I will be upfront with this, and say that I’ve never been a huge fan. But I did reinstall a Matrix server, and some clients to see if it’d gotten better in the year or so since I’ve last used it.
This just… Kind of feels like a more centralized XMPP with group chat folders that sort of function? The spaces feature is neat, but I’ve tried 4-5 clients, and every single one of those throws all of them into the same screen as the DMs by default, and I can’t find a way to change that.
Am I missing something here? Like. I want to at least see what people like here, I just can’t.
Matrix starting development under Israeli company Amdocs is enough for me to never touch it with a 10 foot pole no matter its rebranding and move to become a “UK” company.
You can self-host it and there’s even a full rewrite in Rust available, which AFAIK is independent of the company.
Element is still a main client and it’s the same people who worked for Amdocs in the past.
Everything about it screams “backdoor” to me including a supposed dev of it showing up and talking about how ethical and super duper cool the Israeli company actually is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36020947
And
Because we all know bankrolling 15 devs for years is super cheap.
Their history is shady enough for me to not even consider it.
What’s more, even if you self host, unless you only allow chats within your instance, your server pisses metadata to any server it federates with, and as the “default” instance is matrix [.] org you basically have to federate with them.
Even if it isn’t backdoored through the app (which afaik has never been audited) or server (which afaik also hasn’t), or the protocol (which afaik has, but me no trust), if they’re spying on the metadata that alone is an issue, and they absolutely could do that.
What’s Amdoc? Some association of American doctors?
Forgive me, I’m a citizen of an EU country no one gives a shit about and that has successfully “exported” a prime minister to a neighboring country.
An Israeli software company which has been caught making spyware multiple times
Yeah… I’d seen some stuff with that, just didn’t mention it because I hadn’t looked into it too hard. The one I’m trying is a fork of a rewrite of the original server software by unrelated devs. I did try Element, but there’s nothing on the server that I actually care about.