trash cat (they/them) and Juliana (she/her) talk about Matrix. Part 2 of 2.
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Timestamps
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+- 0:00.000 [Theme]
+- 0:08.943 What's it like using encryption on Matrix?
+- 20:13.711 A brief note on OTF funding
+- 20:40.788 Issues with Matrix
+- 44:36.851 Our opinions on Matrix
+- 50:13.580 [Outro]
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Transcript
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[Intro]
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trash cat: You're listening to trash cat tech chat, a Librepunk podcast.
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What's it like using encryption on Matrix?
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tc: If you want to know details about the cryptography, listen to the extra thing. But I want to talk about from a user perspective, what is it like using the cryptography, and how do we verify other users, and things like that.
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Juliana: Yeah. Obviously, it kind of starts at account registration 'cause that's when you, you know, initially create your identity, and by default, I think, everything is encrypted but not necessarily verified? I'm not sure exactly what the difference is.
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tc: Um, so, I think I know what you mean, but I want to give a little bit of clarification for the audience. What you mean, I think, is conversations that you have, messages that you send to other users in private rooms by default are encrypted.
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J: Yes. Which, for context, is the main... Most of the time I have had Matrix open, it has been for that purpose, regardless of client or whatever.
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tc: Yeah. So if you just like, start a new room with someone, most clients, at least Element, by default will make it encrypted, and you just don't have to do... You don't have to take any extra action to make it encrypted. It's just encrypted by default.
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J: And if you're in a room that's not encrypted, and you want to start it being encrypted, or if you want to verify an encrypted room, whatever that means, you can initiate a... I guess you'd call it a "handshake". A verification session where you basically--
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tc: I wanna um... Small correction there: It's not... Okay, so there are two things going on that I think you're talking about, and one of them is there are rooms... Okay, so there are rooms and users, and those are different entities, and the way that we're going to interact with them is a little bit different and important to talk about. Okay? So...
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J: Okay.
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tc: And sorry for interrupting you, but like...
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J: No, yeah, I would rather you make sure we're saying the correct things. I mean, I... Part of the problem is, my clients are all in French, so I don't necessarily know exactly what's happening.
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tc: [laughs] Okay uh... So there are rooms. Everything on Matrix is a room. Kind of. In the sense that you have chats with individual people, like direct messages you might think about them as, are a room with the two of you in it. And group chats are also a room, just with more users in that room. So a room is kind of the basic entity of like, "Here's where a conversation is happening." Rooms can be either encrypted or unencrypted. By default in major Matrix clients, by which I mostly mean Element, but also FluffyChat, I believe, does this. By default, when you make a new room, and it's a private room, which includes either a quote-unquote "DM", direct message where like, it's you and one other person, so like, Alice and Bob together in a room that's just a private chat with them, or when you're making a room, you can mark it as private or public. By default when you make a private room, it will be encrypted. And you can also -- in a room that's not encrypted, you can turn on encryption, which is just like, a little toggle in the menu that says, "This is going to be encrypted from here on." I said something earlier when we were talking about XMPP like "I wanna talk about this later." One of the things that's interesting and noteworthy to me about the difference between XMPP and Matrix is at what level the encryption is specified. I think that's the way I want to phrase that. So in XMPP (and probably other things, I don't know) -- In XMPP, if you and I are having a conversation, there's no real, like, concept of a room. There are multi-user chats, which exist as like a room-type thing in XMPP, but if you and I are having a conversation, it's just like, my device is sending a message which then will get delivered to your device or devices on either or both ends. And I can enable encryption at the device level. So I can say, "Okay, I want messages sent from my device to your device to be encrypted. But it's not, like, sort of specified on the server anywhere that "Oh, this conversation happening is encrypted." It's just I am sending messages that are encrypted. With Matrix, it's like, an actual variable of the room that says, "This room is encrypted."
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J: That is an interesting distinction.
