BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration
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Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration
#2Congrats to the folks running the Element project!
I hope this means more development/funding/documentation of the project :)
Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration
#3Why not use / invest in Mattermost?
Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration
#4Why not use / invest in Mattermost?
Perhaps you could provide some initial arguments why they should?
Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration
#5Congrats to the folks running the Element project! I hope this means more development/funding/documentation of the project :)
It does sponsor some development, although we still have a big gap on overall Matrix funding currently (hence trying to drum up additional sponsors and support via https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/01/funding-matrix-via-the-ma...).
Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration
#6Why not use / invest in Mattermost?
Perhaps you could provide some initial arguments why they should?
Mattermost is great, but it's not decentralised, it doesn't federate, it's not end-to-end encrypted, it's not based on an open standard, it's vendor-locked to Mattermost, only has one usable client implementation, and is rather aggressively open core (unlike the BundesMessenger distribution which is entirely apache-licensed FOSS). I'm also not sure that whether deployments easily scale up to million+ users like a big Matrix deployment can.
It's worth noting that if Mattermost adopted Matrix, like Rocket.Chat has[1][2], the vast majority of these limitations would fall away :)
[1] https://www.rocket.chat/press-releases/rocket-chat-leverages...
[2] https://matrix.org/blog/2022/05/30/welcoming-rocket-chat-to-...
Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration
#7I really like the idea. But I am skeptic - digitalisation of Germany's public services and offices in the past hasn't exactly been a success story.
Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration
#8As mentioned in the article, the German health services already adopted Matrix for their "TI-Messenger", which is supposed to make secure communication between health care professionals easier. Or, well, possible at all. Right now this is a morass of "don't mention anything private" emails, letters and faxes. I'm surprised that ticker tape isn't involved somehow.
But don't worry, if German health services doing something right is triggering your "the end is nigh!" response: As far as I know, the rollout for patients is still a long way coming and they still don't even have a date set for video chat (right now a cottage industry of anyone involved in HC doing their own WebRTC thing).
Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration
#9This is interesting. Being German, when I read the headline I had a "not another public IT project destined to fail" moment. But this actually makes sense. The government and military need a secure communication tool, it is not a pie in the sky, but built on existing software, and they start with a well defined user base. My guts feeling is that this will be a successful project.
Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration
#10Why not use / invest in Mattermost?
[..]Real time collaboration systems such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Mattermost, Wire, Threema, WhatsApp and Signal are currently all closed proprietary systems - meaning they are walled gardens whereby all parties have to use the same vendor. That’s impractical, creates vendor lock-in and stifles innovation. There’s simply no way that a government entity using, say, Microsoft Teams would be able to have secure real time communication with another government entity using, for example, Slack, Mattermost or Wire.[..]