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Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

element.io

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Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you encrypt your hard drive?

I don't follow. What does my hard drive have to do with plaintext messages on Element's servers?

Aj, my bad. I skimmed over the part where it says they are hosting the bridge for you. Since matrix is focused on privacy etc I assumed this is available as a container/VM I can run at home or on a VPS.

Indeed then very weird why I should trust them more with my personal data than anybody else.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#73
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this tier only lets you use the new ...one.ems.host domain [1]. Element Home pricing might be better for you if you have a few friends who are also interested ($10/month for 5 users), and won't use bridges [2]. [1]: https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix#element... [2]: https://element.io/personal-plans

Sadly I don't have a single friend on Matrix that I could consider doing this with, and it's unlikely I could convince my wife to use it either. So it would be double the money for only that piece of flair.

You don't need to convince your wife to switch, you can start by helping her setup the app on her phone and tell her to use this app when talking to you.

Lower the stakes and the expectations. Even if she is starting conversations with you on any other app, you can still start the conversations on Element. There will be bugs and quirks she will find, you just offer help and ask her for patience.

With time, they get used to the app and will be okay with starting the conversation with you there.

That's what I did with my wife, my parents, closer family and friends. Then you get one day like the recent Facebook outage, and they will come to you to ask if you can help their friends to sign up to it.

Slow and steady is the way I found to run this race. I already managed to get rid of WhatsApp and Messenger on my phone, it's only telegram for the odd group chat that is still resisting a full change.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#74

The fact that content sent to signal and Whatsapp resides unencrypted at the matrix homeserver makes this product completely useless to me. I don't think I want to sacrifice the security for having all my chats in one place. If they can fix that I might reconsider. They already reverse engineered the Whatsapp protocol. I see little reason why it can't live in the client? I don't really follow why they move the bridge…

Data does not _reside_ unencrypted with End to Bridge Encryption : https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/general/end-to-bridge-encryption...

But the bridge is not hosted by me but by them. I need to trust matrix not to MITM me

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#75
post #60

This is nicely timed. Brief history: when Hangouts was going away and Google Chat coming in, I pitched Matrix to my friends as a better alternative that didn't require unique phone numbers, awkward desktop limitations, and a better federated future. We stuck with Google Chat because inertia and networks suck that way. I revisited the instance I had setup and got the mautrix-googlechat bridge working. It's pretty nice…

Beeper implements Google Chat. I've been using it, it works really well.

https://www.beeper.com/

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#76
post #40

Back in the day before the rise of Facebook, there was an open source service that combined all the popular messaging protocols - MSN, AoL, IRC, etc. It was called Pidgin[0], and it never got particularly big. I see the same thing here. While it's interesting, I'm failing to see what the use case is. What's the niche that needs this solved in a big way? [0] https://www.pidgin.im/

No, it wasn't a "service" - it was a program. Unlike this thing. The main difference between this and Pidgin seems to be that you pay a monthly fee for someone to man-in-the-middle all your communications.

Of course the protocols Pidgin bridged were only used for real-time communication, rather than for leaving messages which could be attended to (or delivered) later.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#77

Back in the day before the rise of Facebook, there was an open source service that combined all the popular messaging protocols - MSN, AoL, IRC, etc. It was called Pidgin[0], and it never got particularly big. I see the same thing here. While it's interesting, I'm failing to see what the use case is. What's the niche that needs this solved in a big way? [0] https://www.pidgin.im/

Pidgin and Gajim.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#79
post #56
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a service, because the bridge is a software that need to be keep operational 24/24h and sometimes this is not so trivial (if I don't get wrong WA need an Android emulator running).

Pidgin doesn't use a "bridge"... it is just a generic local client that supports plugins for various protocols that are implemented via adversarial interoperability.

And because of that Pidgin is horribly unreliable. Don’t get me wrong, I used it for years, but over time all the plug-ins broke for one reason or another.
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