I got excited for a cheaper offering when I saw the headline. If I was wanting to pay $10/month that was already an option. Sadly this is just marketing and not anything more appealing.
Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home
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Re: Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home
#62Good stuff! Now we just need to get the cost down. I got email hosting for free with my domain, that's the price point I would like for Matrix, too.
May I ask which registrar it is? The ones I know only offer email forwarding for free, not a full-fledged email account.
It's Strato.de
Depending on the specific package, I get 1-unlimited email accounts on my new domain
Re: Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home
#63This would be insane for anyone outside of HN. $10 a month for a 5 person chat? They know everyone can get this free elsewhere for decades now? A 5 person Signal group would even have higher security.
The beauty of matrix is the interoperability: you can actually talk to other users on other servers, like email.
You can join large public groups, too.
Re: Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home
#64This seems like a great move forward for Element, looks like this is angling to replace the New Vector offering they had a while back? The pricing is certainly odd, though. For 5 bucks a month I run my own server with almost a dozen folks on it, which requires basically zero maintenance (I can count the number of times I've had to go in and restart it over the past two years on one hand). Double that for a limit of 5…
I had the same thought, but do your dozen folks use video calls on your instance? Does it work well enough? I'd definitely expect to be able to host a text-only instance for $5, but maybe they also need to provision for more demanding features? I only use Element / Matrix as an IRC replacement for now so I couldn't tell.
I host a Matrix server for my family and we regular make audio calls to Australia. I had to try a few services before I found a $5 VPS that worked well, but network was always the limiting factor rather than server specs. The unavoidable latency makes video calls unpleasant so I can’t speak to that.
Re: Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home
#65Why home vs nickle? Nickle seems to be the same with the addition of your own DNS for the same price.
This genuinely makes no sense on Element's part. The exact same features are listed for the same price, on the feature comparison page - https://element.io/pricing - except Nickel has one extra. Why would anyone choose to have one less feature, all-else being apparently equal? Either the comparison page is wrong/missing something, or...?
Hi - I head up Element Matrix Services (EMS), so hopefully I can answer some of these questions for you.
Element home is really aimed at helping to get less technical users up and running with their own home on Matrix as quickly and easily as possible.
Under the hood Element Home servers and our smaller / Nickel products are pretty similar (similar resource allocations etc.). The main differences are in the setup process.
With Element Home we've created a whole new setup process and have tried to reduce the number of configuration steps, selecting default options wherever possible.
The trade-off for this is that while many of these options are changeable after setup, some (like custom DNS) are not. So, if you're a bit more technical and want things like custom DNS, then you're better to start off with a Nickel host.
Re: Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
This genuinely makes no sense on Element's part. The exact same features are listed for the same price, on the feature comparison page - https://element.io/pricing - except Nickel has one extra. Why would anyone choose to have one less feature, all-else being apparently equal? Either the comparison page is wrong/missing something, or...?
The link to "Nickle" actually goes to the subscription page for "Silver". Their product listing seems to be broken? If it's just an option that can be turned on or off in a control panel of sorts, the plans might just be different pre-provisioning configurations. For many people, especially the non-tech users, custom DNS isn't really something that they want or even should be using.
Thanks for the report on that. I'll get someone to look into it asap.
Re: Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home
#67This seems like a great move forward for Element, looks like this is angling to replace the New Vector offering they had a while back? The pricing is certainly odd, though. For 5 bucks a month I run my own server with almost a dozen folks on it, which requires basically zero maintenance (I can count the number of times I've had to go in and restart it over the past two years on one hand). Double that for a limit of 5…
I also think the explanation could use a bit of work. If I have more than 5 users, do I need to switch to Nickel? Get another Home plan?
Up to 5 Monthly Active Users are included in your subscription. After that you can add additional users at an additional $2 per user per month.
It's worth noting that the Monthly Active bit can be quite important. What this means is that you're not charged for the number of users registered on your server, but the number who are actively using the server. Users are only considered as "active" and counting towards the number that you pay for if they use the account for more than two days in a rolling 30 day period. The aim here is that you're not penalised for occasional or "drive-by" users of the service.
(Disclaimer -- I head up EMS (Element Matrix Services))
Re: Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home
#68Is that the only base domain? ems.host (I assume element matrix service?) is so uninspired and sounds like a back end domain rather than what you want your identity tied to. Could they not have gone with something a bit more catchy and on brand?
Well i haven't really gotten used to the name "Element" yet, it's as bland as it gets.
And vague. At least "Telegram", "Signal", and "Whatsapp" suggest that they have something to do with communication, whereas neither "Element" nor its logo/icon suggest what it is. Unless they know what it is already, most people would probably scroll past it, assuming it's like a boring CRM thing or crappy drop-shipping store or whatever.
But I guess it's too late for them to reverse that decision. Maybe the logo will change, but the name is probably here to stay.
Re: Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home
#69This seems like a great move forward for Element, looks like this is angling to replace the New Vector offering they had a while back? The pricing is certainly odd, though. For 5 bucks a month I run my own server with almost a dozen folks on it, which requires basically zero maintenance (I can count the number of times I've had to go in and restart it over the past two years on one hand). Double that for a limit of 5…
> You can just enjoy the fact you know you chose someone you trust (us!) with your data. Yeah, no. Blast from the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19642554 This is the entity/company who decided to revoke clients keys because not because the users messed up but because they messed up and therefore destroying access to the users messages and defended that as the approach!
Their quote related to the incident and deleting keys (GPG release signing keys on prod machines, no locked down servers, etc leading to the hack):
>You might have lost access to your encrypted messages.
>As we had to log out all users from matrix.org, if you do not have backups of your encryption keys you will not be able to read your encrypted conversation history. However, if you use server-side encryption key backup (the default in Riot these days) or take manual key backups, you’ll be okay.
>This was a difficult choice to make. We weighed the risk of some users losing access to encrypted messages against that of all users' accounts being vulnerable to hijack via the compromised access tokens. We hope you can see why we made the decision to prioritise account integrity over access to encrypted messages, but we're sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused. [1]
I think this shows they simply revoked keys to avoid the hacker accessing messages. Had messages been breached, that would have been significantly worse for an E2EE federated messaging platform.
[1]: https://matrix.org/blog/2019/04/11/we-have-discovered-and-ad...
Re: Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home
#70While I love Matrix and support their mission, this pricing is quite a bit steep, as well as the 5-person limit being too restricting. They will price out large majority of people who actually could/would want to switch.
Hi - Yep, we totally get that this won't be for everyone. We're currently looking for ways to be able to increase the efficiency of these smaller servers and to be able to pass those cost reductions on to customers. We've also got some projects in the works aimed at being able to offer single account / single user "homeservers" and obviously the pricing for these would be much lower, but we're not quite there yet. More info. on this as soon as we have it.
In case it's not clear, it isn't a 5 person limit for Element Home servers, it's just that up to 5 (active) users are included in your subscription. You can add more users at any time for an additional $2/month. Also bear in mind that you're not charged for everyone registered on your homserver, just the ones that are using it :)
(I head up Element Matrix Services / EMS)