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tc: Yeah. I'm not sure I have anything to say about it further than that. [laughs] But that is, that's how it works. The room... In Matrix, the room itself is encrypted or unencrypted. And if it's encrypted, then all clients are at least supposed to send encrypted messages in that room and not send unencrypted messages. So that's the first thing is "Is encryption on or not?" And then the second thing, which is what you were trying to talk about when I interrupted you, is verification, which is a separate matter from "Is the room encrypted?" And verification is... So basically, there's this big problem in cryptography. I think I talked about this... Yeah, I talked about this in the first episode with like, trust on first use and stuff. But there's this big problem in cryptography that is: How does Alice know she's actually talking to Bob? How does Bob know he's actually talking to Alice? And the answer is: At least in the context of Matrix what they do is they verify each other. Alice and Bob, out of band, in some, like, trusted -- ideally in-person they meet up and compare numbers. They compare their identity keys to say, "Is the entity that I'm talking to digitally who claims to be Bob actually Bob? Is -- actually the person that I meet up with in-person that I know as Bob? And vice versa with Alice. And this is done on a per-user level. Mm, let me... Sorry, there are two things taht I want to say about that. [laughs]
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J: Go ahead.
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tc: I introduced you to talk, and then I'm just doing all the talking. But, uh... [laughs]
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J: I'm sorry that I don't have a better understanding.
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tc: It's okay! It's uh... But um, okay, so... Alice and Bob want to verify each other. So, in a system like XMPP, what this looks like is each of Alice's devices, each device has its own keys. It has its own identifier. And if, say, Alice has, you know, a laptop and a phone and a desktop computer, and Bob has a laptop and a phone, and they want all of the devices to be able to talk to each other, they have to -- and have that strong verification, they have to pairwise verify each pair of devices. So Alice's desktop to Bob's laptop, Alice's desktop to Bob's phone, Alice's desktop to Alice's laptop, Alice's desktop to Alice's phone, and so on. Every pair of devices needs to verify each other.
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J: Okay.
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tc: In like, OMEMO, in XMPP land. And that's terrible user experience. But that's the basic idea is they meet up, and they say, "Okay, you know, do these numbers match up?" And if they do, we mark them verified and say, "Okay, we know that we are actually talking to each other." But it's a terrible user experience to have to do it manually. When Bob gets a new phone, suddenly Alice has to re-verify that device from all of her devices, each individually, and also Bob has to verify his new device with his old devices. And um... it's just a whole mess. Matrix does this really nice thing in this area, which is called "cross-signing", which basically... When Alice starts... So, when Alice like, opens her first device on Matrix, whatever. Say when Alice starts running her second Matrix client, so she already set up on her laptop. Now she's setting up on her phone. Her laptop will ask her to verify the new device. And so she does that, and they do the cryptographic key verification -- which, I do want to talk about how that works, but right now I want to talk about like, what does it mean? They do the cryptographic device verification, and then Alice has verified that her own phone is the same device as her -- Sorry, they verify each other. Both devices verify each other. Alice has verified that her laptop and her phone are run by the same person, and when Bob goes to verify Alice, he can verify one of her devices as being "Alice" -- so, essentially, instead of verifying individual devices, you're verifying people. Bob verifies "Alice" as the owner of the laptop and by extension her phone. And then if Alice gets a new device, her -- say, adds her desktop as well, she verifies her desktop with one of her devices (she doesn't have to do it with all of them), and now her desktop is trusted by her other devices as part of the same identity, and by extension, Bob, and whoever else have already verified Alice's identity, can trust Alice's computer -- her desktop -- without any additional work. It's a much simpler, much easier system where you just, you verify users rather than individual devices, and you trust a user to manage their own devices properly, and it makes everything so much easier to use than, like, XMPP is.
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J: Yes.
