Unlurker

Show HN: An A2A-compatible, open-source framework for multi-agent networks (github.com/openagents-org)

> Star Us on GitHub and Get Exclusive Day 1 Badge for Your Networks This made me close the tab. Stars have been gamed for awhile on GitHub, but given the single demo, my best guess is that this is trying to build hype before having any real utility.

There are already people using this in many applications, there is a new one coming out today https://x.com/milvusio/status/1991170853795709397?s=20

Good to see a2a getting more attention. If you are a rustacean, We are building something in the a2a space as well. Tho we don't have sudden increase in stars :/ https://github.com/agents-sh/radkit

Nice , time to learn Rust!

Fancy logo, has a website, sudden rise in stars. Checks all the boxes of open-source software that's waiting for enshitification.

Genuine question: do you know what that word means?

Can someone please explain what this means? I'm familiar with agentic development workflows but have no clue what this means and what I can do with it? Is it something like n8n, to connect agents with some work flow and let the work flow do stuff for me?

In the late 90s and early 2000s there was a bunch of academic research into collaborative multi-agent systems. This included things like communication protocols, capability discovery, platforms, and some AI. The classic and over-used example was travel booking -- a hotel booking agent, a flight booking agent, a train booking agent, etc all collaborating to align time, cost, location. The cooperative agents could add themselves and their capabilities to the agent community and the potential of the system as a whole would increase, and there would perhaps be cool emergent behaviours that no one had thought of. This appears, to me, like an LLM-agent descendent of these earlier multi-agent systems. I lost track of the research after I left academia -- perhaps someone here can fill in the (considerable) blanks from my overview?

openagents aims to build agent networks with "open" ecosystems, many agent systems these days are centered around workflows, but workflow is possible when you already know what kinds of agents will be there in your team. But when you allow any agent to join/leave a network, the workflow concept breaks, so this project helps developers to build a ecosystem for open collaboration.

Nice work — making multi-agent networks A2A-compatible in an open-source framework looks very promising.

Definitely not malware: https://www.star-history.com/#openagents-org/openagents&type=date&legend=top-left

Seems like a pretty typical trajectory to me. I posted a project on HN and got a graph of roughly the same shape (though a much more modest magnitude). https://www.star-history.com/#maxbondabe/attempt&type=date&legend=top-left Maybe it's malware, I haven't checked, but star counts go vertical when you launch your project and it receives a warm reception. ~850 stars in 11 days for an AI project doesn't seem at all crazy to me. ETA: The README contains a mild inducement to star the repo. Mostly a vanity role on Discord, if I'm not mistaken. > Star Us on GitHub and Get Exclusive Day 1 Badge for Your Networks Seems sufficient to explain any inauthentic behavior. How that impacts the probability this is malware, I can't say.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it is malware. Is it not possible that they just paid for some kind of PR or fake stars? Just playing devils advocate as I think your accusation isn’t based on much merit and is quite a big claim to make.

This looks great. Open-source work in multi-agent systems is still quite fragmented, so having an A2A-compatible framework feels very useful. A question: how difficult would it be to plug in custom agent personalities or domain-specific tools? If you have a roadmap or examples, I’d love to see them.

Hi, we are working on a feature allowing someone to quickly write and launch an agent into the network with zero code (just configuration). Example config: https://github.com/openagents-org/openagents/blob/develop/examples/agent_yaml/openmcp_agent_config_example.yaml We are doing the final testing, and this feature should be working very soon.

