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

element.io

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

#331

Post by TeMPOraL »

Gigachad wrote: post #47
personjerry wrote: post #35

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/

Agreed, not sure what the use case is. It’s super trivial to switch between messaging apps and it’s not often that you are having a conversation with multiple people over multiple apps at once and even then it’s still manageable. The only thing I can think of is people who do not wish to have the app installed for privacy / open source reasons.

Think of people who are:

- Not tech-savvy and easily confused by keeping 6 different messengers around.

- People for whom multiple clients becomes a cognitive burden.

- Waste of storage space, memory and CPU power that those (hugely bloated, most of the time) clients incur, especially on mobile devices.

- People like me, with diminished executive functioning capacity, who are fucking tired of bad ergonomics of all those clients together and each individually, and who'd prefer a single, consistent, ergonomic and powerful UI to manage the torrent of messages they receive.

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

#332

Post by pmlnr »

finnn wrote: post #255
pmlnr wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen your project! Congrats, it is very nice. I stopped fiddling with transports because signald doesn't compile/run on freebsd (some of the java libs behind it rely on native libs which have problems compiling), and for now I've put it aside.

https://www.freshports.org/net-im/signald/

Huh. I wasn't aware of this. I tried for quite a long time to compile it myself a while ago and failed, I'll give it another go, thank you!

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

#334

Post by Gigachad »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #331
Gigachad wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, not sure what the use case is. It’s super trivial to switch between messaging apps and it’s not often that you are having a conversation with multiple people over multiple apps at once and even then it’s still manageable. The only thing I can think of is people who do not wish to have the app installed for privacy / open source reasons.

Think of people who are: - Not tech-savvy and easily confused by keeping 6 different messengers around. - People for whom multiple clients becomes a cognitive burden. - Waste of storage space, memory and CPU power that those (hugely bloated, most of the time) clients incur, especially on mobile devices. - People like me, with diminished executive functioning capacity, who are fucking tired of bad ergonomics of all th…

The first two are not well solved by Matrix as the default client is far less user friendly than the proprietary alternatives.

Storage space might be an issue on very low end phones but these days phones are starting with 128gb of storage which no IM app is close to filling. Mobile OSs are extremely good at sleeping apps and can receive messages while the app is not running at all using notification services. I would say that resource bloat is actually much more of an issue on desktop where you have 10 instances of chrome running and none can be closed while still receiving notifications.

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

#335

Post by xchaotic »

tigroferoce wrote: post #319
godelski wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Specialization is a thing. Not everyone specializes in security. Which let's be real, being an expert in security is really difficult, especially since it's a constantly moving goal post. Unless you're an expert it's probably not a good idea to roll your own.

Also, to run your own service you must specialize in security AND devops. The two thing overlaps a bit, but not 100%. And you must hope that every contact you are talking to has the same knowledge.

so much this - you can make a service 100% secure - by shutting it down. But if you want to stay online and be secure at the same time, there's always some resource tradeoff between the two

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

#336

Post by zuck9 »

tao_oat wrote: 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…

Been using https://texts.com — they preserve E2E for Signal/WhatsApp.

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

#337

Post by feanaro »

zepto wrote: post #276
feanaro wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not even close. I can evaluate the likelyhood of my partner being compromised. I can’t evaluate the likelyhood of a gateway I may not even know about being compromised. Why? It is your partner that is deciding to use what is essentially a Signal client installed on a remote server controlled by Element. If it is true that you are able to estimate this likelihood for your partner, this fact should already have been…

This is only true now that Element have introduced this compromised way to access signal. So yes, Element have introduced a new fact that downgrades everyone’s estimate.

> This is only true now that Element have introduced this compromised way to access signal.

It's never not been true since Signal is just a protocol which you can use programatically. It's certainly not been true at least since signald became a thing. And Element is not the first one to come out with such an offering (see e.g. Beeper).

It's just better known now.

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

#338

Post by feanaro »

KAMSPioneer wrote: post #330
tshaddox wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I _could_ go to each of my contacts and explain why I don't want them to do things like use the cool new Element service with Signal. But 1) I (finally) have a lot of contacts using Signal, so that would be a pain to manage; 2) to me, the entire idea of Signal is that I can pretty much set it and forget it on any relatively-modern smartphone for friends, family, etc. and not have to worry about anything but the bie…

Hahaha of course not. I don't really propose an alternative. I'm just lamenting the situation and trying to provide context to the Element CEO about why the original commenter, and people like him, might not be 100% jazzed about the democratization of technology that, in terms of message _security_, is a step backwards. Doesn't mean I'm in favor of such ridiculous things as you've suggested here.

> jazzed about the democratization of technology that, in terms of message _security_, is a step backwards.

Well, you can always switch to Matrix and have democratized and secure native messaging which uses a cryptographic protocol comparable to Signal. ;)

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

#339

Post by lvs »

zuck9 wrote: post #336
tao_oat wrote: 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…

Been using https://texts.com — they preserve E2E for Signal/WhatsApp.

Um, how do they do that?

> All integrations were implemented in-house using the Texts Platform SDK. The SDK will be open sourced at a later date.

Seems like a big nope.

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

#340

Post by zuck9 »

lvs wrote: post #339
zuck9 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been using https://texts.com — they preserve E2E for Signal/WhatsApp.

Um, how do they do that? > All integrations were implemented in-house using the Texts Platform SDK. The SDK will be open sourced at a later date. Seems like a big nope.

https://texts.com/privacy says:

> Messages, contacts, auth credentials, account information never touch Texts servers.

> Your messages are sent directly to the messaging platforms.

> All end-to-end encryption is preserved when the platform supports it.

> Texts is a client and works like the official app.

Apparently all the code runs on the user's device.

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