This — is The Construct

It all started in 1988 when Jarkko Oikarinen developed a free and open source server at the University of Oulu which facilitated real-time communication over the internet. Its derivatives have underpinned the major IRC networks for decades ever since.

Due to its age and stagnation since the mid-2000's, a growing number of proprietary cloud services have filled the vacuum of innovation. In 2014 a new approach was proposed to reinvigorate real-time communication for free and open source software: a federation of networks known as the matrix.

This is the Construct — the community's own Matrix server. It is designed to be fast and highly scalable, and to be developed by volunteer contributors over the internet. This mission strives to make the software easy to understand, modify, audit, and extend. It remains true to its roots with its modular design and having minimal requirements. Even though all of the old code has been rewritten, the same spirit and philosophy of its predecessors is still obvious throughout.

Matrix is about giving you control over your communication; Construct is about giving you control over Matrix. Whether you are optimizing the entire protocol or just filling a need only a few others might share: please support the project by contributing back.

Join us in #test:zemos.net / #zemos-test:matrix.org

Installation

Dependencies

• Boost library 1.66+
• RocksDB library 5.16.6.
• Sodium library for curve ed25519.
• OpenSSL library for HTTPS TLS / X.509.
• Magic library for MIME type recognition.

Optional

• zlib or lz4 or snappy database compressions.
• GraphicsMagick for media thumbnails.

Build tools

• GNU C++ compiler, automake, autoconf, autoconf2.13, autoconf-archive, libtool.

• A platform capable of loading dynamic shared objects at runtime is required.

Getting Started

1. At this phase of development the best thing to do is pull the master branch and use the latest head.

2. See the BUILD instructions to compile Construct from source.

3. See the SETUP instructions to run Construct for the first time.

TROUBLESHOOTING

See the TROUBLESHOOTING guide for solutions to possible problems.

Developers

Generate doxygen using /usr/bin/doxygen tools/doxygen.conf the target directory is doc/html. Browse to doc/html/index.html.

Plan

Roadmap for service

• Phase One: Matrix clients using HTTPS.
• Phase Two: Legacy IRC network TS6 protocol.
• Phase Three: Legacy IRC clients using RFC1459 / RFC2812 legacy grammars.

Roadmap for deployments

The deployment mode is a macro of configuration variables which tune the daemon for how it is being used. Modes mostly affect aspects of local clients.

• Personal: One or few users. Few default restrictions; higher log output.
• Company: Hundreds of users. Moderate default restrictions.
• Public: Thousands of users. Untrusting configuration defaults.

Roadmap for innovation

• Phase Zero: Core libircd: Utils; Modules; Contexts; JSON; Database; HTTP; etc...
• Phase One: Matrix Protocol: Core VM; Core modules; Protocol endpoints; etc...
• Phase Two: Construct Cluster: Kademlia sharding of events; Maymounkov's erasure codes.