↙ time adjusted for second-chance

The lost cause of the Lisp machines (tfeb.org)

As someone who used Franz LISP on Sun workstations while someone else nearby used a Symbolics 3600 refrigerator-sized machine, I was never all that impressed with the LISP machine. The performance wasn't all that great. Initially garbage collection took 45 minutes, as it tried to garbage-collect paged-out code. Eventually that was fixed. The hardware was not very good. Too much wire wrap and slow, arrogant maintenance. I once had a discussion with the developers of Franz LISP. The way it worked was that it compiled LISP source files and produced .obj files. But instead of linking them into an executable, you had to load them into a run-time environment. So I asked, "could you put the run time environment in another .obj file, so you just link the entire program and get a standalone executable"? "Why would you want to do that?" "So we could ship a product." This was an alien concept to them. So was managing LISP files with source control, like everything else. LISP gurus were supposed to hack . And, in the end, 1980s "AI" technology didn't do enough to justify that hardware.

You may try CADR (precursor to Genera) on-line: https://lispcafe.org/cadr/usim.html

“ I am just really bored by Lisp Machine romantics at this point: they should go away. I expect they never will.” What? They’re awesome. They present a vision of the future that never happened. And I don’t think anyone serious expects lisp machines to come back btw.

See also: Amiga romantics. 8-bit romantics. PDP-10 romantics. Let them stay. Let them romantizice. <glasses tint="rose">

>They present a vision of the future that never happened Hauntology strikes again

Sun JavaStation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaStation

I was aware of these, it's kinda what I meant by "None of these were really Java Machines". They were just shitty sparc machines that had Java OS in flash. It didn't have some kind of Java co-processor and still relied on a JVM. Java OS was pretty neat but I wouldn't really consider it a "Java OS" since it was basically just a microkernel that bootstrapped a JVM from what I've read. An actual Java machine IMO would have to at least have some kind of Java co-processor and not rely on a software based JVM

Sun also tried, and failed, to bring to market, a microprocessor architecture for running Java on metal - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAJC

For those unaware, Symbolics eventually "pivoted" to DEC Alpha, a supposedly "open" architecture, which is how Genera became Open Genera, like OpenVMS. (And still, like OpenVMS, heavily proprietary.)

Yes, but also. OpenGenera was ported to x86 some time ago.

Wasn’t the “open” at the time meaning “open system” as a system that is open for external connections (aka networking) and not so much open as in “open source”?

I was both Alpha being quasi-open itself, like OpenPOWER today, and like earlier PDP minis had been, whereas VAX had been pretty locked down: https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/decus/vmslt05a/vu/alpha_history.html > Although Alpha was declared an "open architecture" right from the start, there was no consortium to develop it. All R&D actions were handled by DEC itself, and sometimes in cooperation with Mitsubishi. In fact, though the architecture was free de jure, most important hardware designs of it were pretty much closed de facto, and had to be paid-licensed (if possible at all). So, it wasn't that thing helping to promote the architecture. To mention, soon after introduction of EV4, DEC's high management offered to license manufacturing rights to Intel, Motorola, NEC, and Texas Instruments. But all these companies were involved in different projects and were of very little to no interest in EV4, so they refused. Perhaps, the conditions could be also unacceptable, or something else. Mistake #5. However OpenVMS did go much further in supporting POSIX interoperability.

Ask HN: What are some modern technologies that you refuse to adopt?

IoT. I have no interest in home appliances with fancy screen, internet connectivity, apps, and any of that other nonsense. I’m also pretty skeptical of the whole smart home market. A lot of it seems like technology in search of a problem… and it also seems very buggy.

Ai for anything but translations

That would be smart devices: TVs, fridges, teapots, watches, phones

↙ time adjusted for second-chance

A surprise with how '#!' handles its program argument in practice (utcc.utoronto.ca)

There is no security issue here. The file with the '#!' needs to be executable, and at that point it doesn't matter what it invokes because you made it executable. It could have shellcode in it or it could call python3 which can also execute shellcode. Or more likely, it would just be a malware binary which you deliberately gave permissions to and executed.

I wonder what the reason was for having the kernel handle this, instead of the shell? To allow programs besides the shell to execute interpreted scripts as if they were actual binaries? This is of course in stark contrast to dynamic linking, which is performed by a userspace program instead of the kernel, and much like the #!, this "interpreter"'s path is also hardcoded in dynamically linked binaries.

tbh it is lame for any program reading a text file to not support BOM. It's just one if.

