This is a very unpopular position from a security perspective. All messages should be exchanged by some type-safe structured container like protobuf to avoid a huge class of bugs that comes from quoting and odd character sets, manually implementing parsers, confusing types, and broken string arithmetic.
When comparing to signal, or indeed to any modern chat client, you need to call out when you are mentioning non-Riot clients that don't support encryption.
In the original article you did this well: when you claimed "no fragmentation," the next sentence explained that the claim didn't apply to encryption.
In general, matrix feature-boasting about things it can do without encryption is confusing people. Most new users are coming to matrix expecting encryption, and they get it. But then matrix advocacy presentations proceed from the ridiculous assumption that open-source chat without encryption would be interesting as something to move onto, while hiding this assumption. Please stop doing this to preserve your credibility.
Each individual Comcast customer has in theory paid for a DS3 worth of bandwidth (modulo the "cap"), which should be a reality-check that some of your assumptions from that era need updating.
The defense (and it was always a thin one) of ratio clauses in peering agreements was hot potato routing. The ingress traffic is what you actually have to haul a long distance, so the agreement says "you must meet us everywhere we peer, and you must maintain ratio." Together, those rules mean each individual path will be asymmetric but the overall load on the WAN will be shared between the peers. It was always slightly silly, though.
Hot potato is now over. CDN's are desperate to do all the work and bring traffic as close to eyeballs as the monopolists will allow because the cost of actually building a network is irrelevant compared to the rent the monopolists are extracting. The monopolists are selling so-called "transit" to haul packets 1 mile. They're really charging for access to their captive eyeballs, not for moving bits. If you want to send a few megabits to Asia, fine, whatever. You can do it for the same price. They're not even mad, "glad we could make a deal," etc. The situation is nakedly broken and warped, and everybody actually in the business knows it.
Peering has always been a mix of market power, shaming, and political excuses ("ratio" was one). What we're now seeing is the shaming and excuses fall away thanks to apologist bloggers and weak politicians, and market power emerge as the only thing that matters. Compared to this power, traditional outdated notions of neutrality are irrelevant: there is no need to give traffic less "preferential" treatment when you can simply depeer them and then try to sell them so-called "transit" to go 1 mile. "Paid peering" == "well, how much money you got? Let's make a special deal just for you".
I used DS3 as an example. But no, even in 2014, you've only paid for a DS3 (or whatever) worth of bandwidth in theory. It's not just the last mile that's oversubscribed -- so are all the trunks leading up to it. If that's changed between then and now, I would lay pretty good money that it's changed to make things worse, not better.
Without meaning to express either approval or cynicism, market power has always been the only thing that matters in this business. But CDNs have paid big ISPs special rates for years, because they really do put special strains on infrastructure. And my impression remains that that's what this particular battle is ultimately about.
everything this bot links to is a fucking Youtube! video. They seem to think all the skeptics are from illiterate ADD iGeneration. I don't have time to sit through a bunch of blipverts.
