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Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

matrix.org

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Re: Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

#61

Post by sneak »

neilv wrote: post #15

Thoughts on how this will get us towards when libre software privacy&security type people are ready to advise friends to move to Matrix for personal communication? (To be clear, the platform has to be all open source and open standards, actually decentralized, guided by those principles -- not an effectively proprietary play even if nominally open. For example, you should be able to get all the same functionality wit…

One of the big problems as I see it is that all notifications on iOS must be proxied via APNS and those can only be sent by the app publisher, so all home servers must send their iOS notifications to Vector (the Element publishers) to be sent to APNS and on to an iPhone or iPad.

This is a centralized point for surveillance of metadata. I also do not know how much information is actually contained in the notification itself. In any case Vector has knowledge of every home server with an iOS client, and their approximate traffic levels.

Re: Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

#62

Post by brunoqc »

Rip matrix p2p.

I wonder if they were serious about it, or if it was just vaporware (a la Musk) to get more funding. It has been announced years ago, they raised millions and they have big governments contracts. WTF is going on?

Re: Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

#63

Post by Arathorn »

kibwen wrote: post #57

Techy friend group of mine migrated from Discord to a self-hosted private Matrix server a few months back. No complaints so far, although we didn't use Discord's voice/video/screen-sharing features (which I hear that Matrix intends to support eventually). UX-wise, it made me appreciate the distinction between Discord's "everyone is subscribed to every channel in a server by default" stance, and IRC/Matrix's opposite…

The plan on Discord-style voice/video/screensharing features is Element Call (https://call.element.io) which is built to be embeddable into Matrix clients. It’s already in Element X, and is in Element Web/Desktop behind a labs flag. Meanwhile you can always embed Jitsi.

Re: Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

#64

Post by xorcist »

amstan wrote: post #18

It's quite disappointing that there's huge ongoing work around reinventing clients from scratch where the basic functionality of not ringing all my devices while I'm using only one of them [1] is still not there (bug open for years), despite it being a pretty simple fix. [1] https://github.com/vector-im/element-meta/issues/360

Is it really that simple though? Jabber tried to be smart about which device to ring, and sometimes someone ended up with a missed notification. I always felt gutting that complexity and ring all instead would have been the more robust way.

Re: Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

#65

Post by contact9879 »

brunoqc wrote: post #62

Rip matrix p2p. I wonder if they were serious about it, or if it was just vaporware (a la Musk) to get more funding. It has been announced years ago, they raised millions and they have big governments contracts. WTF is going on?

It's still in development[1]. Seems like p2p will depend on dendrite so until dendrite is stable, p2p will not be available.

[1]: https://arewep2pyet.com/

Re: Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

#66

Post by amatecha »

kevincox wrote: post #45
amatecha wrote: post #25

Regular reminder Matrix/Element work closely with law-enforcement to provide encrypted comms for them. It's a sector Matrix/Element actively markets to and deals with. My personal view is I'm not using a chat platform designed/developed by an organization so eager to partner with governments and law enforcement agencies. There's Element's Chief Product Officer & Managing Director presenting at the European Police Con…

I find no issue that the company is working with law-enforcement to provide secure communications. In fact this makes me feel better about the security of those communications as they are trusted by these governments (not that this is a huge mark of quality, but I would consider it positive). I your distrust of law-enforcement so strong that any company that they purchase from must be untrustworthy? Or is there anoth…

My concern is in the opposite direction of what everyone appears to be interpreting, despite what I thought was clear wording in my initial post.

It's not that govt/LE uses Matrix. It's that Matrix/Element actively seeks out partnership with govt/LE (to the extent of presenting on stage at a police conference), suggesting they are particularly interested in a relationship with authorities and personally sympathetic to these authorities, at the management/director level.

This is not a position I expect from an organization that is determined to build secure communications potentially used by activists, people living in oppressive/authoritarian regimes, etc... If I was a member of such a high-risk group, I don't think I would be putting my faith in this org to produce something I can actually consider truly secure.

Re: Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

#67

Post by Arathorn »

brunoqc wrote: post #62

Rip matrix p2p. I wonder if they were serious about it, or if it was just vaporware (a la Musk) to get more funding. It has been announced years ago, they raised millions and they have big governments contracts. WTF is going on?

wtf is going on is that:

a) p2p matrix works pretty well as a proof of concept - you can try it from https://arewep2pyet.com; it’s not remotely vapourware.

b) funding has been spent on core Matrix dev and making Element kick ass (cf Element X)

c) an awful lot of very large Matrix + Element deployments (eg LuxChat in Luxembourg, Merkury 2.0 in the Polish MOD, many German local authorities) decide to run Matrix deployments without routing a single $ to support development at either the Matrix Foundation or Element, such are the joys of the Apache license.

As a result, we’ve had to pause some of the longer-term R&D. I very much hope that P2P will resume (especially if someone explicitly funds it) and the team is still at Element (but working on sliding sync and account portability). But right now we’re focusing exclusively on fixing the core problems in both Matrix and Element which others in this thread are complaining about. Hence Matrix 2.0, and Element X.

Re: Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

#68

Post by Lacusch »

orblivion wrote: post #31

> The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a huge step in that direction - regulation that mandates that if the large centralised messaging providers are to operate in the EU, they must interoperate. Wow. Not interested in winning the war this way.

Maybe you're not but I know a few people (myself included) who will take any win on the privacy front we can get.

Re: Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

#69

Post by xorcist »

Arathorn wrote: post #48
geek_at wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the idea of matrix (synapse + element + mobile apps) and I have started moving my family there too but we had so many problems with notifications not being sent to the phone unless you actively open the app. There is a huge discussion about that on git and some can't reproduce, some can't get a single notification even though the apps notification checkmarks were all green. So it had a very very low WAF [1] an…

Hmm… we haven’t had notification problems like that in many years, from memory. Any idea if this was trying to deliver push notifs to Android without using Google? (Which historically has been painful thanks to Android OS versions terminating the app in the bg). Element X has totally rewritten notification code (given it’s moved from Kotlin to Rust) and should be much more robust for bugs like this. Sorry you got bit…

Communicating via Apple or Google is sadly required these days. How does that work with matrix? Does the protocol specify how to trigger those notifications? Do I need to register for a Google API key when setting up the server? I can't recall seeing anything about that in the configuration file.
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