Matrix.org Will Migrate to MAS
matrix.org192 points by LorenDB a day ago
192 points by LorenDB a day ago
Cool! I’ve recently consolidated all of my Google Chat and WhatsApp friends onto Matrix (via Element) because it’s E2EE. Gchat isn’t and I assume that Meta has a backdoor into WhatsApp conversations. So, those platforms can’t be trusted. Signal doesn’t have a web interface, so that’s a no-go for me. lol Telegram.
Matrix has been great for me and I recommend that everyone else use it!
> I assume that Meta has a backdoor into WhatsApp conversations
They don't need a back door when they control the front door: the app. End-to-end encryption doesn't protect the endpoints.
(In other words, your concern is warranted.)
You're absolutely right. End-to-end encryption protects message content, but WhatsApp still collects metadata, which is incredibly valuable.
Even though they can't read your messages, they know who you talk to, how often, when, and for how long. They also track your device info, IP address (which can reveal your location), network details, and app usage patterns.
And this data isn’t just sitting there—Meta uses it. For example, if you chat with a business on WhatsApp, you might start seeing ads for that business on Instagram or Facebook. They don’t need to read your messages when they can infer so much just from how you use the app.
Disclaimer: Comment translated from Spanish and corrected by Chat GPT.
> Even though they can't read your messages
I've long wondered if this is actually true.
If I have a closed-source app and claim (and can verify!) E2EE, surely I could still read every message from my closed-source app, within the app itself, and you'd never know.
I've never been a mobile app developer but I've been a desktop and web developer since the 90s so I don't know what apps can and cannot see but in a desktop app or web app, if it's on the screen, it's decrypted and I can put code in to read/steal it.
Am I missing something here?
It's true in a sense - using an iPhone or an Android phone Apple/Google could be streaming your screen contents constantly, so even e2ee wouldn't help.
I just don't know if that is actually true, or if meta doing e2ee and then pinging your messages around from the app after they're delivered is true. I've no reason to believe either is.
At about 2:33:15 here, Zuckerberg somewhat alludes that Meta can take screenshots of WhatsApp messages.
And the default/largest homeserver, matrix.org, uses cloudflare, so all your data belongs to them as well.
It is disappointing that they use Cloudflare, especially since most Matrix metadata hasn't yet been moved to the end-to-end encrypted channel.
(Arathorn: is e2ee metadata still on the roadmap?)
But no, not all your data is exposed. The e2ee parts, like message content in encrypted rooms, are opaque to Cloudflare.
yup, encrypted metadata is very much on the roadmap. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/425... is one of the more recent proposals for it.
Self-hosted Matrix with all the bridges is awesome and brings back that Pidgin/Adium life of one chat app for all of my friends. Too bad Apple has an uncanny ability to avoid consequences with iMessage.
It's wonderful that it seems work well for you but my experience in bridging group chats with XMPP or IRC was terrible. Lost messages, bridge crashes, puppet accounts getting randomly broken/duplicated with discarded messages.
From the bridges I've run, only the Telegram bridge is somewhat stable for me but it also has it's warts.
Might be different if you run a strictly personal server for 1:1 conversations but I'd say from an ux perspective the bridges idea largely failed IMHO.
I don't think it's the fault of element/matrix it's a difficult problem and I guess with limited resources they made a lot of progress and made things possible that weren't before but it's not plug and play, at least it wasn't for me.
In general I've found it's also difficult to communicate in group chats if there are two worlds with a slightly different view (missing reactions, some elements of the messenger are not supported like captions, polls and so on...)
Signal doesn't have a web interface, but being able to use a desktop app is OK for me.
The big downside for me is not being able to use it on two devices. All the other services, privacy concerns or not can now do this. It's one reason why I stopped donating to / advocating for signal.
Settings -> linked devices?
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007320551-Li...
This lets you use the desktop application and a phone at the same time, which I use.
It doesn't allow you to use multiple phones at the same time.
It's something I've just recently run into trying to set it up on an Android tablet. The funny thing is they allow it on an iPad. It'd be great if they allowed just any phone or tablet to link to the primary device. I'd complain but it's been deaf ears for the last 4 years to get them to put gifs back into the desktop app.
You should not use it ! Xmpp is the answer with its few issues and matrix requires hell of system resources as well.
