About Matrix Matrix is an open protocol for decentralised, secure communications.
Matrix Manifesto We believe:
People should have full control over their own communication. People should not be locked into centralised communication silos, but instead be free to pick who they choose to host their communication without limiting who they can reach. The ability to converse securely and privately is a basic human right. Communication should be available to everyone as a free and open, unencumbered, standard and global network.
Tried Matrix a few times over the past year or two and…
It kind of always felt like the liveleak of chat clients. Performance was horrible and all of the orgs that prioritized it were shady as hell (says something when SPTarkov was the least sketchy community).
I dunno, maybe I just “don’t get it”, but I also see no real need for it. Never say anything over chat/IM that a company knowing would hurt (also, people forget just how much power the instance admins of the various fediverse apps have…). And chat, by its very nature, is ephemeral. So migrating between instances doesn’t really get much.
With lemmy/reddit and mastodon/twitter, it makes more sense. Those are banks of knowledge that need to be preserved. And while there are definitely issues if a major instance goes down or defederates, there are theoretically ways to migrate and duplicate material. Mastodon supports account/feed migration and it looks like lemmy has community migration on the roadmap.
But for matrix/discord/irc? With very few exceptions, chat logs from even a week ago are not particularly useful. And for any larger chat room, the users who form a community tend to splinter off. The rest just come and go and are faceless interactions.
Kudos to those who use it/care. And I still wish there were an “open protocol” so that I could use the steam overlay to chat with a buddy playing elden ring on her xbox while I play trepang2 on my PC. But… we also can just call each other on the phone or use whatever chat client we want on our phones/a laptop/whatever.
And, I guess, in general I am increasingly worried about people with bad opsec. A lot of the “fediverse” discussions are reminding me of the crypto crowd thinking it provides a high degree of security and anonymity because a corporation is not involved. And they really don’t realize just how much power and access instance owners/admins have.
people should always think that everything they post on the internet can be searchable and viewable by anyone, it is public information
Exactly. Drives me a little crazy seeing all these posts and comments about how the Fediverse has poor privacy. It’s a public forum people, you should be considering everything you say here to be freely accessible information. At no point did anyone promise that your posts and comments would not be available to someone outside the service.
A lot of it is making sure people actually understand that.
Because people GLADLY say their deepest darkest secrets in twitter DMs and facebook chat and the like. But with fediverse stuff? It isn’t even the hope that you don’t matter enough for a large corporation to care (although, tesla has demonstrated that they’ll just search for the juicy clips to share around the office…). People don’t realize that it is the proverbial “Guy in his Parents’ Basement” who has all that access. And depending on how large your instance is, that could very well be a human readable amount of data.
Which is why I compare it to cryptocurrency. Everyone insisted bitcoin was super secure and blah blah blah. And… the reality is that you don’t even need a warrant or to scream “terrorism” to get access to transaction records for the entire planet. There are ways you can try to obfuscate your records, but they also tend to make you stand out.
At the end of the day: Everyone should act like there is a big burly FBI agent behind them at all times. But most people don’t, and it is worth reminding them of just who IS standing behind them.
I used to work at Discord and I can tell you that this is, painfully, not the norm.
You literally have no idea who’s behind Discord.
That’s why i wpuld name my matrix instance not the fbi. It helps keepa the weirdos out
I’m 99.99% sure that discord released an xbox app so you can chat on discord cross platform now. Haven’t used an xbox in ages though.
Quick google
what do you mean with “all of the orgs that prioritized it were shady as hell”?
There are open chat protocols, like XMPP. The issue is corporations either don’t use them, or use them to enshittificate (that’s what happened to XMPP, even. As for open GUI protocols, which is needed for the second part of your message, same issue: there’s open protocols and open toolkits all over the place, but the corps that produce consoles and games won’t use them (or, when they do, they’ll still lock them behind an “ecosystem”).
tl;dr: choose better (more open) games, and you can have p much all the chat you want.