Matrix has always supported "Guest" accounts, where a user can immediately join a room and start talking in there with a generated user_id. They have limitations, but for the "get going straight away" factor it was quite nice.

Element (back when we called it Riot) removed support for this a while ago BUT we are trying to design it back into the app, which you can follow https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/9264

And yeah as a developer on the project, getting users into rooms quickly and chatting is a desperate goal of mine.

I'm glad to hear that. You guys really seem to be willing to be wrong, and seriously listen to ideas. If you fail you will color me the strongest shade of surprised: everything you are doing is optimal.

You might be interested in https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse-s3-storage-provider, which provides S3 storage options for Synapse.

I personally run https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-media-repo/ which is basically a media server written in Go which has lots of bells and whistles for rentention, storage platforms and scaling.

i have and it leaves all media on the hard drive still

You might need to look at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse-s3-storage-provider#re...

While Matrix definitely tries to appeal to IRC users, it's absolutely not just a IRC replacement. It's been a conscious decision from Day 1 that history is important given that the default for any messaging system today is to store history. Honestly it feels like a massive improvement over the days of bouncers and logs hosted in the cloud.

That all being said, there are ways to make your rooms drop history if you wish through the config (and I believe it can be configured per room too).

Yes, that's a popular opinion that I do share (though more accurately, I occasionally want the ephemeral conversation that lasts not too long). But "I have no idea why" would be a stretch, hence the reply.

I've never used the feature on Matrix because as you say, it doesn't really apply. Matrix (or really Element here) doesn't require you to use an identity server at all, so I don't really think it invalidates the protocol in a meaningful way.

Yep, it exists as https://p2p.riot.im/! The team is making tons of progress including the new pinecone project. It regularly gets talked about in https://matrix.org/blog/posts if you want to keep up to date.

So the good news here is we're working on "implementation guides" which are basically developer friendly documentation on how to do X rather than a raw technical spec. I don't recall if it's actually hosted anywhere just yet, but you can see the progress in https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/tree/master/impleme...

The short term plan is to replace the existing (rather rubbish) Gitter<->Matrix bridge with a fully featured bridge that seamlessly bridges between Gitter and Matrix.

The long term plan folding gitter.im features into Element and Gitter users will migrate to using Element and Matrix.

Mozilla will no doubt use their own domain name, and would have the option to go self hosted if they wish to.

Moving synapse databases around isn't too difficult, and certainly Modular.im would be able to provide the data on request.

It's mentioned half-way down the blogpost (https://hackernoon.com/what-does-it-mean-to-be-an-open-start...)

>There’s no official definition yet, and the Oxford dictionary weren’t available for comment, so let’s write one; A product or company which operates in the open and shares their statistics publicly.