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tc: So just to clarify, like, the difference between how you interact with users and how you interact with rooms... It's a little bit confusing because sometimes they look like the same thing in the interface, in particularly when you have, um -- [sarcastic] "in particularly" -- in particular when you have a DM, so to speak, a private room with just you and someone else. But, and I think this is important, what you're actually doing when you enable encryption is you're setting it for that room. Even if there are other rooms with that person in them, those might still be unencrypted. But just that room gets encrypted. And what you're doing when you're verifying is you're verifying the user, rather than the room. And so, you might be in a room -- Say, Alice, Bob, and Carol are all together in one room, and separate from that, Alice and Bob have another conversation that they're together in. Alice and Bob have verified each other, but Alice has not verified Carol. So, in the room with Alice, Bob, and Carol together, they can still use encryption, and Alice will still be verified with Bob within the context of that room, but they won't have that level of ver-- Alice won't have that level of verification with Carol. Does that distinction make sense?
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J: Yes, it does.
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tc: Okay.
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J: The interface to do this, to verify devices to each other, to verify users, to, you know, do all this, looks very similar, and it's very easy for a user to do. You just like, so when you log into a new device for the first time, you will be asked to either use a copy of, uh... I don't remember the exact terminology, of a key that you can download through a client.
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tc: The uh, in English, what it calls it is "Secure Backup".
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J: Yes. You can use that to verify a device, or you can scan a QR code. So that's how I've mostly been doing it lately. Or you can do the emoji thing, which is where it shows you a list of emoji, you look at the emoji and see if they match, and if they do, you confirm on both devices that they match.
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tc: Yeah, and emoji verification is really nice. In like, XMPP/OMEMO land, we have scanning QR codes. That is a paradigm that exists. But if you're not in a situation where you can scan QR codes, you have to manually compare hexadecimal strings that represent public keys. And that's not a good time. But the other thing about that is with XMPP, because we don't have the cross-signing, and because we don't have the... all the various features that are nice with Matrix, with XMPP, you have to do both steps in the verification, by which I mean if Alice's phone and Bob's phone want to verify each other, Alice's phone must verify Bob's phone, and also, Bob's phone, which has a different fingerprint for verification, must verify Alice's phone. That wasn't the right way of saying that. Alice must verify Bob's fingerprint, and also, Bob must verify Alice's fingerprint. It's a 2-step process. Matrix simplifies it into a 1-step process, right? where you scan a single QR code that represents both parties, or you compare a single sequence of emoji that represents both parties, and then you've done both steps of the verification, rather than having to verify two different numbers.
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J: Yes. And this simple interface is used for everywhere that user verification is required, so it's super nice.
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tc: One complaint I have about Element and cross-signing and everything is the Element... the ability to do cross-signing is not exposed in a way that allows it to be done offline. So what that means is, if I -- So in, say, XMPP for example, let's say my only computer is a desktop computer, but I still want to verify with someone by meeting up in-person. Well, I can write down my fingerprint and then show it to them, and they can say "Ah yes, I believe that this is you." You can do that in Matrix, but only per-device. You cannot do that with the cross-signing key. At least with Element, there is no interface to manually verify a cross-signing key, which is really obnoxious. [laughs]
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J: That is interesting. I hadn't thought about that. But yeah, that makes sense.
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tc: Like, there's no reason it couldn't be an option, to be clear. I mean, there's no technical reason you shouldn't be able to just write down your cross-signing key -- the public key -- and then show it to someone, and they open up a thing and say "Yes, this matches. I want to sign this cross-signing key" or whatever. There's no technical reason it can't be; it just is not implemented in a way that allows you to do that.
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J: It's kind of a shame.
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tc: It is. I hope that they fix that at some point.
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J: I'm trying to think if there's anything else I want to say about the sort of user interface to this.
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tc: At one point, I don't remember if I included this in the first episode or not, but you said when we were having that conversation, you talked about the -- I think I cut it -- you talked about um -- you said you like that it's... that it has both encrypted and unencrypted rooms, and you can enable encryption later from a room that starts unencrypted. Would you like to talk about that?
