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Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

matrix.org

111–120 of 283 posts

Re: Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So host it yourself. It's literally designed to do that.

Yeah, that's great for me, but doesn't help me when everyone else is using the hosted stuff :)

Ok, I'll bite, what even could be the alternative here then? You want something without big funders, totally OSS, and extremely friendly for grandmas? Feels like one of those "you can only pick two" type things to me, but would love to learn that's not the case.

Re: Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The reason we "actively seek out partnership with govt/LE" is simply because they are by far the primary customer segment who actually have an clear need for self-hosted interoperable end-to-end encrypted communication and are willing to pay for it. If we don't find organisations who are willing to pay Element for services, then quite simply we can't pay people to work on Matrix and Element as their dayjob, and the whole thing would switch into best-effort volunteer run activity (although I'd presume most of the team would feel pretty burnt if that happened and go spend their freetime on something else). About 80% of Element's revenue comes from public sector, and without it the project simply wouldn't exist.

Hopefully, eventually, the rest of the world will wake up to the fact that sleepwalking into using Teams and Slack (or WhatsApp) is a catastrophe in the making. It's only a matter of time before someone publishes a torrent of every line of Teams scrollback or Slack scrollback for some high-profile organisation; the breach has probably already happened; the breacher is just waiting for the best strategic moment to drop the information bomb.

But until then, Element makes payroll by selling to folks like the French and German Governments, the United Nations, etc. They pick Element because it is high trust, and they can audit it and run it themselves. And there is categorically no way that I or other senior management at Element would destroy the company (let alone Matrix) by breaking that trust by letting someone undermine its privacy.

Which is why we're in the surreal situation of on one hand selling to the UK Government, while also frantically criticising them for the catastrophic idiocy of the Online Safety Bill: https://element.io/blog/the-online-safety-bill-an-attack-on-....

Separately: I'm literally years overdue in publishing Element's internal ethics guidelines publicly, which spells out precisely who we do and don't do business with. For what it's worth, the high level summary is:

  * We don't sell to criminals (under UK/US/EU law)

  * We don't sell to sanctioned (by UK/US/EU) or abusive govts or organisations

  * We don't sell to orgs who explicitly encourage use which goes against our terms of service.
Our definition of abusive governments/orgs are those who commit human rights abuses or, who commit international atrocities (as defined by the UN), or contracts which primarily support the above.

Most western governments (including their police forces) do not fall into this bracket.

Re: Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

#113
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the API is still evolving, and it's also useful that it supports other homeservers than Synapse. It's also written by an entirely different bunch of people (it's effectively written by the Dendrite team rather than the Synapse team). Once the API is stable I'm sure all the homeservers will implement it natively. Until then, think of it like a reverse-proxy that lets an HTTP/1 webapp talk HTTP/2 to the outside…

> it's effectively written by the Dendrite team rather than the Synapse team I would then ask why it isn’t integrated into Dendrite

...because then Synapse wouldn't be able to use it?

Re: Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

#114
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you can just wait. But the proxy is really lightweight and doesn't require maintenance.

Until there's an incompatibility, upgrade, exposure, memory overflow, or some other security issue/exploit. Unless you're saying that it's immune to everything and will never experience a change or issue.

I'm pretty sure that all those issues will affect sliding sync whether or not it's integrated in Synapse. In fact, some people might actually prefer the fact they can operate it separately and restart/maintain it separately from their homeserver :)

Re: Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

#115
my biggest struggle with matrix, is that, at least in element-ios, messages keep transpositioning, i.e. at some random time a message that is 2 days old is pushed all the way down to the new messages. also the aop frequently crashes with some media.

but apart from that I of course love the idea of an „SMTP approach“ to instant messaging :)

Re: Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

#116

my biggest struggle with matrix, is that, at least in element-ios, messages keep transpositioning, i.e. at some random time a message that is 2 days old is pushed all the way down to the new messages. also the aop frequently crashes with some media. but apart from that I of course love the idea of an „SMTP approach“ to instant messaging :)

this is literally why we rewrote element-ios in rust, in the form of Element X iOS :) https://element.io/labs/element-x

Re: Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

#117
post #2

I always get so confused by the naming between Matrix and Element. I get that Element is the client, but I honestly thought that the name Matrix for the server (or is it just the standard for the protocol?) was sunset. Great service though and hope if gets UX improvements too, as Discord and Slack keep getting more clutter.

Yeah. I still think that the Matrix.org Foundation should have a branded client, simply called “Matrix”, available in all the major app stores.

Lock it to the matrix.org server and offer membership in the foundation as an in-app purchase. Could help with some of their recent funding issues.

Re: Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deploy…

Thanks Matthew, I always appreciate your comments. I also do appreciate the Apache license. Sorry for the vapourware comment. It's hard to tell these days. Was the Google self-driving car thing vapourware? It never went anywhere. I know that pinecone worked as a PoC. I ran a node for years, for fun. It's just that it always felt like the progress was crazy slow. The yggdrasil demo was what, 4 years ago? How fucked up…

The best way to get P2P Matrix back on track is to find someone to fund it, and point them at funding@matrix.org. Unfortunately it's as simple as that.

Re: Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

#119
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 deploy…

Makes me sad that billions got poured into cryptocurrency-sphere projects but classic p2p barely scrapes by.

(I mean by society not new vector)

Re: Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

#120

I'm curious if someone could build a discord replacement on top of matrix, most importantly with voice chat and video streaming functionality. Discord is clearly focused on monetization at this point, the only changes happening now are ones that make your experience objectively worse. I've also been on Linux for a few years now and discord still doesn't support streaming game audio. And before someone suggests it, I…

Absolutely. Element is already quite close to that, and once Element Call and native Matrix group VoIP matures more, hopefully it'll be even easier to converge on Discord's featureset.
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