> There is precisely one way to do a 1:1 VoIP/Video call in Matrix
Yeah, that's awfully close to what the xmpp people used to say. There are rtc calls and there are conferences, and otp is something else than omemo entirely.
For the end user however, when they click that telephone icon in their client, they may or may not get an embedded widget of some type or other, or an rtc stream, or something else. Should the remote client support the same thingamajig, they get a voice call. Look at the dozen or so most popular Matrix clients and for a non-technical user, it's still a gamble.
It's pretty much comparable to email in the 90s. Send a file, and it may end up as a uuencoded Mail Attachment, or perhaps a base64 encoded MIME. In the latter case it may be a multipart MIME or a non-multipart. Non-technical users sometimes couldn't open the file and then you had to send it some other way. Over time some clients got important enough for a de facto standard to emerge. It's still not perfect in 2021, one well known software company insists on their own .eml attachment that doesn't always work.
Matrix is quite similar to xmpp in this regard. Take the dozen most popular clients for each protocol, and check off how many popular features (voice calls, e2e, profiles, conferences, screen sharing etc.) interoperate fully. There's certainly room for improvement.
Don't take this the wrong way however! This is the price we pay for open protocols. If the alternative is low protocol innovation, then bring on the interop testing and annoyed users! It's worth it.
> aren't actually merged into the spec yet, but are specified at MSC1236
You even have standards proposals! They have numbers. Great! Let me guess, you bunch them up, spread some holy standardization water on them, recite an incantation and then they are part of an Offical Standard. Guess how many other protocols developers do that?
> that's not me or the Matrix core team doing that
Again, the tone could certainly be improved. One needs to look no further than this thread, to see other software developers being told in exactly how many ways their standard suck.
Take pride instead in what you did, and if someone asks you again why you didn't use the existing standard to build your chat product, just tell them you had more fun that way. Don't say inefficiency, don't say battery management, don't say interop when all of those metrics aren't looking any better in Matrix. Tell them about the nice team web chat you did, which is plenty reason to use it.
Yeah, that's awfully close to what the xmpp people used to say. There are rtc calls and there are conferences, and otp is something else than omemo entirely.
For the end user however, when they click that telephone icon in their client, they may or may not get an embedded widget of some type or other, or an rtc stream, or something else. Should the remote client support the same thingamajig, they get a voice call. Look at the dozen or so most popular Matrix clients and for a non-technical user, it's still a gamble.
It's pretty much comparable to email in the 90s. Send a file, and it may end up as a uuencoded Mail Attachment, or perhaps a base64 encoded MIME. In the latter case it may be a multipart MIME or a non-multipart. Non-technical users sometimes couldn't open the file and then you had to send it some other way. Over time some clients got important enough for a de facto standard to emerge. It's still not perfect in 2021, one well known software company insists on their own .eml attachment that doesn't always work.
Matrix is quite similar to xmpp in this regard. Take the dozen most popular clients for each protocol, and check off how many popular features (voice calls, e2e, profiles, conferences, screen sharing etc.) interoperate fully. There's certainly room for improvement.
Don't take this the wrong way however! This is the price we pay for open protocols. If the alternative is low protocol innovation, then bring on the interop testing and annoyed users! It's worth it.
> aren't actually merged into the spec yet, but are specified at MSC1236
You even have standards proposals! They have numbers. Great! Let me guess, you bunch them up, spread some holy standardization water on them, recite an incantation and then they are part of an Offical Standard. Guess how many other protocols developers do that?
> that's not me or the Matrix core team doing that
Again, the tone could certainly be improved. One needs to look no further than this thread, to see other software developers being told in exactly how many ways their standard suck.
Take pride instead in what you did, and if someone asks you again why you didn't use the existing standard to build your chat product, just tell them you had more fun that way. Don't say inefficiency, don't say battery management, don't say interop when all of those metrics aren't looking any better in Matrix. Tell them about the nice team web chat you did, which is plenty reason to use it.