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The Matrix Space Beta

matrix.org

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Re: The Matrix Space Beta

#51

Post by Arathorn »

hda2 wrote: post #37

What is the E2EE story for spaces? Besides space names and member lists which I assume are visible to the server like normal rooms, what other information is also visible to the home server? Are rooms/subspaces inside spaces also visible?

Spaces are identical to rooms, which means that state events (key value data like name, membership, avatar, etc) are currently not e2ee, but conversation data would be e2ee if there was any. Encrypting human visible payloads for state events is on the roadmap however, but encrypting the metadata would be hard. For that, we are working on P2P Matrix to stop the metadata pooling anywhere.

Re: The Matrix Space Beta

#52

Post by cassonmars »

spicybright wrote: post #26
nerdponx wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Discord style communities Boring and obvious, but this is probably what most people would want. Now that we've seen how good and usable the Discord model is, it's pretty much the baseline now for public chat rooms.

It sucks there's no open source project that mimics discord well. They all shoot themselves in the foot by over complicating the model. It confuses users, and makes creating stable clients hard. I don't want a tool-box of primitives and a recipe book. I want a decentralized discord clone not owned by a giant company. Let's start there and add the crazy stuff later.

It’s funny you mention that — I just started such a project (three hosting modes: centralized, federated, fully decentralized) as an educational series to teach software development on multiple levels. It’s very early (read: non functional), and I’m still figuring out the best way to teach and build simultaneously, but constant weekly progress is being made.

Educational site (I’m backporting the previous sessions to the site, session 7 is the first one hosted right now): https://www.codewolfpack.com

Project repo: https://www.github.com/HowlerChat/Howler

Re: The Matrix Space Beta

#53

Post by Arathorn »

Arathorn wrote: post #49
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power levels feels like the most IRC answer possible, and breaks down as soon you want mutually exclusive abilities. Why is this the preferred model?

Because the decentralised ACL implementation (state resolution) relies on power levels as a simple comparator for determining merge conflict resolution. State resolution is the academically novel bit of Matrix and hard to get right, and while we can swap it out for role based ACLs in future, this is orthogonal to Spaces. Meanwhile it honestly hasn’t come up as a requirement, even from enterprisey folks, given we push…

I should also add that there are at least two matrix spec change proposals flying around to add role based ACLs, and one of the main reasons for switching spaces to be built on rooms is that they will automatically inherit the ACL model when it lands :)

Re: The Matrix Space Beta

#54

Post by Arathorn »

sneak wrote: post #42
viccuad wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do the Matrix clients still phone-home to some centralized server (Vector, I think it's called) There's no centralized server. There's a server with the majority of users for now (in matrix.org), but the network is decentralized, with many servers. The server implementation run by the majority is called Synapse, but there are others (Dentrite, Conduit, Construct..). I'm puzzled by this comment. Can you elaborate on…

> I'm puzzled by this comment. Can you elaborate on what you mean by phoning home? On first launch, it connects to multiple centralized servers before you have a chance to select your homeserver. The issue was with the default client, in the default config. Not sure if it's still happening, but it was concerning enough that it happened in the first place. https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/13942 https://…

As per my comment at https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/11655#issuec..., we'll switch auto-update checks to require user confirmation.

Re: The Matrix Space Beta

#55

Post by Arathorn »

viccuad wrote: post #36
sneak wrote: post #27

Do the Matrix clients still phone-home to some centralized server (Vector, I think it's called) as well as to matrix.org on every launch? That's what kept me from switching last time; to me a federation client that's going to phone home to a central server is no better from a privacy standpoint than using Signal (which isn't federated but is also end to end encrypted and phones home to its centralized server), and Si…

> Do the Matrix clients still phone-home to some centralized server (Vector, I think it's called) There's no centralized server. There's a server with the majority of users for now (in matrix.org), but the network is decentralized, with many servers. The server implementation run by the majority is called Synapse, but there are others (Dentrite, Conduit, Construct..). I'm puzzled by this comment. Can you elaborate on…

I suspect they're referring to https://matrix.org/blog/2019/09/27/privacy-improvements-in-s... and https://matrix.org/blog/2019/06/30/tightening-up-privacy-in-...

