| 23 May 2025 |
 Zhaofeng Li | * but my client (element desktop) shows that sending message requires moderator power level, so my homeserver knows about it and should have blocked me from sending it in the first place | 08:49:48 |
 K900 | It is entirely possible for your client to be out of sync with your homeserver | 08:50:10 |
| K900 | As insane as that sounds | 08:50:20 |
 uep | oh, for sure. I had two clients, same account, seeing different things | 08:53:34 |
| uep | it did, because I'm on matrix.org and saw the first one | 08:54:14 |
 emily | it uh, didn't for me | 08:54:25 |
| emily | which should be impossible? | 08:54:29 |
| emily | oh. okay. lovely. | 08:54:41 |
| uep | but fractal saw the permission for post at 50, element saw it at 0. | 08:54:41 |
| emily | I hate it. | 08:54:49 |
| emily | so Matrix is actually distributed and not federated, but only in ways that break things? | 08:54:56 |
| emily | I thought you just trusted your homeserver. | 08:55:01 |
| uep | but it's very clever and resilient to transient netsplits | 08:55:22 |
| uep | it just replaces them with long-term state splits | 08:55:35 |
 Cat | its so routine that the moderation bots are architected around this assumption. | 08:55:43 |
| Zhaofeng Li | ok, maybe a more productive question is: is it still possible to moderate that (old) room? | 08:55:58 |
| Cat | its federated. | 08:56:17 |
| uep | yeah, i'm apparently still in there as is mjolnir | 08:56:25 |
| emily | in a federated system you wouldn't have two clients on the same homeserver disagreeing about the state of a message… | 08:56:41 |
| Cat | The fact your client can slide out of sync with your server is due to the fact that the Sync protocol is made to be "friendly" | 08:56:45 |
| emily | right. so sync makes it a distributed system | 08:56:55 |
| uep | * yeah, i'm apparently still in there as is mjolnir (with privs, at least according to some perspective) | 08:57:04 |
| Cat | As in the sync protocol works on a snapshot of the room | 08:57:04 |
| Zhaofeng Li | * ok, maybe a more productive question is: is it still possible to moderate that (old) room? because none power level changes has "stuck" apparently | 08:57:05 |
| emily | without any of the advantages | 08:57:09 |
| Cat | but if the room is mutated in the right way said snapshot becomes invalid | 08:57:19 |
| K900 | Not in a way that affects 100% of the clients in the room | 08:57:34 |
| Cat | and the reason for this snapshot based aproach is because the shit that actually is going on inside of the homeserver is not something you want a junior client dev to worry about. | 08:58:03 |
| Cat | i dont know if sliding sync has fixed the state resets are invisible over /sync problem. | 08:59:10 |
| Cat | but thats the problem. If state changes in specific ways they wont show up in /sync but will show up in /messages and /state | 08:59:40 |