You mean you access all these on Matrix/Element via the bridge? Or you actually mean you convinced all of them to ditch their chat apps and migrate to Matrix, or at least install Element as well in addition to the other ones? It’s a feat if it’s the latter without or without ditching. Is this a very privacy conscious demographic?
For me the issue was contact names tbh. Is that solved? It used to be that the contact name was set by the contact and not by me/my address book.
Wasn't there a big falling out between the Matrix team and Element or am I misremembering what happened?
Element is the company formed by the team who created Matrix to work on Matrix, almost all of whom are still there; there is no falling out :)
The Matrix Foundation is the non-profit set up by the Matrix team in 2018 to keep Matrix itself independent of Element and other Matrix vendors - to act as a steward of the protocol and a standards body. Originally Element donated almost all of its code on Matrix to the Foundation (e.g. Synapse, the original Matrix server) as permissive Apache-licensed FOSS, assuming that if Matrix was successful, folks would want to fund it.
In practice, by 2023, Matrix was very successful... but it transpired that the vast majority of folks commercially building on the Foundation's Apache licensed code failed to route any funding back to the Foundation (as the hosting body) or to Element (as the primary code contributor), despite many polite requests. As a result, there wasn't enough $ to pay folks at Element to keep working on the core Matrix projects as their day job. So, to keep the lights on, Element stopped donating their work to the Foundation, and changed license to non-permissive AGPLv3 in order to sell AGPL-exceptions to the folks commercialising it. This has helped the situation somewhat (although Element isn't at breakeven yet). Meanwhile, it's left the Foundation focused on governance, the Matrix standards process, trust & safety and hosting core libraries like E2EE and matrix-rust-sdk.
There's no beef between the Foundation and Element over this. In a utopia the projects would certainly have stayed as Apache licensed code in the Foundation - but then again, other standards bodies like W3C or XSF don't publish code these days: it's a phase that a given protocol grows out of once third party organisations get busy building implementations.
Disclaimer: i'm conflicted on this, being project lead/co-founder for Matrix, and then CEO/CTO at Element.
I say this all the time, but the point of the permissive licenses is you're making a donation to private industry.
There are reasons to do this, for example if you believe that private industry adopting some technology is good and you want to make that happen.
But people keep seeming surprised by the fact that these donations aren't reciprocated (or at least people don't seem to plan for them to never be reciprocated). It sounds to me like the AGPL license was more consistent with their goals.
Not quite. The point of permissive licenses is that you're making a donation to everyone. If private industry uses your donation fine, if not that's fine too. But it's certainly true that if you have a problem with private industry using something you freely gave them, permissive licenses aren't for you.
If you wanted to make a donation to everyone, you'd use a copyleft license.
The point of permissive licenses is to grant the ability to exclude people from the enjoying the benefit of improvements.
I.e. they're not for creating public goods. They're grants for making it easier to create excludable goods.
> The point of permissive licenses is to grant the ability to exclude people from the enjoying the benefit of improvements.
I find this comment to be incredibly disingenuous, and just plain false.
Excluding people would only be done if someone took a permissive license and then re-licensed it to something more closed... you've entirely made up a malicious assumption about what people do with the software. And you're even assuming people ARE doing something like this with the software.
A permissive license simply lets you do just about anything you want with it. Some will agree this is more "free". But, freedom TO vs freedom FROM is a common argument.
You don't need to re-license permissively licensed software to include it in your code.
Apple, as far as I know, doesn't release the FreeBSD fork they use in Mac OS.
Companies generally use a ton of permissively licensed software and don't release forks of it under any license because the entire point of the license is that you can take the code, make modifications, and you have no obligations to give anything back when doing so.
There was an attempt to rebrand "free software" -- meaning software focused on user freedom -- as "open source" -- referring to software permissively licensed for use by corporations. This was the point of the OSI. [0]
> The “open source” label was created at a strategy session held on February 3rd, 1998 in Palo Alto, California, shortly after the announcement of the release of the Netscape source code....The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label “free software.” Brainstorming for this new label eventually converged on the term “open source”, originally suggested by Christine Peterson.
So literally a decision by a committee of industry folks to play down the idea of freedoms or giving back and focus instead on the business case.
So they killed the ethical argument that favored copyleft licenses in favor of the business argument that favored permissive ones.
