[liberationtech] Do you have any thoughts on Matrix.org?

[Nathan of Guardian]

On Fri, Jul 7, 2017, at 05:43 AM, Jonathan Frederickson wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 7, 2017 at 2:36 AM, Yosem Companys <companys at tmp.ucsb.edu>
> wrote:
> > I hadn't seen it before. It describes itself as "An open network for secure,
> > decentralized communication." See: http://matrix.org/
> 
> I've been a daily user of Matrix for the last few years, and I run my
> own Matrix server. I really like it - it solves a lot of the issues I
> have with XMPP. Notably, server-side history is treated as a
> first-class citizen, and it even works with end-to-end encrypted
> rooms! (The clients hold the keys, the server holds the encrypted
> messages.)
> 

I see it more as an upgrade for IRC than XMPP myself, and a more open
alternative to Slack. I use it as part of my daily workflow, connecting
with various teams and communities. 

We've created a Guardian Project channel here, and linked it into our
existing IRC channel on Freenode. I think you can also link it into a
Slack, if you have one, making a great grand unifier across all the
various places and ways you might want to connect to people. Riot
(formerly Vector) is a nice web and native interface into the Matrix
protocol:
https://riot.im/app/#/room/#guardianproject:matrix.org

> End-to-end encryption is still a bit spotty (and therefore still
> disabled by default) but aside from a few corner cases it usually
> works pretty well. They're working on it.

Yes, it is useful that you can create private rooms with encryption
enabled, and it does seem to work for small groups. It is definitely
experimental, as is the WebRTC support for voice and video calls. There
is good work going on in the core related to the encryption protocol,
which is based on the always excellent work for the Signal/OWS team. The
usual caveats of "browser based encryption" apply here.

+n
-- 
  Nathan of Guardian
  nathan at guardianproject.info