Re: The Matrix Space Beta

#56

Post by eitland »

Arathorn wrote: post #51
hda2 wrote: post #37

What is the E2EE story for spaces? Besides space names and member lists which I assume are visible to the server like normal rooms, what other information is also visible to the home server? Are rooms/subspaces inside spaces also visible?

Spaces are identical to rooms, which means that state events (key value data like name, membership, avatar, etc) are currently not e2ee, but conversation data would be e2ee if there was any. Encrypting human visible payloads for state events is on the roadmap however, but encrypting the metadata would be hard. For that, we are working on P2P Matrix to stop the metadata pooling anywhere.

> For that, we are working on P2P Matrix to stop the metadata pooling anywhere.

For everyone who just glanced through the comment above, this is big and a major selling point compared to most competitors (IMO).

Re: The Matrix Space Beta

#57

Post by medstrom »

ajayyy wrote: post #41
viccuad wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do the Matrix clients still phone-home to some centralized server (Vector, I think it's called) There's no centralized server. There's a server with the majority of users for now (in matrix.org), but the network is decentralized, with many servers. The server implementation run by the majority is called Synapse, but there are others (Dentrite, Conduit, Construct..). I'm puzzled by this comment. Can you elaborate on…

They could be referring to the vector identity server for email/phone number -> matrix matching. I believe this is enabled by default on synapse installations (self-hosted ones too), but the URL can be changed in the config. https://matrix.org/legal/identity-server-privacy-notice-1

The relevant thing is whether the client enables it by default. From my experience, Element iOS doesn't.

Re: The Matrix Space Beta

#58

Post by Arathorn »

eitland wrote: post #56
Arathorn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spaces are identical to rooms, which means that state events (key value data like name, membership, avatar, etc) are currently not e2ee, but conversation data would be e2ee if there was any. Encrypting human visible payloads for state events is on the roadmap however, but encrypting the metadata would be hard. For that, we are working on P2P Matrix to stop the metadata pooling anywhere.

> For that, we are working on P2P Matrix to stop the metadata pooling anywhere. For everyone who just glanced through the comment above, this is big and a major selling point compared to most competitors (IMO).

It's also early beta, though (although we're committed to getting Matrix hybrid client-server & p2p in the medium/long term). https://matrix.org/blog/2021/05/06/introducing-the-pinecone-... has more on the latest developments on P2P (and public beta builds for iOS & Android) from a few weeks ago :)

Re: The Matrix Space Beta

#59

Post by Arathorn »

hparadiz wrote: post #35

A good and robust bot api and useful smart widgets based on url are a must. I've had chats go from discord to matrix and then simply die after a few days.

Matrix's bot support should be excellent? It's arguably more robust than Discord's given it's an open API and there are tonnes of SDKs and bots building on it: https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk, https://matrix.org/docs/guides/usage-of-matrix-bot-sdk, https://github.com/bnjbvr/botzilla, etc.

What do you mean by 'smart widgets based on url'?

Re: The Matrix Space Beta

#60

Post by ognarb »

spicybright wrote: post #26
nerdponx wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Discord style communities Boring and obvious, but this is probably what most people would want. Now that we've seen how good and usable the Discord model is, it's pretty much the baseline now for public chat rooms.

It sucks there's no open source project that mimics discord well. They all shoot themselves in the foot by over complicating the model. It confuses users, and makes creating stable clients hard. I don't want a tool-box of primitives and a recipe book. I want a decentralized discord clone not owned by a giant company. Let's start there and add the crazy stuff later.

There is an attempt named harmony with multiple clients. https://github.com/harmony-development

Disclaimer: one of my friend is involved in this project

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