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J: Yeah, I guess so. So basically, the reason I like that is that a lot of people are not going to go out of their way to have encryption. So if I were to say, "Hey, talk to me on this encrypted chat app", they might think "Oh, encryption. This is going to be, you know, complicated, a pain in the butt. I don't want to do this." Whereas if I say, "Just make an account and talk to me on this thing", they're not gonna have that pre-judgement that it's gonna be complicated. And then, because it actually makes encryption -- comparatively at least, I mean -- simple, it allows you to just like, start it up. Like, you could just be chatting with them one day and hit the button, and then they don't have to know what's going on. You hit the button, and you can just be like, "Oh yeah, we're just verifying each other, and badda-bing badda-boom, you have encryption." It's a good way to avoid intimidating someone before they come into an encrypted chat, you know, situation.
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tc: Yeah, I get you. I do wanna clarify again, just that -- the difference between encryption happening in the room and verification. Like, those are different things.
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J: Yeah. So, I had a misunderstanding on that because I was using Fractal so much, so most of my rooms were not encrypted. And then when I switched to Element, I had to activate encryption on them, and to do that it requires you to verify at the same time.
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tc: On Element? It shouldn't require verification to turn on encryption.
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J: There was something I had to do. Or, maybe it was just that the other person had to agree to turning on encryption.
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tc: I don't think that's... right either. I think just anyone with like, admin permission or whatever level in a room can unilaterally enable encryption for the room, and then it can never be turned off again for that room. And like, that's the way that that works. And like, verification is good and everything, but it's not... Like, most rooms in Matrix, unless they're intentionally big public rooms, most rooms in Matrix are -- not with Fractal, but with Element or whatever -- are going to be encrypted, but you probably haven't verified the other users 'cause that's like, the default state.
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J: That's interesting. I wonder what was happening then. Huh.
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tc: I don't know... That's okay, though. [laughs] But yeah, you don't need to verify the people in a room to have an encrypted room, but without verifying them, a malicious server or something could just drop an extra device into the list of devices and then start reading your messages.
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J: Gotcha.
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tc: Yeah. Okay, anything else about the experience using encryption, cross-signing and everything... Anything else about that before we move on?
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J: I don't think so.
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tc: Okay.
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A brief note on OTF funding
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tc: So, just very briefly I want to acknowledge, because in our first episode I talked about Signal getting funding from the Open Technology Fund, OTF, I want to acknowledge that libolm was audited in 2016, like I mentioned before. That audit was funded by the OTF as well. That's the entirety of what I had to say on that matter. I just thought it was worth mentioning since we talked about that.
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J: Yeah.
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tc: Cool.
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Issues with Matrix
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tc: So then, the next thing I wanted to talk about was: What are some issues with Matrix? Both in terms of privacy and in terms of user experience, whatever, what are some problems with Matrix?
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J: Well, as our recent discussion may have shown, it's not exactly transparent everything that is going on.
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tc: Yeah, it's a little unclear sometimes. [laughs] And like, I think part of that also is just Matrix is so complicated. Like, if you try to follow development at all, there's a lot going on in the space, in Matrix specification development and in all the different pieces of software that do things related to Matrix. It's just really complicated.
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J: Does it need need to be that complicated to have the kind of features and functionalities that it does?
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tc: Um... I don't know. I don't know enough about it under-the-hood to really answer that question. One thing I can say personally is I don't care about all of the features that it does have. I would personally prefer something that's simpler and more just focused on privacy. But that's me, and that's not representative of everyone who uses or likes Matrix. I know a lot of people like a lot of the things about it, the ability to have large public rooms and bots and stuff like that.
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J: Yeah, I would tend towards your side on this too. I don't use like, voice chat. I don't use video chat on it. I might in the future because it's there, and that's convenient, but it's not the primary reason I'm using it. Large rooms are cool, again, because it's there, kind of, but if it were not... So, the main reason I'm involved in rooms is for projects I've collaborated on or like, communities I've been active in. So I'm in the Raspberry Pi room. I would probably not start a room myself just because that's not the chat paradigm I'm most comfortable with. I like talking to people one-on-one usually.
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tc: Yeah, same for me.
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J: And this ties in, I think... Honestly, from a user experience perspective, at least, I think Matrix's greatest weakness is it's trying really hard to be Discord, and I don't think that's necessarily a good idea.
