> Why Not Matrix? Our project's size and level of traffic would be difficult for Matrix, at its current level of development, to support. Whereas we would not even be in the ten largest Discord communities; some gaming communities are ten times our size.
It sounds like Kubernetes needs to free-ride on commercial solutions, hopping among them as needed, which predictably may eventually keep being needed, given the corporate-economic environment at present and for the forseeable future -- though, maybe not in the case of Discord, if gamers and other premium users fully subsidize the costs.
That makes sense. But Kubernetes is open source, and that brings its own ethos in a sense. Kubernetes IMO should really use an open solution, in order to help the broader open ecosystem. Matrix is probably that.
Maybe Arathorn can comment on this. If "size and level of traffic would be difficult for Matrix, at its current level of development" really is an issue, I would hope that the Kubernetes community could help push Matrix (the protocol and/or the open/free instance) into doing what is needed in order to help figure out how to get the support where it is needed.
It seems that Element.io, the services company, could provide the required services, but would charge Kubernetes money for that.
Ok. For a free as in beer solution, maybe Discord is where it is at. A little weird, though?
Meanwhile, usability has improved radically on Matrix clients over the last few years (although many people don't realise if they're stuck on the old legacy Element clients, rather than using newer clients like Element X).
So, not sure what the full story is here.
If they did use Matrix, someone would have to run the server - and Element doesn't have the $ to provide hosting for free, and perhaps k8s doesn't want the admin hassle of running their own. One solution could be for Element to provide a cheap license for the Element Server Suite enterprise distro (https://element.io/server-suite), which would then (ironically) use k8s to scale elastically and be supported by Element's SRE team. It would also have the pleasant side-effect of helping fund Element's development on Matrix and improve things further.
If this is of interest to anyone reading this, you know where to find me :)
bitpush•7mo ago
>> Most likely, yes. The CNCF Projects Staff, which includes several long-time Kubernetes contributors, has proposed that we move to Discord.
Unfortunately, this just feels like kicking the can down the road. The scale at which k8s operates can only be handled by a very few platforms, and discord is definitely at the top of the list but the circumstances that led to this Slack development will undoubtedly come for discord as well.
Perhaps this discord migration should be seen as a stop gap, while the committee looks to migrate to another place.