Draft:Matrix Live S0704
 | This page is currently a draft.
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| They want to add stories to Matrix! | |
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| Host | Thib |
| Guests | Sorunome, Krille, Henri Carnot |
| Date of Upload | 10.12.2021 |
| Video Platforms | |
| Youtube | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLlSGqzgzhg |
Shownotes
Project Links
Further Information
Matrix Rooms
- FluffyChat: #fluffychat:matrix.org
- MinesTRIX: #minestrix:carnot.cc
Topics of the Episode
- 1.0.0 Release of Fluffychat
- MinesTRIX demo
- Stories in Matrix
Transcript
Thib: Hello members of the federation! Today for matrix live I have 3 heroes of the federation trying to resist the silos. I am with Krille, I hope I am pronouncing it right, I am with Soru, both are from FluffyChat and I am with Henri Carnot who is doing MinesTRIX, a social network client.
So the main topics we are going to cover today are the v1 release of FluffyChat[1], which is an exciting release with a revamped ui, — I am excited to what we are going to show, because Krille and Soru have prepared a demo for us — and Henri is going to show us how MinesTRIX looks in practice. So a social network based on Matrix — it's exciting — and little birds told me that they are going to work together on something eventually, so we are going to talk about that later in the end of the episode.
Krille and Soru some people might not know what FluffyChat is. How would you describe it?
Krille: Well, FluffyChat is an app. It is a messenger app that is easy to use but which should also be secure, open source and decentralized, and it uses the Matrix Protocol. So FluffyChat is a Matrix Client, but it tries to be as easy to use as possible, so it is accessible to everyone.
Thib: Alright, so you say everyone. The Matrix Protocol is very flexible, so if you have products like Slack you know who it is for, it's like for teams or/and enterprises, then you have Telegram which is more for individuals, matrix can be both for large companies, large groups or for individuals, for people who would like to have a sort of WhatsApp equivalent. Who would you say FluffyChat is for?
Krille: FluffyChat is for, for example Telegram or WhatsApp or Signal users, because we already have the great client Element in the Matrix, which has a very nice UI which is a little similar to this part [referring to Thib's example]. I think clients like Telegram, Signal or WhatsApp have an a little bit different UI as well, so my purpose was just to start a client which then serves these [Telegram, Signal or WhatsApp] users, so we have both on the matrix board.
Thib: Right, so really simple to use for everyday people, for one-to-one conversations and small groups.
Krille: Yeah, that's at least what I hope you will [use it for].
Thib: All right. I could see very fancy and gorgeous screenshots of the revamped UI of FluffyChat.[2] But unfortunately for me, I live in France and have an iPhone, so I could not try it because we have some weird laws on encryption. Is it possible to see how it looks like in practice?
[A DEMO is shown by Krille][3] Transcriber's notes will follow as a summary of what is shown.
- FluffyChat works as a native Linux app
- The app is the same as on the mobile platforms. This means the different versions do have most of the same features.
- Multi-Account support has been improved and now is sortable into “bundles” which look like sections.
- Overall Design has been modernized.
- Many small animations have been added.
- Colours have been adjusted.
- Pluralism support. If multiple accounts are in the same room and in the same bundle, it allows you to send directly from any of the users without having to go through all menus or change the Client.
- Space support has been added in the form of a selector at the bottom of the room list.
- The workflow to start a new chat has been reworked to make it simpler.
- Instead of matrix identifiers, there are now QR Codes available.
- You are able to enter matrix.to links directly.
[The transcript continues here from the timestamp 8:40]
Thib: Alright, impressive demo. I really like FluffyChat, and I can't wait to be able to use it on my iPhone eventually.
In the meantime, I still have questions like is FluffyChat sponsored, because it looks really polished and professional already. Are you doing that on your spare time or is your company[4] sponsoring FluffyChat?
Sorunome: FluffyChat is actually developed in our free time, however we take a lot of use of the Famedly SDK, which is the Matrix SDK [that] Krille and Soru also develop at work. As many cool features as we can, we try to implement inside the SDK and that is then of course work and not free time. FluffyChat [then] is basically a thin GUI layer above the SDK that we developed for work. That GUI layer, which is FluffyChat, is done in our free time. All the heavy lifting like Encryption and the like, that is actual Famedly work.
Thib: Alright, thank you Famedly for supporting a fraction of FluffyChat, and thank you all for taking your free time to develop that thin layer on top of the SDK…
Sorunome: Well, the thin layer can also get quite big in some cases, but like it's the GUI stuff which is FluffyChat and then the backend stuff is all Famedly basically.
Thib: Alright, so you are not particularly looking for new sponsors?
Sorunome: No.
Krille: No.
Thib: Alright, and you nearly answered my next question, which was "Is FluffyChat built on top of components sponsored by your company?" and the answer is yes, because it's sponsored by Famedly, and it's the Famedly SDK.
[Krille and Soru mention that the SDK is written in Dart]
I have heard about a thing called "FluffyBox". Is it something you can talk about?
Krille: Yes. We had some problems with the database backend in our app and the database solutions inside of Flutter. Our biggest problem was, that on the web platform it is not easy to create a database which works on all platforms. This is because on web if you want performance you need to use indexeddb, and we have used before a package named hive which is great, but it had not a very good performance on web, because the indexeddb implementation of this package was not that good. We have thought a lot about it, and we have then created a new package which is a wrapper around hive and indexeddb-native, which now seems to be the best solution to fix this issue. It looks like we are going to fork hive completely in the future.
I asked around in the company if someone knows a good name for this package and if no one says anything we just take something, which has fluffy in the name and nobody came up with another name, so I thought "okay let's name it FluffyBox".
Thib: Alright, so that FluffyBox component is something that made me invite Henri who worked on MinesTRIX, because Henri has stumbled upon it while it was a very early release. So Henri, thanks for accepting my invite on such a short notice. You recently unveiled MinesTRIX, which is a social media/social network based on Matrix. Can you tell us more about it?
Henri: Basically, MinesTRIX is a proof of concept to showcase the fact that we can build social media based on Matrix. So in fact we had previously Cerulean, which has shown that it was possible, so based on this I decided to continue this concept with MinesTRIX. The goal is to build social media, which will be privacy focused, in order to protect the privacy of our users. All the details of post filtering is done on the client and not on a remote server. On top of that, thanks to Matrix, we can end to end encrypt the posts, so only your friends can read your post. The other thing [is] that I wanted to build a client and to make it as simple as possible.
Thib: Alright, can we see it?
Henri: Yeah sure.
[A DEMO is shown by Henri][5] Transcriber's notes will follow as a summary of what is shown.