Now people are saying "hey it's unfair that you're not giving back." Fair enough, but that's an ethical argument. That's what the OSI was trying to get rid of.
The OSI approach has its place. We wouldn't have Mac OS or Google or Meta without it. But its place is allowing industry to standardize and to reduce costs. Those benefit consumers indirectly since we have fewer competing standards and reduced development costs can imply reduced end user costs. But that only works because each company can make improvements and exclude others from using those improvements; i.e. they can make proprietary improvements.
> You don't need to re-license permissively licensed software to include it in your code.
If the project you include it in does not use the same license, then I think you are technically re-licensing it.
But either way, I don't see how the rest of your comment applies to what I said.
Wake up. That's what's happening to your gifts you released under permissive licenses. Enterprises like AWS, Apple etc. build their business on them and don't want to give anything back.
> I find this comment to be incredibly disingenuous, and just plain false.
I wonder if there will be any justification for this remark :-)
> Excluding people would only be done if someone took a permissive license and then re-licensed it to something more closed
Yes, that is the only way they can be distinguished. If nobody ever distributes proprietary software including the permissively-licensed code, then it might as well be copylefted.
> you've entirely made up a malicious assumption about what people do with the software. And you're even assuming people ARE doing something like this with the software.
I think this is your point of departure with reality. This happens constantly! Anyone who ever includes permissively licensed code in a proprietary codebase is denying the users of that codebase from the freedoms the upstream developers gave them. The freedom to do this is the freedom to withhold rights from other people. You can choose not to care about that, if you want. But that's what is happening.
I think we need to distinguish using and abusing. IMO a private corporation taking the source to make a commercial project and refusing to give anything back (whether patches, money, or otherwise) is abusing.
When corporations utilize the code and make a good faith effort to contribute back something, no matter how trivial, they are using the source.
Just because it’s legal doesn’t make it right and I feel confident given the current state of the world saying that we should start expecting more from corporations. The idea “they only exist to make money” is how you break the social contract.
> a private corporation taking the source to make a commercial project and refusing to give anything back (whether patches, money, or otherwise) is abusing.
What I'm saying is that's the point of the license. That's why universities use the licenses (e.g. MIT, Berkeley) and why Apache uses it. They're designed to stimulate the private sector by moving IP from research into industry (universities) or by industries pooling resources to make software purchases cheaper (Apache).
I don't think it makes sense to describe using them in this way as abusive or bad faith.
> IMO a private corporation taking the source to make a commercial project and refusing to give anything back (whether patches, money, or otherwise) is abusing.
I don't agree. Releasing under a permissive license is explicitly saying "dDo what you want with this, including using it commercially without giving back". And if you're saying that, you can't cry "abuse" when someone does exactly what you told them they could do. Because that's what you've done: the license terms explicitly say that.
"Legal" has nothing to do with it; if you want other people to have to contribute their changes publicly, you use a copyleft license. If you don't care, you use a permissive license, and then there's no such thing as "abuse", as long as people follow the letter of the license.
FWIW I think AGPL is the right license choice for you. The more experience I gain the more I lean toward AGPL for products, MIT for libraries.
I don't think there's anything wrong with permissive license for a piece of software. But if you're running a business that needs to pay developers, it's really not a good idea. Very few, if any, people are going to donate to your project out of a sense of duty to help you keep the lights on.
I don't disagree, but I think the bigger risk is just that big companies who can and should throw some financial support your way, just won't if it's permissively licensed. They've demonstrated repeatedly that they'll just take the software and use it, including making (sometimes substantial) money on it, and none of that will flow back up.
There are ways to get web interfaces for Signal.
But I think the bigger issue is that any platform that controls the javascript sent to you from a web page, can also backdoor/MITM/inject malicious code at any time without you knowing.
>lol Telegram
Did I miss something? what's wrong with telegram?
I'll tell you what's right about Telegram: I don't know how they're the only independent app that seems to be able to produce such a well built UI/UX for a chat application in 2025.
I maintain that someone should fork their codebase and bolt on a different backend (Signal, Matrix, whatever). It's right there and it's very, very good.
(Yes, I know it's not as simple as "bolt on a different backend". You know what I mean.)
> I don't know how they're the only independent app that seems to be able to produce such a well built UI/UX for a chat application in 2025.