There isn't really any one "text file" though, the kernel looks for the first two bytes to match what "#!" corresponds to in ASCII. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8nblo6BawU is some great watching on how "Plain text isn't that simple"

Because /bin is the standard location for bash. The only one that breaks that expectation is NixOS (and maybe GuixSD?), apparently. I'm surprised they didn't symlink /bin or put a stub. Last time I tried NixOS was like 10 years ago. I thought there was a /bin/bash, but maybe it was just a /bin/sh? Other interpreters like python, ruby, etc. have more likelyhood of being used with "virtual environments", so it's more common to use /usr/bin/env with them.

Will not wok on OpenBSD where the shell that comes with the system is ksh at /bin/ksh and /bin/sh and if you want bash it is a third party package and correspondingly gets installed as /usr/local/bin/bash It does get awkward, especially when porting. all your third party libraries and includes are in /usr/local/lib /usr/local/include but at least it is better than freebsd which also insists on putting all third party configs under /usr/local/etc/

I'm not sure the reason then, but they're definitely right; it works fine with zsh, doesn't work with bash. I wrote a test script to try it myself. I don't have fish installed and can't be bothered to go that far, but I suspect they're right about that as well.

It is strange, cursory digging for an explanation was a little more complex than I bargained for... https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/v6.17/fs/binfmt_script.c#L121-L134 I think it makes it to calling open_exec but there's a test for BINPRM_FLAGS_PATH_INACCESSIBLE, which doesn't seem relevant since 'bash' isn't like '/dev/fd/<fd>/..', but does provoke an ENOENT. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/v6.17/fs/exec.c#L1445 Maybe someone else can explain it, I'd enjoy the details, and ran out of steam.

↙ time adjusted for second-chance

Three Hapsburgs and a Reporter Walk into a Canadian Vault (nytimes.com)

The initial reportage couldn't resist the "lost jewellery" tag when they were never lost, just not openly discussed.

I think it's correct. They were lost to the general public and were considered missing. When a smaller yellow diamond surfaced there was speculation that it's the Florentine diamond that was cut.

How can a paper like the New York Times not even get the name of dynasty right and this across multiple articles? It's the House of Habsburg, not Hapsburg.

German usage https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Hapsburg%2CHabsburg&year_start=1800&year_end=2025&corpus=20&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CHapsburg%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CHabsburg%3B%2Cc0 Vs https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Hapsburg%2CHabsburg&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en-US&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false US (In my head NYT is an anachronism from the 60s but I've a feeling the editors would be more than fine with that characterization)

Already addressed: "While the family spells its last name with a B, the New York Times stylebook spells Hapsburg with a P, which brought no shortage of scolding emails upon publication."

How can the New Iork Tymes just choose how they spell things? That's messed up.

These idiosyncrasies are amusing but they do have a habit of dominating the conversation. E.g. the New Yorker (I think) uses diaeresis to represent distinct syllables resulting in words like “Cooperate” being decorated. Or that chap here who insists on using 5 digit years. But some go missed. My personal favourite is that I prefer to fully close clauses within quotations. > The President said, “I will never bomb the moon!”.

↙ time adjusted for second-chance

What influence has the BBC had on history? (historytoday.com)

