I think Matrix as a protocol has been pretty ineffective, as their top priority seems to be keeping data permanent and duplicated. Both performance and privacy are at the bottom of their priority list. The one good thing I can say about it is that encryption of message contents is enabled by default in conversations and available in groups, but that's about it - nothing else is, or can be, encrypted. In other words, every participating server knows who is talking to who, and how much, and when, and in what rooms, and what those rooms' names are, and what those rooms' descriptions are, and who moderates them, etc.

Meanwhile, an app like Signal can do none of that, and that's by design.

If you're looking for a privacy oriented messaging system, you'd best look elsewhere.

I'm new to Matrix and found this comment on reddit. How much of it is accurate and does it actually contribute to whether or not the future of the protocol is promising?

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xethos 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

@Arathorn would be an objectively better person to discuss this, but the Redditor isn't completely off the mark: metadata is (currently) not nearly as well-guarded on Matrix compared to Signal.

However, work is ongoing to improve the situation; more importantly, Matrix is a different threat model (in my opinion), and allows for different trade-offs.

When I use Signal, I have to trust Signal's servers and their admin team. With Matrix, we get to keep trust circles smaller (friends and family on smaller servers, where we already trust the people running them). We have no hard requirement to federate either - if I want something just for people I know, we leak less data than Signal does to the outside world. We also get to host Matrix servers in areas we're comfortable with, whether that's our living room, or any nation that isn't America.

Matrix isn't perfect, but I appreciate how quickly they're improving, and the areas they're focusing on.

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tptacek 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Matrix and Signal have very different objectives. Matrix wants to be an encrypted IRC or Slack. Signal wants to be a secure messenger you can entrust your life to. They are both worthy projects; there's not as much overlap as people think.

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pkulak 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I trust my life to the server I host in my own closet. People can lecture me all day long about the superiority of Signal's encryption, and I'll just slowly rotate my chair to point my index finger at the Dell OptiPlex behind me.

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tptacek 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's fine. You'll pardon me if I'm unwilling to trust my own safety to your Dell OptiPlex. Whatever you think about Signal, the fact is that Matrix --- which is what the thread is about --- makes decisions that serve the IRC/Slack use case at the expense of the "absolute most possible safety" use case. That makes sense: some of larger-scale group chat's goals are in tension with "absolute most possible safety".

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dwohnitmok 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I wouldn't characterize Signal as "absolute most possible safety" as you are implicitly doing here.

I would probably characterize Signal as "most possible safety for the average nontechnical user" which entails trade-offs against absolute safety for certain UX affordances (and project governance structures that allow for these decisions to be made), because if said affordances are not given, the average nontechnical user either simply won't use Signal or will accidentally end up making themselves even less secure.

	▲	tptacek 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I couldn't be less interested in arguing with you about Signal. My point is that it doesn't make as much sense to compare Signal and Matrix as people think it does. Large-scale group chat is intrinsically less safe than the kind of chats most people use Signal for. You can substitute whichever other secure messenger you prefer. This "average nontechnical user" stuff, though, miss me with. For 2 decades people have been encouraging the "average nontechnical user" to do incredibly unsafe things on the premise that any kind of message encryption is the best alternative to sending plaintext messages. No: telling people not to send those kinds of messages at all, unless you're dead certain the channel they're using is safe, is the only responsible recommendation.
	▲	BolexNOLA 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This is basically the same logic for why I often recommend Plex over jellyfin to people. Yes Plex is not proper self hosting. Yes Plex the org is making increasingly questionable decisions. But for people who want to get away from the major streaming services and maybe even want to dip their toes into something that resembles self hosting, there really is no other option like Plex. It’s so insanely turnkey and easy to install on every device. You also don’t have to worry about exposing your network if you don’t know what you’re doing. If nothing else it’s an incredible foot in the door for a lot of people to make the leap to something like jellyfin later.

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NegativeK 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I obviously can't speak for you, but there's not a freaking chance I'd trust my life to the servers I run.

To go maybe too literal: when I'm working on machines that could physically eat me, I don't trust myself with just one off switch -- I want redundancy. And since computers are horrible piles of ridiculous complexity, the closest I can get (and not really get close) is trusting some of the top minds to overthink the crap out of it in a way that I can't do with the systems I manage.

But again, YMMV.

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butvacuum 21 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

When you leak that much metadata, it's disenginious to call it encrypted.

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Gigachad 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In the real world friends and family aren’t running their own matrix servers. At most they are signed up for whatever random one came up first in the search results.

So you end up with a similar problem to Mastodon where either you are facing problematic or inexperienced admins, servers shutting down, and everyone centralising on the main server.

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Klaus23 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's pretty accurate. I was a bit shocked when I saw that room names were not encrypted. I thought that was such a basic privacy requirement, and it's not hard to implement when you already have message encryption.

Matrix seems to have a lot of these structural flaws. Even the encryption praised in the Reddit post has had problems for years where messages don't decrypt. These issues are patched slowly over time, but you shouldn't need to show me a graph demonstrating how you have slowly decreased the decryption issues. There shouldn't be any to begin with! If there are, the protocol is fundamentally broken.

They are slowly improving everything, with the emphasis on "slowly". It will take years until everything is properly implemented. To answer the question of whether the future of the protocol is promising, I would say yes. This is in no small part because there are currently no real alternatives in this area. If you want an open system, this is the best option.

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this_user 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think part of the problem may be that Matrix is just pretty complex, because of its modular and decentralised design. Meanwhile, Signal is much more centralised and monolithic. And while they have added a few features over the years, its core functionality is relatively simple, and they were initially just focussed on getting that right.

	▲	Gigachad 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I remember reading some of the pdf on state management in matrix. The math and logic behind working out what the current name of the group chat is made my head spin.

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kachapopopow 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

it's pretty on point, it's mostly a "trusted" platform as long as you trust the host with the messages between two people (or more?) being (optionally) encrypted.

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sroerick 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Pretty crazy, right? It almost seems like a honeypot