matrix: open, decentralised network

also matrix: everyone uses matrix.org because doing anything else is miserable

@ariadne @chris and I ended up switching back to Signal

@kevin @chris yes. unfortunately i need to interact with matrix-using communities

@ariadne see also: bluesky

@ewjoachim yes. exactly.

@ariadne i dont really get why FOSS communities don't just use XMPP it is the most practical way to communicate

@lynn simple. it is a matter of aesthetics: when people think XMPP, they think of clunky chat apps

element looks enough like "discord" that people accept it

@ariadne def agree that its some bs optics game. but i do admit that BoB not being standard XMPP and generally "media" being a bit harder. but FR u are kidding yourself if you think u need more than text/images/videos to get anything done in a community

@lynn if someone built a desktop application and mobile application (maybe all of which use the same framework, probably Flutter or something) and did not say it was "XMPP", it would probably do well

@ariadne @lynn and yet Element manages to be clunkier than most XMPP chat apps I tried

I stopped using XMPP because there was no E2E encryption, no history replication over multiple devices (hell, *just* using multiple devices was broken af), and file transfer was so broken I still remember that bzip2|base64 starts with Qlp...

in 2015 it was a shit protocol with moderately ok clients. then the last person i knew who used XMPP switched to Telegram

@ariadne isn’t matrix.org even more miserable due to being extremely slow and having disabled stuff like online status

@charlotte yes, this is why everyone just uses discord instead

@whitequark @lynn yes, but it doesn't *look* clunky. aesthetics are important in software adoption...

@whitequark @ariadne good thing all of those things are fixed by literally all recent clients/servers

@whitequark @ariadne also Element has never worked longer than an hour for me. it bricks itself and loops trying to open a chat that it thinks "doesnt exist" despite me making it

@ariadne

I liked irc before the end of freenode. But that too has the same clunkiness problem.

If you're a fan, @lynn , which client would you recommend?

@lynn @ariadne last time I reviewed whether XMPP's E2EE was something I should use the answer was "definitely no" https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/, at which point I stopped caring because without good E2EE it becomes "Telegram with worse UI"

@lynn @ariadne Element is one of the worst applications I use on a daily basis, made by people who seem to be incompetent at the job. nothing that I say should be understood as endorsement of Element, which I viscerally hate and only use because of network effects

@whitequark @lynn oh yes, like i said, it is hot garbage.

but it *looks* competitive to the proprietary chat apps.

if you put it next to slack or discord, it is basically the same UX (just a lot clunkier)

@ariadne @lynn I understand and accept your point but I feel like anybody who's used Discord will open Element and then feel like their brain is being rubbed on some sandpaper, which kind of takes the competitiveness away

the screenshots look the same but surely people pick their chat client not just going by screenshots?..

@whitequark @lynn they do, sadly.

@whitequark @ariadne i think some of this goes over my head, but the E2EE is there and works well enough for people with average clients? a lot of this post also attacks specific versions, which is a bit unfair to an open standard which started in 1999. they even admit it follows what Signal has done. i think the main thing i agree with is that XMPP is perhaps a bit too jumpy and disorganized at times

@whitequark @ariadne

While Discord gets its money from Nitro subscriptions, the only income stream Element has is corporate/government users.

Even though people don't choose chat clients based on screenshots, corporations do.

@ariadne

Gajim looks kinda like Discord. 🤷‍♂️

@lynn

@whitequark

That makes me sad, because I'm honestly not sure what else I could use.

Matrix is Matrix, Signal is centralized and proprietary, Delta Chat is a leaning tower of software shoehorned into doing things it's absolutely not designed to do, Tox is kaput, and everything else is insecure, proprietary, etc.

@lynn @ariadne

@whitequark

XMPP definitely had E2EE in 2015. Not OMEMO, but it did have OTR and OpenPGP.

The lack of forward secrecy is extra scary for a private chat app, so it was certainly not ideal. But it wasn't nothing.

@ariadne @lynn

@argv_minus_one @ariadne @lynn I used OTR with XMPP in 2010s very extensively. it was so easy to downgrade in practice due to fragile implementations that I don't think it had protected much of anything at all

@argv_minus_one @whitequark @ariadne that is indeed the situation we find ourselves in, we can only hope that xmpp irons itself out in some eons or signal eventually shows their hand. personally i would rather bet on the heat death of the universe

@lynn

I heard that there's a project to integrate yet another E2EE protocol named MLS (Messaging Layer Security) into XMPP.

This protocol is maintained by the IETF, for what it's worth.

I hope it pans out. 🤞

@whitequark @ariadne

@giacomo

🤷‍♂️ I've never used it. People complain about it a lot, including in this conversation, but that's all I know.

@paolo @whitequark @lynn @ariadne

@whitequark @lynn @ariadne I think the main problem of Matrix is that it tries to be 3 things at once. It tries to be a public chat (like IRC), it tries to be a privat chat, and it tries to be instant messaging. Trying to achieve all three of those makes it very complex. It needs to deal with "federated user accounts" and such thngs. IRC, for example just believes you when you claim you are user X, which is socially accepted there. Usernames are no "secure identities" there.

@whitequark @ariadne @lynn honestly xmpp has shaped up a fair bit in recent years, i run conversations on mobile and gajim on desktop without major issues, omemo for E2E, even omemo messages get properly replicated device to device
old clients are still crusty as hell and file transfer can be a lil wonky depending on the xmpp server, but compared to 2015 it's a completely different experience. the protocol is still horseshit but most of those warts are covered up

@ariadne @lynn I just stay away from communities which base themselves on discord or matrix.

@ariadne @lynn Flutter is awful. It’s a pain to build and package. Pasting images doesn’t work on any flutter tool that I know of. The UI elements aren’t clear and obvious.

But that’s probably why we don’t have good GUI clients, we don’t have good toolkits for *nix.

@giacomo

How does Matrix deal with key trust?

@paolo @whitequark @lynn @ariadne

@ariadne yeah, I threw up an instance a couple years ago to try it out, but it was a horrible user experience. just joining a room, not even an encrypted one, took like 10 minutes.

could be I had something set up poorly, but ugh

@wouter Sure the problem is that many projects looked and found an alternative to irc and the people are just no longer on irc that much. The network has lost value. That value is now not zero, but it's not the same anymore.

@argv_minus_one The whole "need second device to confirm first device" was what really turned me off #Matrix

Be it as secure as it may, but usability wise it has issues.

@alcea

That sounds alarming. What about people who have only one device? What about people who have only one device whose security they fully trust?

@ariadne We’re trying matrix at work. It’s hosted by our IT department. It’s been a week, and I think we’ve already spent in person-hours trying to make it work for everyone the amount we pay for Slack yearly. We’re fifteen in our group.
@whitequark

@ariadne @whitequark I forgot to mention that there quarters of us are programmers or programming-adjacent, and the rest are still tech-savvy.

@oscherler @whitequark sounds about right, i find myself allergic to it for a reason