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tc: I also feel like in general it's trying too hard to be everything. Like Matrix wants to adverti-- I mean, okay, so part of this is like, Matrix wants to advertise itself by all of the benefits of it, some of which are mutually exclusive. So like, Matrix wants to be known as, for example, a private messaging platform. Right? You have the end-to-end encryption, you have all the cool stuff there. Matrix also wants to be known as the one place to do all of your communication because you can bridge everything else to Matrix. But, as discussed before, those two things are incompatible with each other. You can't have both end-to-end and a bridged roo-- Sorry, end-to-end encryption and a bridged room from like, Matrix to Discord or whatever. And I feel like there's... Like also, if you look back at previous Matrix things, I think people... Like, Matrix didn't even used to be identifying itself as a chat platform as the primary thing. It was like, "This is a protocol for being a store of information" or something, "and it can be used as that for instant messaging." I don't know, I feel like there's just... There's so much going on that it wants to be, and there's a lot of stuff built on Matrix that um... Like they're working on... There's some social media platform that's in the works that's built on top of Matrix or something like that, and...
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J: What?
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tc: Yeah, I'm trying to remember what it's called. I don't know. I think Krille Fear, who's the developer of FluffyChat, I think is involved with that, and there's an effort to bring stories functionality to Matrix.
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J: Oh no.
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tc: And like, all kinds of other things. I feel like Matrix wants to be everything, and I don't think that that's a good thing, personally.
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J: Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. I think this is... I saw someone talking about this the other day. Not everything needs a story, right? They were talking about, I think it was Duolingo has implemented a stories functionality, and it's like... Everything is trying to be social media now, and not everything needs to be social media. But because Matrix is trying to appeal to a mainstream audience, and, you know, these big products that everybody knows, Snapchat, Instagram, you know, whatever, have these features, it's something that most people are going to come to expect. And so in order to be a mainstream platform, Matrix has to look like all the mainstream platforms, and I think that's to its detriment.
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tc: Yeah, I agree. Some other issues with Matrix -- if you're okay moving on from the "Matrix tries to be everything"?
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J: Yeah.
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tc: Okay, some other issues that I have. Like, the whole idea of "store everything forever", basically, is not something that I want. Actually, what I would want is by default everything to be ephemeral, and then optionally you can make things longer-lasting if you need to. Matrix, as far as I'm aware, still doesn't have any real mechanism for ephemeral messaging. You can delete, i.e., redact old messages, like existing messages, manually, but I don't think there's any way to have self-destructing messages or anything like that.
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J: Yeah, that would be a good thing to have. And it's interesting. The storing everything forever makes sense now when you mention that it was originally a store of any data. That's interesting but also not a great basis for a secure chat platform.
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tc: Yeah. And like, I mean, I run an XMPP server, and I run a Matrix server. And like, one of those, I have to worry about like, "Oh, what if this", you know, "takes up too much space on my server?" And the other one -- XMPP, again, doesn't even store things long-term by default. You have to like -- I mean, all the modern clients tell it to do that at this point. But you have to enable settings. It's mod_mam, the message archive management. You have to enable message archive management to have your messages stored temporarily, and the reason you do that is for like, multi-device syncing purposes, not so that you have a long-term history on the server. HTTP fil-- Well, okay, I should step back. With XMPP, the way that files are usually implemented is you upload the file to the server where it gets stored in a specific place that it's accessible. Whatever. You upload the file to the server, and then you send a link to the file as an XMPP message to the recipient, and then their client downloads the file. Those files... And I'm speaking from the perspective of I run a Prosody XMPP server. That's what I'm used to. I'm not sure what ejabberd does. But those files get purged regularly by default. I think they only exist for like a week on the server by default, and then they get deleted. I think I have my server set to delete them after 48 hours because generally everyone's online all the time. Like, your phone is going to download the image or whatever I sent you in most cases within a few hours, at least when it's back online if it wasn't online. It doesn't need to be stored on the server after that.
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J: Yeah.
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tc: So I would prefer, both as a server operator and as a user of Matrix, I would want it to be much more ephemeral.
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J: Yeah, I think that's -- at least having the option for that is a good idea.
