What ultimately pushed me to leave Matrix was discovering that my homeserver’s admin was using my account without my consent.
In an encrypted room even with fully verified members, a compromised or hostile home server can still take over the room by impersonating an admin. That admin (or even a newly minted user) can then send events or listen on the conversations.
…, I’ve decided to move my conversations over to SimpleX.
For the past few months, the Matrix community has been largely inactive (despite having over 5,000 members), while the Telegram community has remained much more vibrant. This is disappointing given that I have been a strong advocate for using Matrix and have promoted it widely. For some reason, people are not moving to Matrix at the rate I had hoped.
Yeah, the good old matrix hate. It remains the strongest fediverse chat to date and has no equal in terms of features and encryption while being federated.
If you want to be completely safe, you always need to host your own. If you are on a hosted service, you have to trust the admin or use 1on1, end to end encrypted rooms with the option of only trusting explocitly trusted devices.
Before someone starts to complain again: yes, that makes the experience other than 1on1 barely usable. welcome to the real world, neo. Something something eating and having cake…
We really need to not announce every fediverse service we dont use anymore every five minutes. It is a completely individual choice based on what you like, what your threat model is.
Most of us have the need to not be transparent to corpos and our government without special reason (eg you are on gov watchlists because that requires A LOT better persec than using an android or ios phone, windows computer, etc).
This is easily achieved by asking your trusted friend to host a matrix server for 5-10 friends or doing it yourself.
Joining matrix.org or any other major instance (which is against the idea of the fediverse btw) will always open you up to a couple more avenues for exploitation.
But that is absolutely not the threat model of a user coming eg from whatsapp, fb messenger, etc.