Precisely because they don't spend so much effort for privacy. If your server can read all your messages, it's suddenly easier to provide great features. For instance, GMail can add your next hotel stay to your calendar automatically because it has access to your emails. That's great UX, but poor privacy.
This is not entirely true. For example, Calendar.app does the same by locally extracting the .ics out of Mail.app without ever sending anything to Apple.
I don't think Telegram's UX is tied to their permissive privacy, but they do seem to start with UX then do what's needed to support it. That does give them an edge. (Instagram has terrible privacy and actively mines information from chat and their UX is only passably good.)
> This is not entirely true.
My point is that it's generally harder to add those features in a privacy-preserving way. GMail couldn't do it if it couldn't read the content of the emails, period. It doesn't mean that there is no way to have nice features in a privacy-preserving way. I just said it's harder (sometimes impossible).
> I don't think Telegram's UX is tied to their permissive privacy
Not exclusively, but it is obviously a lot easier! Take a web client: if the server has access to the data, your client can just fetch it. If the server doesn't even know about the existence of the group, that's harder. Why do you think only the "secret chats" are E2EE in Telegram (and those don't support groups)?
> then do what's needed to support it
What do they do to support privacy? They don't have E2EE except in the secret chats! That hasn't changed in a decade!
> Instagram has terrible privacy and actively mines information from chat and their UX is only passably good
This keeps getting further from what I said :). Of course, it's possible to do worse than Telegram!
This is such an odd comment.
What on earth makes you think that the same engineers responsible for fluid and smooth UI/UX are the ones who’d ever influence the cryptography/privacy/security? Whether or not the chats are encrypted has zero to do with this.
Telegram has almost universally smooth scrolling, things work well across platforms, it’s native pretty much everywhere with low memory usage and mostly platform specific behaviors. Signal half asses this, and Element is… shoddy, at best, in comparison.
Unless you're extremely privileged, privacy does play a role in every feature. There is no user experience if you're imprisoned for speaking your mind and your government intelligence has pwned Telegram servers.
Making a smooth app isn't that hard. Inventing the cryptographic protocols to enable group management without server-side control, and proving their security is the hard part. Something Telegram's developers haven't the faintest idea of how to do.
People communicated via unencrypted phone calls and SMS and other unencrypted mediums for decades so you might just be massively overstating the importance of E2E message encryption for an average person.
That was the time before we lived our half of our social lives online in group chats and social media.
My calls and texts used to be about me agreeing with my buddies when to hang out. They weren't nearly as private as me keeping in touch with buddies I rarely see IRL, online.
Also, there was a period of transition. Had I known the MSN messenger was completely unencrypted, in that everyone, not just Microsoft, could listen in, I might have felt my privacy violated. I sure as hell feel that in hindsight.
The world has been changing a lot over those decades, and the technological and surveillance capabilities of state actors (and malicious, non-state actors, for that matter) has increased dramatically. Not needing E2EE a few decades ago has nothing to do with whether or not we need it now.
The world was fine without Internet for most of its history. What's your point?
> Unless you're extremely privileged, privacy does play a role in every feature.
No, dude. Come on - you really think that plays a role in how smooth a listview renders? Or whether it follows the correct tab focus order? I don't think I could be more clear about what I'm saying in my last comment. Their client side app is incredibly smooth and well built. Signal, Element, etc do not stack up.
> Making a smooth app isn't that hard.
Yes, it surprisingly is. Multiple chat apps in 2025 still fail at this.
> Inventing the cryptographic protocols to enable group management without server-side control, and proving their security is the hard part. Something Telegram's developers haven't the faintest idea of how to do.
This isn't even in the realm of what my point was.
>Come on - you really think that plays a role in how smooth a listview renders?
That's not a feature. Stickers is a feature. Calls are a feature. Messages are a feature. Group chats are a feature. Group video calls are a feature. Link thumbnails are a feature. Forwarding messages is a feature.
>Their client side app is incredibly smooth and well built.
Yes, and the Trojan horse was so beautiful John Oliver would totally have hit on it.
Telegram UI is fine, I'll give you that. But it was created at the expense of designing the app private. Move fast yolo security isn't the justification.
They'd have to re-design the protocol from scratch to make it E2EE by default. Hell, you can't even get feature parity with secret chats. E.g., stickers do not work.
