element values its community any more.

The half-done or broken improvements still get called "innovations" and give innovation overall a worse reputation.

I wish it would randomly pick the next song from the entire playlist whenever it changed songs.

Though as you say it might already be doing this now. I don't remember feeling like I'm rotating through the same 30 or so songs recently. But also I did start working around it, so I may just not be noticing.

For assets line like IP you have to factor in how risky the returns are, how much investment you'd have to make to see them (e.g. making a movie), and overall strategy (do we want to be in that line of business).

All this to say - if you have IP that pays 10 million a year, you can value future returns on that IP in today's dollars. If someone offers you more than that to buy it, you should take the deal; you come out ahead.

I'd put Lapce in that spot: https://lapce.dev/

The company I work for had a bug driven by the underscores-in-numbers and scientific notation functionality (`20230101000000_e111111`, a timestamp underscore a git short hash, was parsed as a huge number rather than a string). The serialization library from one language did not implement those features and so did not quote the value in its output, but the deserialization library in the other did and would parse it as a number. This eventually resulted in it becoming null (not sure why, maybe it was too large for the int type in the target language?) but even if it hadn't been we then format it into a URL (to download an artifact) so the fact that our YAML libraries disagree would cause the string value to change and break the download.

The YAML standard is too big, resulting in only partial implementations, and the disagreements can result in unexpected value changes. With no handcrafting whatsoever.

7% interest on a loan in a year with 3% inflation (the real cost of having money that year) that is guaranteed to be repaid seems like evidence of corruption to me. But maybe I think too simplistically.

[0] https://esp-rs.github.io/book/installation/index.html

I don't think asking noob questions makes you part of the community in the way it matters here - actually contributing.