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

element.io

111–120 of 422 posts

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

#111

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, it's still good:

https://github.com/petermolnar/awesome-pidgin-plugins

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

#112
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/

Yup. And looks like element One is a direct competition to beeper

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

#113
post #87
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? I used Pidgin a lot. I always found it very convenient to have everything in one place and UI. Better one client than MSN + AOL + ICQ + IRC + Yahoo! + XMPP. In the last few years I haven't used it much, but that's because it just doesn't support the popular messaging apps…

Pidgin was extremely convenient. But it was commoditizing messaging platforms so of course it had to be shot in the head by them.

who's them?

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

#114
post #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 tak…

You can self-host. I suspect they use this: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

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

#115
post #7

Does anyone know what this product is based on? Is it just a ready-made image with all the bridges preconfigured (and prerequisites such as a small android vm for a viable whatsapp bridge), or has there been some evolution on the existing package? Is there documentation on what was done to achieve this? Purely on the content of the article: Given that the messages are not stored encrypted locally and that this servic…

I've been running the Signal bridge for a couple of months and it seems pretty unstable. Sometimes it stops delivering messages and I have to restart either signald or the bridge. At other times, it broke completely and started working again only after a couple of days, when I updated signald. I haven't tried the WhatsApp bridge yet because it needs to go through my phone or an Android VM. WhatsApp recently announced…

Yes this has been my experience too. The WhatsApp bridge I used had been pretty unstable. I thought it might be a configuration issue from my side.

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

#116

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

It always has been, since the beginning. This is purely convenient hosting for those not inclined to self-host.

Oooh, I may have misunderstood something, I think. :P

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

#117
post #110
post #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 tak…

I want this to take off. I'm tired of having to follow trends because people suddenly think there's a new shinyshinytrendy thing around: IRC to ICQ to MSN to Skype to Google Talk to Facebook Messenger to Whatsapp to Signal. Pidgin is good (I also miss the ancient Trillian, even though it was closed source), but limited to a local device. There are XMPP Transports as well for these (see https://git.eta.st/eta/whatsxmp…

Trillian was awesome! It's just a shell of its former self now.

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

#118
post #110
post #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 tak…

I want this to take off. I'm tired of having to follow trends because people suddenly think there's a new shinyshinytrendy thing around: IRC to ICQ to MSN to Skype to Google Talk to Facebook Messenger to Whatsapp to Signal. Pidgin is good (I also miss the ancient Trillian, even though it was closed source), but limited to a local device. There are XMPP Transports as well for these (see https://git.eta.st/eta/whatsxmp…

I don’t run my own service for the same reason I don’t build my own car or I don’t do accounting for my company, I don’t have the time to learn how to do it nor doing it.

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

#119
I just have a really hard time understanding who this is targeting. If you're on average more willing to sacrifice privacy over ease of use, you're very likely not using Signal or Matrix anyway. So if you're not, but you're using both WhatsApp and Telegram, how is using two apps a big enough problem to set up a third one?

Even if we disregard that, I can honestly say that I don't think using four separate apps is a problem. I don't even think using ten different apps is a problem, because it's mostly transparent to the user anyway. You get (configurable) notifications from all of them when you need to care about something, and the "sharing" feature on both iOS and Android these days is normally smart enough to figure out who, or at least which app, you want to share something to -- so for me this "multi app confusion" is already pretty well solved on an OS level, at least on mobile.

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

#120
post #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 tak…

You don't know that when you message someone on Signal it's for their eyes only.

What you know is that unless their device is compromised, it is up to them to decide who can read the messages that you send to them.

Thus the situation with the bridge is not in reality different from the situation now.

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