https://www.cambridgeclarion.org/press_cuttings/mi5.bbc.staff_obs_18aug1985.html > At the last count, in 1984, the BBC had a staff of almost 30,000. We have discovered that all current affairs appointees, together with many of those involved in the actual making of programmes - including directors and film editors - are vetted. > We have also established who runs the system. It operates, unknown to almost all BBC staff, from Room 105 in an out-of-the way corridor on the first floor of Broadcasting House - a part of that labyrinth on which George Orwell modelled his Ministry of Truth in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.' > The names of outside applicants are submitted to F Branch 'domestic' subversion desks at MI5, which is headed by the diplomat Sir Antony Duff. They are fed into a computer containing the details of 500,000 'subversives'. https://www.cambridgeclarion.org/press_cuttings/mi5.bbc.page9_obs_18aug1985.html > MI5 probably got their toe-hold in the BBC during the war when staff running the external services broadcasting to occupied Europe were vetted. Sir Hugh Greene, later to become director-general of the BBC, remembers: 'I was vetted in 1940. MI5 thought I was a Communist, but it turned out to be a mistake .' During the Cold War, Attlee's Government openly announced that civil servants who were Communists (or Fascists) would not be allowed access to classified material. But the BBC were keeping a secret blacklist. Hugh Greene recalls a case in the external services: 'He wasn't a security risk at all. It turned out he had worked for MI6,the rival secret service, and there had been an internal quarrel.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Christmas_tree%22_files edit: the BBC coverage of the Scottish independence referendum, Corbyn, and Brexit was embarrassing. The Prescott memo is just the latest observation of how the BBC has been used as a tool to propagate elite opinions and accomplish intelligence objectives. Of course you like it, it's for you.

> The Prescott memo is just the latest observation of how the BBC has been used as a tool to propagate elite opinions and accomplish intelligence objectives. Of course you like it, it's for you. I think this kind of criticism is in bad faith. Because there's an implication that you're comparing the BBC to some kind of ideal unbiased news outlet. In reality, the alternatives to the BBC are much more obviously nefarious and make far less steps to remove bias. If the BBC is a tool to "propagate elite opinions", then how would you describe Fox News, the Daily Mail, The Times (UK), or even CNN?

When you're attacked from all sides, it's either you're doing it all wrong or all good. Obviously I want to think it's the latter.

Come on guys, they have been the global arbiter of truth in the English speaking world and beyond for decades (the incarnation of CNN and the internet put aside), never ever, ever, ever, ever would that power be of interest to anyone! Anyone! You have to be a Putin-puppet, Covidiot, Transzenohomophobic misogynist, and anti-Semitic christian communist Neonazi to believe differently!

Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory (element.io)

