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Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

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Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#51

Post by rapnie »

bityard wrote: post #18
dust-jacket wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I thought this was a weird take too. Too often people take privacy for "I can do what I like". IMO deleting something you've sent to someone else is not a privacy concern at all.

I don't agree with it myself, but there are people who seem to want to frame "the right to be forgotten" as a privacy issue.

Just one example, but trying to get that revenge porn off the web, can be seen as an attempt to restore ones privacy. Where others should not have the right to continue to peek into ones private life.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#52

Post by davorak »

broken-kebab wrote: post #43
nicoco wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An open protocol can mandate indeed, but that is still in the realm of pinky promise security. A better design for a privacy-friendly chat protocol is to not write a lot of stuff on a lot of different remote servers when that's not necessary IMHO. One of matrix's selling points is to be censorship-proof though; in that case copying stuff as much as possible makes a lot more sense.

>pinky promise security You are right, though I still prefer "weak feature" as a term :) There's enough value in such things. Cryptography crowd is concentrated on omnipotent Eve breaking ciphers, and that wrench from xkcd, but I dare to claim that majority of both commercial and private leaks happen just because well-intentioned users don't have enough capacity to keep track of all the things, and proverbially think…

It's hard to explain to a non technical user. Something like "We tried to delete the message, but some of the people who received your message might still have a copy." Does not sound great and is going to be hard for a non technical user to understand and hard to implement in a way that a non technical user will find satisfying.

So if I was a dev on matrix/element and this feature came across my plate I would have to weigh it against features that I know can be implemented in a way which make technical and non technical people feel satisfied and better about the application.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#53

Post by AJ007 »

nicoco wrote: post #38
Almondsetat wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A protocol can only support, never mandate. If I send you "DELETE MSG #4829" and you do nothing and reply with "200 OK; DELETE MSG #4829", nobody observing the protocol's messages will ever know what happened. Sure, an omniscent being could say "but he internally broke protocol, he didn't delete the message!", but by definition if something cannot be verified inside the protocol, it is outside of protocol.

Sure. In practice, in federated networks bad actors end up being blacklisted. It does not provide any "formal" guarantee, but… it tends to work fine enough. For this specific "deletion request" feature, of course it should always be seen as a convenience thing, and absolutely not about security . As with many engineering things, it's tradeoffs all the way down. For instant messaging, a federated approach, using open…

I don't know what's wrong with XMPP other than the network effect collapsed when the GMail chat thing was killed, while the mobile client options were poor for a very long time.

Matrix has the appearance of being a drop in replacement for Slack or Discord, but the design decisions seem so compromised that the only explanation is they did manage to establish a (somewhat weak) network effect? It certainly is not a good look for an open source project to be running on Slack or Discord (free/cheap plans rugpulled or to be soon.) Then that leaves IRC, which has a network effect collapsing at a much slower pace.

I never got far enough to try hosting a matrix server, but reading the linked post -- Matrix definitely is not GDPR compliant. The combination of whatever end form of ChatControl the EU gets along with possibly hundreds of other laws across the world and individual US states makes me think the days of a public facing non-profit or small startup running a project like this are over. (Or maybe the future of open source is funding lawyers while the development is all done for pennies by AI?)

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#54

Post by Jnr »

tcfhgj wrote: post #21
Jnr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XMPP felt great when compared to Matrix. Matrix was in a bad state some years ago when I hosted it for a while, and seems like it still is the same messy state. I avoid it as much as possible but for some reason there are communities using it. At this point it should just die so people would be motivated to replace it with something better.

People are motivated to replace it with something better, it's called Matrix 2.0.

I tried it a year ago when it was introduced, it did not work. Is it stable now?

