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Element – All-in-one secure chat app for teams, friends and organisations

element.io

71–80 of 119 posts

Re: Element – All-in-one secure chat app for teams, friends and organisations

#71
post #69
post #45

For anyone wondering how it compares to Signal privacy wise: Signal works with a contact list, for private 1 to 1 and private groups. You need a phone number to use it, and they claim to encrypt almost all metadata, such as message senders. Signal claims they cannot read the content nor the history of users actions (but you have to trust them on that, they claim to use SGX enclave stuff, but can anyone technically ve…

Element looks like more of a hassle specially for non tech savvy users in my family circle, I'm trying to get them to move to Signal from WhatsApp / FB Messenger.

how so?

Re: Element – All-in-one secure chat app for teams, friends and organisations

#72
post #45

For anyone wondering how it compares to Signal privacy wise: Signal works with a contact list, for private 1 to 1 and private groups. You need a phone number to use it, and they claim to encrypt almost all metadata, such as message senders. Signal claims they cannot read the content nor the history of users actions (but you have to trust them on that, they claim to use SGX enclave stuff, but can anyone technically ve…

Would anyone be familiar as to how to regularly purge metadata (or even message history) from homeservers? I run my own server and don't need my message history to live forever there.

Set the retention policy setting on your homeserver (I'm assuming you're using Synapse): https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/bce0c91d9a89097c9...

I also have mine set up though without a default_policy so I can have the server forget stuff in my bot control rooms cause they get cluttered with useless stuff pretty fast.

Re: Element – All-in-one secure chat app for teams, friends and organisations

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I believe the change in name was at least partially to make it easier for IT to sell to management. I don't envy the person trying to convince their manager to switch to Riot.

But 'vector' sounds fine and cyber. Or 'scalar'. They could at least go with 'LMNT' (leet manager's new tool) and make the logo a cyber ambigram, like this: ` |_|\|\|¯| `. As you can see, I do sympathize with their struggles XD

IIRC, I saw in a discussion somewhere that most of the math related names are already taken, and Vector was moved off of for search rankings or some such thing.

And yeah, Element is a pretty boring name.

Re: Element – All-in-one secure chat app for teams, friends and organisations

#74
post #67
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may as well say, "There's nothing wrong with Gab/Parler/Voat as long as you stay away from the political discussions". It doesn't matter. Your technical and logical distinctions are minor and irrelevant to most people compared to an overwhelmingly negative reputation.

>You may as well say, "There's nothing wrong with Gab/Parler/Voat as long as you stay away from the political discussions". It's just a fundamentally different system than what you're comparing it to and has many well established communities that aren't what you appear to be alluding to. >It doesn't matter. Your technical and logical distinctions are minor and irrelevant to most people compared to an overwhelmingly n…

> It's just a fundamentally different system than what you're comparing it to and has many well established communities that aren't what you appear to be alluding to.

You may as well be telling me how wonderful BitTorrent is for downloading Linux ISOs and to ignore that whole The Pirate Bay thing.

Re: Element – All-in-one secure chat app for teams, friends and organisations

#75
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember I spent about 10 minutes looking into setting up my own Matrix server. Seemed like a good day of work, and then I would still need to figure out how to support media uploads and E2E. The real kicker is that having the data on my own server is certainly nice, but I just don't think it's less likely to be exposed while I'm holding it vs someone else. I remember when everyone had a self-hosted WordPress blog.…

To be fair installing synapse is fairly easy. Media uploads and e2e should "just work". When I recently changed the VPS I was running it on I set up synapse from scratch in about 15 minutes. Of course I have set up synapse many times.

You're right. Just found these directions here and it seems far simpler than whatever I was looking at months ago:

https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md

Re: Element – All-in-one secure chat app for teams, friends and organisations

#76
post #74
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You may as well say, "There's nothing wrong with Gab/Parler/Voat as long as you stay away from the political discussions". It's just a fundamentally different system than what you're comparing it to and has many well established communities that aren't what you appear to be alluding to. >It doesn't matter. Your technical and logical distinctions are minor and irrelevant to most people compared to an overwhelmingly n…

> It's just a fundamentally different system than what you're comparing it to and has many well established communities that aren't what you appear to be alluding to. You may as well be telling me how wonderful BitTorrent is for downloading Linux ISOs and to ignore that whole The Pirate Bay thing.

>You may as well be telling me how wonderful BitTorrent is for downloading Linux ISOs and to ignore that whole The Pirate Bay thing.

The hash checks help validate that the ISO file is properly in tact and not corrupted in transit and the peer to peer nature keeps speeds high by distributing the load between multiple peers.

Have a nice day.

Re: Element – All-in-one secure chat app for teams, friends and organisations

#77

So how much of a vps you need to host like 100k users? More users? I tried to look but couldnt find much information.

Depends on what server implementation you're going to go for.

Synapse is the reference implementation currently, but also the most resource hungry. For 100k users I would be looking at 24gb RAM and 256GB+ storage space. Along with multiple cores.

If you don't need as much features, then you can try Dendrite which can have 5x to 10x less resource usage than Synapse.

Re: Element – All-in-one secure chat app for teams, friends and organisations

#78
post #45

For anyone wondering how it compares to Signal privacy wise: Signal works with a contact list, for private 1 to 1 and private groups. You need a phone number to use it, and they claim to encrypt almost all metadata, such as message senders. Signal claims they cannot read the content nor the history of users actions (but you have to trust them on that, they claim to use SGX enclave stuff, but can anyone technically ve…

Matrix: Every home server involved in the chat stores the message, and messages on matrix are therefore most considered permanent. As matrix is federated, every user can be on their own homeserver, which will be storing a copy of all messages seen by that user. E2E is more recent and optional. Most rooms are not E2E, and have browsable history. Signal: Only E2E, with clients themselves storing the only copy of messag…

> Most rooms are not E2E, and have browsable history.

Not sure how this is meaningful especially without further context. A large number of rooms on matrix are public channels to begin with (eg bridged rooms from irc, open source collaboration channels, etc), so they have no need for e2e encryption. All this is really saying is that E2EE is optional, which you already said (and which I'd also argue is probably irrelevant, especially given that E2EE is on by default).

Re: Element – All-in-one secure chat app for teams, friends and organisations

#79
post #45

For anyone wondering how it compares to Signal privacy wise: Signal works with a contact list, for private 1 to 1 and private groups. You need a phone number to use it, and they claim to encrypt almost all metadata, such as message senders. Signal claims they cannot read the content nor the history of users actions (but you have to trust them on that, they claim to use SGX enclave stuff, but can anyone technically ve…

Have you read this very extensive blog post on how the SGX enclave is used for Signal’s contact discovery? https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/

Re: Element – All-in-one secure chat app for teams, friends and organisations

#80
post #10

I'm surprised Matrix is on the front page as much as it is. I mean, it's cool tech, and I use it myself, but it really seems like it's up there every other day. Is there an update that warrants this new post?

Facebook has announced they now have courage to overstep the agreement with EU even more. People start getting tired and look for alternatives.

Did they? I was reading conflicting info. Some were saying that the EU was “excluded” from the change... (not sure how the distinction is made precisely)
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