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tc: Yeah. And then one of the other things there, right? is you have like, if I'm on homeserver1, and you're on homeserver2, and we're in a room together... the basic model of Matrix is every device, every client and every server involved should sync the entire history of that room. So my devices, my server, your server, and your devices should all have a redundant copy of everything. You've got so many different servers -- in big rooms, you might have a bunch of different servers all participating in the same room, all duplicating the same data across everything.
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J: Yeah, I think it's a question of the model, I guess, of who has -- who is the -- what is the source of truth, I guess, for the record? Right? Whose job that is, whether that's the server or the client, I guess.
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tc: Yeah. And then because you've got all this data that's stored long-term and synced across everywhere and whatever, that requires as a server operator you to collect and store lots of metadata on all your users. Even if the messages are encrypted, you -- because of the way Matrix works, you effectively have to have records of every time a message was sent, from whom, to whom, etc. I wanna clarify a little bit: There's something in Synapse that you can do to try to auto-expire old messages. I've never been really clear on how effective that is, but I have mine set to auto-expire old messages after like, maybe it's a month, maybe it's longer. I don't remember. And I think, like I've seen in my client those go away after a certain amount of time, old messages. So there might be something like that that does kind of work, but it's, like, by default, I think you store things for at least a year. And it's, I don't know, not what I would prefer.
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J: I wonder if that might be -- So, okay, I look -- I feel like both of us are very interested in systems, and we're interested in slightly different systems. A big system for me is socials. Like, I'm a programmer. I'm interested in application development. I'm interested in how computers can help people talk to each other, get along, do things, right? And so, I'm interested in the intersection between the system of security and the system of society here. And so, I'm asking myself if perhaps there is like, a government reason -- a government regulation that would require a government using this platform to keep messages for that amount of time, and then that would be why Matrix would make this decision so that it is compliant for any potential government clients.
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tc: That would make sense, but I mean... That makes sense. That's probably at least part of it, and I know there are governments interested in using Matrix. Like, the German government is doing this initiative to get its medical communications infrastructure on Matrix or something like that. Actually, since I talked about funding before, the vodozemac, however that's pronounced, the Rust crypto library for Matrix -- the audit of that was funded in part by the German government as part of that initiative.
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J: Oh, that's super cool.
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tc: Yeah, so that makes sense to me, but I think it should be optional and easier to configure at the server level, you know?
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J: Yeah, a government actor is gonna have a lot of resources to make redundancy possible.
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tc: Yeah. So, I feel ways about that. And... Like, with XMPP, you can argue, "XMPP creates a lot of metadata as well!" or "[insert given chat thing]"
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J: Yeah, I mean, if you're wa-- I mean, fundamentally, if you're watching network traffic, you're going to be able to get a shit ton of metadata anyway.
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tc: Yeah, absolutely. But there's a difference between sort of at the protocol level essentially mandating that you store all this metadata, versus having the ability to store it and also having the ability not to store it longer than it's needed.
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J: Yeah.
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tc: Anyway, so that's a whole thing. Another thing I think is worth talking about is the whole centralization of the network. And it's hard, I think, to find... It's hard to not go with matrix.org, I feel like. All the major clients default you onto matrix.org...
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J: Yeah.
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tc: ...and then there are, like, lists of other servers that are -- that you can use. And you can run your own, but Synapse is not a good time, so it's not great running your own as an experience, so you generally end up wanting to use someone else's. And then like, "Which ones are good?" Well, matrix.org is kind of the only real recommendation you get from like... from Element or from FluffyChat or whatever. So if you go looking for other things, like, there exist some lists. How do you know which servers are good? Some of those lists are run by... let's say, right-wing-aligned people who... There's one list in particular that like... It describes some, I mean, it's -- it promotes like, right-wing servers like Kiwi Farms and stuff.
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J: Oof!
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tc: Yeah, but it like, it's very clearly written with a right-wing lens... like, extreme right-wing lens, if you know about any of the things that it promotes and can like, read between the lines. But one of the things that it says on this site is um... It has a little badge for servers that are... What's the phrase they use? It's like "certified" by matrix.org or something like that. And what they mean by that is servers that matrix.org has blocked because of like, abuse or whatever reasons.