There seems to be a lot of confusion regarding what verification is all about. I'm going to list out what it means, based on my reading of their documentation[1] and on what worked for me. It includes some essential preparations that you MUST TAKE if you have access to your account. This is to ensure that all your devices are verified, that they all have access to all encrypted messages and that you don't ever get fully locked out. DISCLAIMER: I have no direct experience with Matrix or Element code base. I have no affiliation with them either. So this isn't official and a few errors can be expected. Please let me know if you notice any. I will keep this corrected for as long as I can. Otherwise I add the errata as child comments. 1. Matrix has TWO levels of authorized access . 2. The first level is where you enter your regular username and password, that's unique to your homeserver (like matrix.org). It looks like OIDC/OAuth2 to me. On being authenticated at this level, your client (Element, Fluffy, Cinny, etc) is able to access the messages meant for you. At this stage, you're able to read any unencrypted messages. Most community chatrooms are unencrypted by choice. 3. The encryption used for your encrypted messages is end-to-end. Their encryption keys are named 'room keys' in Element (there are several of them). They are not directly available to your homeserver (otherwise, it wouldn't be end-to-end). Similarly, there seems to be an 'Identity key' (presumably a cryptographic private key that makes you the owner of the account and is needed for some account operations). This key is also not directly available to the homeserver. 4. The client app just logged in and the server doesn't know your room keys or ID keys. They're known only to your other clients. So now you need to transfer them from those clients to the new client without divulging them to any servers in between. Once that's done, your new client will be able to decrypt all your encrypted messages and join those discussions. This process of transferring your room keys and the ID key to your new client is the second authorization step known as ' Verification '. (I presume it's called verification because your new client can now prove its authenticity using your ID key.) 5. Verification can be done in three different ways. The first two are manual methods and are rarely used. We will discuss these two later. The other is using a 'verification request'. This is straightforward. Your new client requests the already verified clients attached to your account for your room and ID keys. Any verified client can respond. However, it needs to first verify that your new client is really yours, and not someone who used your leaked password or hacked your account. To do this, the clients currently offer you two methods - one using a QR code and the other using a sequence of icons. If you select QR code, your verified client will show you a QR code that you need to scan with your new unverified client. Since it proves that both clients are in the possession of the same person, the verified client then proceeds to transfer the keys to the new client, finishing the verification. If you chose the Icon sequence instead, then the verified client creates a random sequence of icons that it sends to the new clients. Then both the clients display it to the user. If the user accepts on both device that the icon sequences are identical, it's the required proof that both clients are with same person. The rest of it is the same as before. 6. So far, so good. If you were able to complete till step 5, the new client is verified and now you can carry on with your business. Now we address the situation of what happens if you are not able to do any of these . Just assume that all your clients got logged out together for some reason (yes, it has happened before). Now none of your clients or the server has any of the room keys and the ID key needed to prove your ownership (crypto authn) or access your encrypted messages, even after you log back in. The only solution is to load the room keys and ID key from a backup. This is why it is IMPORTANT TO BACKUP your room and ID keys . 7. There are ' two ways to backup the room keys and the ID key '. These two methods are also the two manual methods of verification that I mentioned above. The first method is to back up the keys on the homeserver itself. It's convenient because all your clients can access them at any time and keep the room keys updated as they change or new ones are added. This feature is called 'Key Storage' in Settings/Encryption tab of Element. It's enabled by default. ALWAYS keep it enabled. You may be wondering how it can be end-to-end encryption if the private keys are stored on the homeserver itself. If you're, then you're correct. They are stored in encrypted form on the server key storage. The decryption keys for that is available only to the clients. So while the server holds the keys, it cannot access any of them. 8. Here is your first opportunity to do something about accidental losses. The decryption key for the key storage can be downloaded and preserved in a secure manner. Perhaps write it down on a paper or put it in the password manager. This key is called the ' Recovery key '. You can download or change it from Element's Settings/Encryption tab. ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR RECOVERY KEY . You can use the recovery key instead of the QR code or the icon sequence to verify your new clients. There are two differences from the previous method. The first is that you can enter the recovery key directly into the new unverified client. The verified clients are not needed here. The second is that this is possible even if all your clients gets logged out . Again, this is why it's very important to BACKUP YOUR RECOVERY KEY!! 9. Besides setting up server key storage, you can take one additional step. This is the second manual method of verification. You can download and backup all the room keys and your ID key on your local system . This option is available as the 'Export keys' button on the Settings/Encryption tab. When you do so, you'll be asked for a password. This password is used to encrypt the file with all those keys, so that they don't sit unencrypted on your disk. This file can be backed up as such, but you can encrypt it again if you prefer. You can use these keys also to verify your account. You'll need the above password to decrypt the keys file. However, this method still has one big CAVEAT . I suspect that the keys file need to be updated regularly, since there will be new keys when you join rooms. So if you use this method to validate, it's likely that your client won't be able to decrypt the rooms/messages for which it doesn't have the copy of their key. But this is still worth doing, because it contains your ID key which can be used to verify all your devices again as a last ditch measure (if your homeserver happens to quit or something). 10. Now let's just say that you're a careless ### who didn't do any of the above. You still have the option to nuke it! That is to Reset your cryptographic identity* from Settings/Encryption. I presume that this just discards all your previous keys and creates a new private ID key. Since all the clients can now access this key, your account is verified again. But you will not be able to access any of your previous encrypted conversations. And the homeserver helps you along by discarding all your previous conversations, room subscriptions and settings. So now you're left with a cleanly empty account. But hey! You have your verified account back! So, in summary: 1. Always verify all your clients 2. Setup server key storage (it is enabled by default, don't disable it) and backup the recovery key 3. Backup the room keys and ID keys on your local system. Use it for recovery/verification only in the worst case 4. Don't forget the password you used to encrypt the above file (just sayin) NOTE: I intentionally left out some crypto details from the above (like session keys) to avoid making it any more complex. If you're unhappy with those omissions, please just leave a comment. [1] https://element.io/en/help#encryption

Last time I used Matrix for our internal team notifications were beyond broken and we moved to Zulip, verification and authentication were also very funky at the time, I don't dare to try it again.

