Matrix was built to become the open communication of the web and serve everyone. But, as the Internet and email did, its network effect started with governments. Today, and as proven by the audience in the room, most European governments and several others are either using it or looking at implementing it for their communications. This talk will tell the story of how we got there and why.
Speaking from experience, matrix is still kinda rough around the edges if you have a 100+ person group with non-technical users.
More broadly, pretty much all of the secure messengers currently have an ~O(N^2) problem with state sync in groups. The only one that isn’t deeply frustrating is Signal and that’s largely because it has very few features and can’t be self hosted.
Why would ppl use group chat for 100+ ppl, just why? Should not something like Lemmy plus Notification suit the role better? I saw ppl use group chat as gallery sharing but when I saw it is WhatsApp, wechat, line… Well, those big corp deserve it.
It sucks because it feels SOOOO close. I had my own server setup but setting up a client was so very hard. And it was hard to explain to friends/family how to set it up.
My CPU on my tiny server was being used like crazy for matrix.
I switched from synapse to continuwuity about 9 months ago and it has been a MUCH better experience. Also switched from Element to Sable recently and it is a much more comfortable and reliable client. Not much more complicated to set up than Discord IMHO.
Shoutout to continuwuity! UwU Queer people power the internet~
And it was hard to explain to friends/family how to set it up.
That’s why I gave up on self hosting it. I can sit here and mess around with recovery keys and verification and whatever else, but if the people that would use it with me can’t just sign up and chat, then I’ve got no one to talk to. They don’t care much about privacy, which I’m finding is most people.
Yea Synapse is very resource hungry. Element built a much more performative enterprise server implementation, but though it’s open source it comes with a proprietary license, which kind of defeats the point when it comes to digital sovereignty in the public sector. From what I heard they unfortunately concluded that this is the only way to prevent organizations from freeriding, but it still sucks for the ecosystem. I’m working on one of the larger European Matrix public sector projects and we’ve been trying to mobilize funds for upstream contributions for some time, but it’s not easy to convince the policy and finance people to approve sustainable contributions to an open source ecosystem; they want to see procurements where it’s 100% clear what you get for your money. Also, public sector communication use cases frequently have high user count, low message volume and a high number of federated instances; so the current Synapse implementation has mostly been workable as you can feasibly scale horizontally. So there is currently not really that much financial incentive and pressure from the public sector to improve the efficiency of Synapse.
Now for comparison’s sake, try snikket, or even barebones ejabberd on a (featuresfriendliness) vs (admin overheadserver resources) basis. Mix in some https://mov.im/ if you must.
My CPU on my tiny server was being used like crazy for matrix.
Have you tried joining a community with 50k or so users in it on a fresh Synapse instance? Your network gets absolutely beat into the ground because it needs to synchronize with every other instance apart of that community, I have had power outages occur and whenever my server would start back up Synapse would just DDOS my network due to how many request it needs to make to stay in sync.
My poor PiHoles flooded with synapse queries.
Host my own Lemmy instance and have yet to experience the same federation troubles I get with Synapse.
Ha yeah!! I wish there was a way like piefed does where it gets a collection of requests all at once rather than just DDOSing tiny servers.
Were you running Synapse?
I tried a couple. Synapse was the one I did the longest if I recall.
I’ve said that before, but the O(N²) issue with E2E encryption only exists in an ideological sense. If your group chat is large enough that the overhead is unbearable, you don’t have a private and secure group chat to begin with, just because a group chat of this magnitude is very much public by definition.
With that said, you can keep server logs encrypted while avoiding the payload/key rotation explosion by using static keys (available since forever with PGP in XMPP) or wait the decade (but most probably, the eternity) that it will take for MLS to be bolted on top of Matrix (and the new protocol design that this entails due to the absence of guarantee about messages ordering)
Appreciate the discussion. I really wish they’d prioritize UX.
ugh matrix sucks and I wish it wasn’t the preferred form of communication for everyone on fedi.
once fluxxer gets federation I’m gonna be done with matrix forever.
Once fluxer gets e2ee and federation and better docs and adoption and professional support and a mature org behind it. Then it can be just like Matrix 😂
Personally I’d prefer XMPP. They way it caches data between instances is way less bloated
Criticism of the matrix protocol: https://hackea.org/notas/matrix.html.
I will not access the posted video as it’s hosted on hostile infrastructure. I request that the author share their videos in a way that honours freedom. Continuing to use the current provider is to enforce the existing monopoly on video distribution and is counter productive to libre software. I will list some viable alternatives: Mediagoblin: https://mediagoblin.org/; Peertube: https://joinpeertube.org/; or via BitTorrent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent.
I will not use the matrix protocol due to its origin with Israel’s intelligence community. Its design is nonsensical in the contexts of liberty, privacy and cryptography. However the design is strikingly coherent if the goal was to design an encrypted communication protocol that was ‘decentralised’, but still auditable by external agents. This design is why government agencies would consider its adoption, but knowing its origins I can not endorse it.
Here you go: https://media.ccc.de/v/matrix-conf-2025-74985-how-matrix-is-becoming-the-communication-standard-for-public-sector I get the adversity to YouTube, but the media.ccc link was literally one click away… I find that there is a fine line between having principles and being pedantic.
Dude just sounded like a sovereign citizen type…
Video is a year old, but still relevant I think.
Here’s this years discussion: https://youtu.be/cQjUjM_OAcw
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