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J: Wow. That's...
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tc: But if you don't know that, if you just pull up a random list, it looks like "Oh, these are good servers to use." And I have had a friend share this link with me and say, "Oh, look, these ones are recommended by matrix.org!" or whatever, and like... and I had to be like, "Yeah, okay... No." [laughs]
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J: For those who don't know, I just want to mention this real quick, Kiwi Farms is an anti-trans hate group that works through the internet to bully trans people and has a body count.
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tc: Yeah. And um... halogen.city is one I think we need to talk about because it's extremely not apparent if you just look at it. There's a server called halogen.city, and if you go to it, it's like, "Here's a cool cyberpunk background. Here's some basic information about the server." It looks really nice. For a while, I was recommending it to friends because I was like, "Hey, this looks nice. It appears to perform well." Whatever, like, what more do you need? And part of this is I think about it as, you know, I think of Matrix as being for one-on-one conversations, encrypted messaging. So like, it doesn't really matter that much which server you're using... from my perspective. But then like, other people, for whom that's not the primary way of thinking about it, they look at what rooms are available, and halogen.city lists a lot of like, right-wing, like, Nazi rooms and stuff like that. And like, oh, well, I didn't know this. I will stop recommending that to people. But it's like... it's not apparent. And you can go looking through the rooms that are publicly listed by a server, but it's not obvious. My point here is that choosing a server is hard, but also matrix.org, which is the default choice in like all cases is not a good choice. And I don't know how to reconcile those things.
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J: Yeah. There's even, when I was looking into setting up a Matrix server of my own, I came across discussions where people were talking about, you know, you might have a deployment like matrix.org that has, you know, thousands of rooms, some of which have tens of thousands of participants, and it's like, that's not practical for most people to kind of keep up with.
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tc: Yeah, absolutely. Like... [disgruntled sound] Yeah.
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J: But then, at the same time, you run into issues. The other night, when my friend was trying to set up an account, she was gonna set up an account on a friend of a friend's server, and it didn't support email verification, or like, putting in an email so you can recover your account. And that was a deal-breaker for her, so she had to use matrix.org.
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tc: Another thing -- this might have been -- this might be what you just said like a point ago -- if you're running, like if you're on some third-party... I hate to use that phrase, but like, matrix.org and not matrix.org. If you're on some non-matrix.org server that's just run by like, a person, you may not be able to join large groups. They may have disabled it -- like, the homeserver administrator may have disabled it. There is a setting in Synapse to uh... How do they say it? It's like "Disallow rooms above a certain complexity" or something like that. They may have disabled it, or it may be that if you just do this action, it will cause everyone on the server to have a terrible experience. If you just try to join like one of the big Matrix rooms or whatever on matrix.org. So you may kind of have to use matrix.org for those big rooms because otherwise it'll like, bring down your server or something. It's... [sighs]
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J: It's a frustrating situation. And I feel like if you had ephemerality of communications by default, that would not be as big of an issue.
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tc: Right, if you didn't have to sync everything when you first connect to a room. [laughs] Yeah.
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J: Also just deployment in general. So, it's federated, which means that it's theoretically possible to talk with anyone from any server, but there's a barrier to entry in the complexity of setting up and administrating a server. And from looking at it, it is not the most complex thing out there, but it is definitely not the simplest, so...
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tc: It's non-trivial, yeah. I don't know, I don't like running a Matrix server. [laughs] And I have run Dendrite in the past, and that was like, okay, but it's not complete. Like, performance-wise, it worked well at what it did. And this was a year or more ago, I think, so it probably has come a long way since then, but... And then you have like the relationship between Synapse and Dendrite where the developers keep doing more and more work on Synapse which makes it harder for Dendrite to catch up to Synapse so that it can become the new standard, the new reference.