I am not sure the founder is reading this. I tried googling but couldn't find it - I recall the hn handle being something like Atheon. Not that hn sends mention notifications. Matrix is something that had my eyes lit after years or being burnt/disappointed by communication apps (Signal included). I had converted/migrated a lot of people to it (I mean of course they didn't "convert" but they had it and were replying to me) from a country where WhatsApp is essentially "basic need" today – along with water, air, food, and shelter and that too in an era when it was not even stable. After that I just didn't know what the hell happened. Matrix, Vector, Riot, Element – things just kept happening. App was never an end user app and it became very clear that it was not the intention either. To be honest it didn't look like a replacement for something like Slack or something like IRC either. It was trying to become something which it seemed/seems has no end goal or destination i.e a clear roadmap. As if the goal is to develop cool features and just put them haphazardly together which I am afraid often results in something Mary Shelley wrote. I still login from time to time and I don't understand what is happening. Something I see this notification, something that, sometimes I see there's a message pending, sometimes I see I have a chat recovered (old/stale; because there's no one I know uses it anymore), sometimes I see a certain chat is not recovered because some verification or decryption (or something) failed, sometimes I see (or understand it) that I might another active and verified device to recover certain messages. I had created some groups and of course they remain abandoned - but no, few og them were filled were porn and the kind of some was scary because that vector/riot/element account is connected to my real ID including the email and I was scared shitless. I tried deleting them but I couldn't. Next time I will try harder or just try to make it private after kicking everyone out. I will still keep the account. Never say never :) I sadly have moved from writing enthusiastic to sad to disappointing comments to not even paying attention to it when there's a Matrix/Element news now. I think I don't even notice it. I think that's the worse kind of eventuality in this context. Anyway, I wish you all luck and I am sure you all know what you are doing.

I mean we’re there for Signal. The parts that suck still are regarding access/retention of old messages which is an area Matrix is ironically slightly better about. But Signal we don’t need to think about verification, at worst it says this asshole has a new identity and then I have to tell them I’ve reset my iPhone for the 4th time this week… Normal users do find retention important even if privacy/security minded users find value in ephemerality.

Can you use Signal across multiple devices?

I decommissioned my server 3 months ago and migrated my community back to IRC. I still had the IRC Podman containers kicking around, so that was easy. I dealt with ~monthly issues around my devices not being correctly verified, messages not correctly decrypting, and various other rough UX edges. There seemed to be a lot of velocity in the beginning but the last couple of years have addressed approximately nothing in terms of the UX and it's a crying shame as Matrix/Element (I no longer fully understand the difference/relationship between these entities) had a lot of potential.

It’s that hard even with a user in the loop to press buttons. Verifying bots is even worse and the docs are either non existent or wrong. This is such a shame because element otherwise does exactly what we want but it makes me nervous it’s so badly supported and buggy.

Let's not forget the shock image spam issue. Public Matrix channels are plagued with horrendous shock images (including CSAM). The development team seems to not care, they have a proposal for "policy servers" which is still incomplete and not supported by all server implementations.

It's kind of wild to me that they haven't prioritized this more. This issue has been open for almost exactly 6 years: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/565 . This one even longer: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/836 . The Matrix permission system still doesn't even have a way to say "sending images is not allowed" (either per room or per user).

Let's not forget a team making a great free product. Yeah we can complain about filthy materials but imagine you working hard to build something as nice as Matrix/Element only for these low-lifes to do these horrible things to it. How annoying it must be to have to spend time battling such things.

