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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Please don’t blame the people who were forced to implement this. There are engineers to blame behind all shitty tech in the world. They’re just trying to work a job. There aren’t exactly a lot of jobs in the tech industry where you don’t work for some of the evilest motherfuckers alive building unimaginably evil stuff. I’m all for directing as much hate, vitriol, credible threats of violence, etc at the people on top, but let’s leave the poor sap who they forced to do their dirty work alone.





  • That’s fair! If you’re on these type of forums, there are a lot of Signal haters and a lot of Matrix lovers, and sometimes they like to make confusing or just straight up inaccurate statements. The crux of the issue is not about the encryption of the text of messages themselves, which both platforms are capable of doing. Personally, I wish there was something like Signal but without the centralization, but the reality is such a thing doesn’t exist.

    Signal (as in the Signal server and by extension the legal entity behind Signal) does not know what groups you’re in, does not know who’s in your contact list, does not know which groups you are sending messages to, doesn’t know which groups exist, and can’t tell the difference between a message, a reaction, a read receipt, a remote delete (“delete for everyone”), an edit… etc. Signal doesn’t have a way to send anything between two parties that the server can see. Signal has received a number of subpoenas which they typically fight, and if/when they lose they over all of the information they have about the subject of the subpoena, which tends to be whether or not they have a Signal account, when they registered the account and when they last used it. You can see these at https://signal.org/bigbrother/

    Matrix (as in the Matrix server you’re registered on as well as the servers of whoever you’re talking to, for groups that means everyone in the group, notably this is not necessarily the same as the legal entity behind Matrix, but in practice a LOT of people use matrix.org for their home server so it frequently is) can see basically all of the things I listed above. The text of normal messages is encrypted. The group membership list isn’t encrypted. reactions aren’t encrypted. read receipts aren’t encrypted. Group membership lists are stored in plain text.


  • Not sure why you think I don’t understand why matrix operates the way it does and I’m especially not sure why you think you know what I want. To help clear it up: I want a secure, decentralized encrypted messaging system that doesn’t let anyone but the participants access any information about their conversations, just like everyone else. What I DONT want is people misrepresenting the current landscape, as many in this thread are doing. End to end encryption of the actual text of the messages is not at all good enough, and Signal has made enormous strides in demonstrating alternative options. I’m not a fan of the usual things people don’t like about signal (phone numbers, centralized server architecture, mixed feelings on removing SMS from Android). Matrix addresses almost all of these, and does a lot of other cool things, but does so at the cost of a lot of privacy. I want people to stop acting like matrix and signal offer the same level of privacy. I get it, decentralization is good, but can we please not misrepresent the offerings of current decentralized solutions compared to current centralized ones just because we like the architecture of one more?

    I’ve operated matrix servers and I’ve looked at the database to see what it knows. It knows a lot, and if a service provider was compelled to turn that over, it could be bad. We should be honest about what the server knows so people can make rational decisions.


  • “theoretically” being the operative word here. Most people don’t. And if they did, they wouldn’t be able to talk to anyone else without the metadata getting copied to that person’s server. Probably okay if it’s between two information security experts who operate their secure own servers, but in reality most people don’t do that. This could be summarized as: Matrix offers a lot of easy ways to be less secure, Signal does not.

    As for WhatsApp, I know they have paid or maybe still do pay Signal for their encryption. I believe Facebook Messenger did or does as well. I’m not sure what the actual implementation looks like and neither is anyone else, because it’s closed source.




  • Only if the signal crew collectively fell down, hit their heads and forgot about their whole mission of protecting metadata privacy. Matrix is a privacy nightmare (compared to signal). It offers optional encryption for the actual text of the messages sent, but everything else from room membership lists to reactions are unencrypted and stored forever by the server. The end to end encrypted message feature was bolted on after the rest of the thing was built, and it shows.

    We’ve seen https://signal.org/bigbrother/ where signal proudly shows that they don’t have any metadata about their users to turn over. There’s a reason we don’t see anything like this for matrix.

    Matrix is good at federating, but fucking horrible at keeping your information safe.