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#55

Post by kassner »

styanax wrote: post #6

As a former user I felt these pain points trying to do nothing more than have a very active one-on-one chat with a good friend. Tens of messages an hour, maybe 2 years running. Using matrix.org and the pre-X clients. It's fine for group chat (IRC style) but that's not a high bar. (a) the encryption between using a mobile and the webapp desyncs/breaks all the time, it just sucks. I mean you'll get "cannot decrypt" a l…

> you can't correct a typo in a sent message in Delta

At least on the iOS app you can, just tested it. I run my own postfix/dovecot, so shouldn’t require any esoteric configurations.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#56

Post by miloignis »

broken-kebab wrote: post #27
Almondsetat wrote: post #12

>this also creates a situation where anything said across federation cannot be unsaid, which is an ironic situation for a protocol/system that often comes up when talking about privacy. How is it ironic? No protocol in the world can force anyone to delete anything from their own device. Chat apps that implement this function are either proprietary (so you cannot control what they can do) or, if OSS, do it on a pinky-…

A protocol can mandate forced deletion. A particular client implementation may ignore it, or some users may circumvent it, so it would be a weaker kind of feature, but still a feature. And depending on circumstances it can be quite useful.

True, and Matrix has the weaker version of the feature: https://spec.matrix.org/v1.16/client-server-api/#redactions It should absolutely work in normal situations across all servers and most all clients.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#57

Post by wahern »

progval wrote: post #25
Almondsetat wrote: post #12

>this also creates a situation where anything said across federation cannot be unsaid, which is an ironic situation for a protocol/system that often comes up when talking about privacy. How is it ironic? No protocol in the world can force anyone to delete anything from their own device. Chat apps that implement this function are either proprietary (so you cannot control what they can do) or, if OSS, do it on a pinky-…

> No protocol in the world can force anyone to delete anything from their own device. But they either do not sign the messages or allow repudiating the signatures. Matrix signs all events forever. Matrix also makes the entire event history (minus message content depending on room configuration) available to servers on join, even if that server's users are not allowed to see it.

These are distinctions without a difference. Events replicated across several independent Matrix servers are not meaningfully different than events broadcast across independent clients in terms of observability or repudiation.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#58

Post by toastal »

jamesbelchamber wrote: post #50

> The only thing that I don't really understand is the decision on data replication. If a user on server A joins a room on server B, recent room data is copied from server B to server A and then kept in sync on both servers. The idea here is that rooms are abstracted from servers and sort-of exist ephemerally. This has the advantage/disadvantage of making it hard for the underlying infrastructure to exert control ove…

You could also try Movim. You could have a decentralized XMPP server with a client that support group calls as well as having posts like a forum folks can comment on.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#59

Post by wkat4242 »

davorak wrote: post #52
broken-kebab wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>pinky promise security You are right, though I still prefer "weak feature" as a term :) There's enough value in such things. Cryptography crowd is concentrated on omnipotent Eve breaking ciphers, and that wrench from xkcd, but I dare to claim that majority of both commercial and private leaks happen just because well-intentioned users don't have enough capacity to keep track of all the things, and proverbially think…

It's hard to explain to a non technical user. Something like "We tried to delete the message, but some of the people who received your message might still have a copy." Does not sound great and is going to be hard for a non technical user to understand and hard to implement in a way that a non technical user will find satisfying. So if I was a dev on matrix/element and this feature came across my plate I would have t…

That is exactly what happens in WhatsApp though. Maybe the message isn't there anymore but it used to say pretty much exactly that.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#60

Post by jamesbelchamber »

toastal wrote: post #58
jamesbelchamber wrote: post #50

> The only thing that I don't really understand is the decision on data replication. If a user on server A joins a room on server B, recent room data is copied from server B to server A and then kept in sync on both servers. The idea here is that rooms are abstracted from servers and sort-of exist ephemerally. This has the advantage/disadvantage of making it hard for the underlying infrastructure to exert control ove…

You could also try Movim. You could have a decentralized XMPP server with a client that support group calls as well as having posts like a forum folks can comment on.

There are a bunch of options out there (though I've never seen Movim - thanks, I'll check it out) but most communities seem either to be on Discord or Matrix (with a few still hanging on to IRC and a few others on Slack) - Discord being by far the best UX of the lot.
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