If you make anything public, you will have to deal with it. You should be mentally prepared for that from the start.

It’s terrible. I had to leave most channels on the matrix.org namespace because they won’t properly moderate their own server from CSAM. I dropped to 7 day media retention to lower legal liability on my own server, since there’s no way to know when one of my users will be in a channel hit with abuse. At this point the majority use case I have for matrix is to bridge to IRC with heisenbridge and be able to use signal on my laptop through mautrix-signal and nheko. The number of native channels I’m in continues to shrink.

Have they done anything to mitigate this? Like client side filters or message scanning for new direct messages?

I used to consider myself a HUUUGE matrix fanboy....while i still respect what the teams have done over time, I have been feeling a little, i don't know, deflated maybe? Maybe its the UX/UI aspect, i don;t know...i have not run a homeserver since like maybe 2019 or so? But nowadays, i have less interest in running a homeserver, and as far using the various clients: meh. Element feels bloated, and others either might be more snappier but might have an odd bug, or don't implement all features that might be expected, etc. So, last year i tried to play briefly with Prosody server to re-acquaint myself with xmpp...and it wasn't so bad. Not as great as i expected for this day ana age, bbut not terrible. The server setup felt like i needed to study a bunch of different docs...and ultimately was smoother than expected....so i think documentation is either outdated, or was written a little less clear than expected. That being said, the low resource usage was ridiculously pleasant compared to matrix homeserver! The fact that an xmpp server allows for such scalability on such low resources is a great testament! And, that was prosody, which some folks state is not even as performant, scalable as ejabbered....so they say...so wow, that's impressive if that's true. Regardless, xmpp servers that can run on such low resource hardware but enable so many users to chat...is quite awesome!!! The client side of xmpp was a different matter; i wasn't so happy. I blame myself because maybe there might have been plugins that maybe i didn't install correctly on server side, i don't know...but it felt not as easy as i expected. The clients were a little disappointing; again not terrible but not great. Maybe i'm spoiled? Or, maybe i did too much wrong? But if that's the case, the maybe there's an opportunity for better documentaiton? I don't know....i really like both matrix and xmpp because both live in the realm of free and open source software.....so i really want both or either to succeed. I want to live in a world where we are not beholden to only proprietary options, like whatsapp, crappy sms/text messaging, etc. I want to give props to all the folks who made and maintain all aspects of xmpp...as much as i am whining, i don't want to take away from all the hard work that they have freely given; super props to them!!! What i really want is a modern, free and open source version of IRC, with plenty of modern features (E2EE, file uploads, presence detection, etc.), decent desktop and mobile clients, easy server installation and management, and said server-side software would ideally not need such beefy hardware to run...Or, is my wish too far fetched?

I think we all want that. The fact that it doesn't exist is an indicator that it isn't trivial to build. All those modern features are at odds with performance.

I think current Element versions accept either a recovery key or recovery passphrase in the same input field, so there's no getting it wrong. Since you seem focused on UI, it's worth noting that Element X (their beta mobile app) has a greatly simplified interface; their team clearly has been working to make it easier. Also, other clients exist. For whatever it's worth, I've been using Matrix for about five years, including some of its roughest times. I seldom see errors these days, but I can understand how folks who were frustrated with earlier iterations would still be soured to it. Such is the nature of an ambitious work in progress, I suppose. I use it because there is nothing else with the combination of features that are most important to me, and because (despite my gripes) I can see slow and steady improvement. I think it's moving in the right direction overall. I could picture introducing family members to it once Matrix 2.0 is released and the implementations shake out any early problems.

> I can see slow and steady improvement. That is true, but what weakens my confidence is that the Element/Matrix team often doesn't present it that way. So much communication from them is about how it's amazing and great and the best messaging app in the world. If they presented it more like a typical slow-growth open source app I think they'd garner more goodwill. By setting high expectations they increase the likelihood of disappointment.