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

element.io

91–100 of 422 posts

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

#91

Any plans on making this free, or self-hosted?

It is possible. I've been running my own for a year, but it takes quite a hefty server at least with Synapse, and it's not cheaper compared to the quite nice 5 euros a month pricing here.

If you want to give it a try, this is what I used: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

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

#92
post #84
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would I want a man in the middle of my communications?

Because the A-Series round of financiers think that's a great idea.

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

#94
post #3

I'm happy to see that element found another potential revenue stream, but will people pay the 5$/month to unify their messaging? I don't know about others but it's not that much of a pain point for me, and I'm using all of the apps they mention - WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram as well as few others like IRC and Discord.

If the available Matrix clients were not a pain to use I probably would.

Exactly. The Element UI isn't the best selling point of Matrix right now and that would be a requirement for someone to switch from all those apps to Element.

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

#95
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Law makers are required here to solve the situation, as platforms themselves refuse to work with each other. If Facebook and Google had to operate a common protocol (just like IMAP), Pidgin would work much better or wouldn't even be needed. But no, they want to prevent people from talking with each other via other platforms because "we're best" or whatever.

It's probably because they don't want to lose users.

If you have FB, and I have Twitter, and we can chat, why would I ever make a FB profile or you a Twitter profile?

The mutual exclusivity is the competitive advantage. All these companies are competing with one another for your eyes. It wouldn't make sense for them to give that up for no return value.

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

#96

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 works with a surprising number of modern services [0]. I used it last year on my 32 bit computer that couldn’t run the official discord client.

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

#97
> It’s also worth noting that end-to-end encryption is necessarily broken as messages to (and from) WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram pass across the bridge(s). The bridge(s) operates in Element’s trusted EMS environment, with no content scanning or datamining, but currently bridged conversations are not stored end-to-end encrypted in Matrix (they will be in the future).

As a Signal user, I kind of don't want this to take off. I like knowing that when I message someone on Signal, it's for their eyes only. It feels like this service starts fragmenting some of the privacy guarantees of the bridged providers.

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

#98

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/

There was a good recent episode of Late Night Linux Extra[0] where the maintainer talks about Pidgin and how it compares with Matrix.

[0] https://latenightlinux.com/late-night-linux-extra-episode-32...

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

#99
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).

WA works with a pure go-based bridge. No Android required. The rest of your comment is true though. Keeping these bridges up 24/7 is quite a bit of work. Most people (even technical ones) probably won’t bother with that.

Which bridge is it? Mautrix/whatsapp does require an Android instance of whatsapp.

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

#100

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/

Back in the day and for a little while platforms companies thought to at least have a common language (xmpp). Then they thought it would be a better idea if we all had 10 different apps on our phones for text messages.

There's no reason for standardization and interoperability not to be forced on these companies.

When you sent a physical letter you have to follow some standards on the envelope addresses, when you make a phone call to the other side of the world people can still hear your voice, same for sms, same for email, but apparently sending a string of text via internet in a standard protocol is an unsolvable problem.

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