Signal might not have every bell and whistle like pinned messages, but when it eventually does, I will know it's done with proper privacy design.
I get that your point is to bore exclusively in the UI/UX with, admiring the forest from the trees. I'm saying the true beauty is with the ridiculously seamless and easy to use end-to-end encryption for everything Signal provides. Both phone app, and all desktop apps stay in sync, all 1:1 chats are E2EE and they are available on all platforms, unlike Telegram where they're limited to phone only. All group chats are E2EE and they're available on all platform, unlike Telegram that doesn't have E2EE for group chats. All chats are E2EE by default, unlike Telegram where no chat is E2EE.
Privacy and security are integral part of every feature. Everything else is a footgun. Arguing about how well the footgun is polished, doesn't make it any less of a footgun.
Signal has over time polished its secure features.
Telegram isn't in the process of securing it's polished turd of a protocol.
> privacy does play a role in every feature
It really depends. People discuss and communicate in public channels like IRC or Discord.
A large chunk of chatting is shitposting with anonymous identity.
Secure chat is only needed in some scenarios.
> What on earth makes you think that the same engineers responsible for fluid and smooth UI/UX are the ones who’d ever influence the cryptography/privacy/security?
Did you even read my comment? I gave an example of how privacy directly impacts UX: GMail couldn't automatically add your events to your calendar if it could not read the content of your emails. I never talked about engineers, just the technical reality. If you don't have it, you can't read it. That seemed absolutely obvious to me: the best UX for a car would be one that doesn't need a source of energy, fits in my pockets and instantly teleports me anywhere I want. Go ask your engineers to make a car that allows that perfect UX, and see how they react.
Telegram has no E2EE except for the secret chats. Last time I checked, the secret chats were not synchronized between devices (i.e. the privacy has an obvious impact on the UX).
So no, I don't think it was an odd comment. It just feels like you don't know how it works technically.
> Did you even read my comment?
I'm not even sure you read mine.
> It just feels like you don't know how it works technically.
You're disregarding what I've said and trying to have a different discussion. Please pay attention.
I am not discussing - nor do I consider it relevant to my point - privacy/security/etc contexts for Telegram's client side applications. Whether or not it's encrypted has zero to do with how smooth and well built a chat UI is. I am commenting on the frontend client side engineering and how Telegram has, hands down, the best implementation. Other apps need to catch up.
> Whether or not it's encrypted has zero to do with how smooth and well built a chat UI is.
Ok, let's talk with concrete examples.
1. Say you open the Signal Desktop app: either you don't get the history of the messages, or you need to wait a fairly long time for them to arrive. With Telegram, you get the whole history immediately. Does that count as "smooth and unrelated to encryption" to you?
2. Say you send a message to a group on Telegram and on Signal/Element. On Telegram you see that the message was received noticeably faster than on the others. Does that count as "smooth and unrelated to encryption" to you?
3. Let's talk about GIFs and stickers: I'm sure Telegram has many more than e.g. Signal. Is that something you consider when you say Telegram has a better implementation and it is unrelated to the privacy concerns?
4. Telegram has bots that enable a lot of feature. Does that count?
You're telling me that for the stuff that isn't impacted by privacy concerns, Telegram is better. You seem very sure of that, and maybe that's right. But can you give concrete examples? Because until now, what I've been reading from you is that the UI/UX is not impacted by the privacy, and this is obviously wrong.
So let me ask this: would you agree that at least some UI/UX is impacted by the privacy concerns?
Every single point that you want to try here has nothing to do with implementing a smooth scrolling, buttery UI/UX of a chat application. Please stop moving the goalposts if you want to actually discuss this.
I also frankly don't even get what you're trying to say with point 1, because Signal loads messages instantly for me on Desktop. There's zero delay. The UI/UX of the scrolling and chat display is the problem.
> what I've been reading from you is that the UI/UX is not impacted by the privacy, and this is obviously wrong
It is not obviously wrong, and you've done nothing but attempt to loop the conversation back to some level of privacy/encryption/etc. These things do not matter in this conversation, full stop.
This (my thread, not the greater thread we're in) is a design and frontend implementation discussion, not a privacy/security discussion. If that is not clear to you, I don't know what to say anymore.