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J: Yeah. And I think that fact, all the development that is going on continuously is also probably part of why, you know, those two -- both of those servers are made by the Matrix project. There's no third-party implementation of a Matrix server. All of these clients that are missing functionality, part of it is development goes so fast that it's hard to keep up.
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tc: Yeah, exactly. I think there are projects that are trying to do third-party Matrix servers, but they're like... they can't keep up, so like... I don't think there's anything complete enough to use... [laughs]
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J: Yeah. And so protocols like IRC are-- which, obviously not by default encrypted; you have to do external stuff for that -- or XMPP or whatever, it's older. It's stable. People know what they're getting. You know. You can use the same, like, plugins that you've been using for 10 or 15 years, and it's no issue.
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tc: And they were written in a time when people tried to write good software.
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J: Yeah. [laughs]
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tc: Like, running Prosody on a server (Prosody, XMPP server) is nothing, you know? It's really easy to do. It's technically not very difficult to set up, and it's really lightweight when it runs. There are a lot of XMPP clients that are very lightweight. They may not be as, you know, beautiful and Discord-like and whatever as Matrix. They may not be as appealing to that crowd. But like, I don't know. I really -- It's probably extremely obvious, but I really like XMPP and-- a lot more than Matrix. [laughs]
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J: Yeah, and I mean, especially for using it as a one-on-one chat platform, and Matrix just adds a lot of overhead that isn't needed for that use case.
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tc: Yeah. And like, I'm not gonna get into the whole thing, but -- go listen to the cryptography extra thing, but Matrix does this more complicated cryptography thing so that it can scale better, but it does that in all conversations, in all encrypted rooms. Even if it's just two participants in the room, it still uses the more complicated, less secure (I'm gonna say), but more scalable thing because it's so focused on like, "This is a room" rather than this is a one-on-one chat versus a group chat or something.
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J: Yeah.
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tc: I don't know.
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Our opinions on Matrix
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tc: So, what is ultimately your conclusion, your takeaway? How do you ultimately feel about Matrix?
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J: Honestly, I feel like in situations where you need a group chat platform, and you want to use -- and you either want encryption or free software or both, it's just kind of your only choice, and um, that's a shame, but it's better than Discord, is what I always say.
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tc: Yeah. I mean, you can do it with XMPP, but it's not optimal with XMPP multi-user chats. I don't disagree. [laughs]
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J: Yeah.
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tc: I kind of think personally -- and I said this when we were recording the first episode, but it was part of the stuff that I cut -- basically, my take with Matrix is there's a lot that I dislike about it. There are a lot of issues and generally a lot of things that I... basically wish it was XMPP. But ultimately, at the end of the day, I think it meets this intersection of like... being decent, good enough at all the different things, which nothing else really is in that intersection. Like, Matrix... I don't like the clients, but they're usable. They're not bad. I take issue with Electron, but like... they're usable. People would probably be okay with them. There are some things that are a little unintuitive, but for the most part, like... it's not too bad. As a network, yes, it's very centralized on the matrix.org server, but it is federated. You can run your own server. You can join a friend's server. Whatever. It has its cool crypto stuff going on, which I like. Cryptography, to be clear.
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J: [sarcastically] Whoa, really?!
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tc: [laughs] Just, you know, I always feel like I need to clarify I'm not talking about cryptocurrencies. And unlike some other messengers, this thing does not incorporate a cryptocurrency into it, at least last I checked.
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J: If it does, we will find something else.
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tc: Yeah, that would not be good. Yeah, so you have reasonable level of privacy there with at least you get end-to-end encryption with forward secrecy and it's-- with deniable authentication, and like... the things you want. It has, uh... You can use it anonymously. You can sign up without any identifying information. Especially, depending on the server, some of them... I mean, it's per-server. They choose what they want to require. You can use it without a phone number. But also, you can optionally sign up... it's like, the vector.im, I think, service, but there's a service you can use to list you -- yourself on a registry based on your phone number or email address or whatever, so that people can automatically add you, which I don't -- I mean, I understand that that's a thing that people like, being able to kind of bootstrap their network of friends on a new network. I understand that that makes it a lot easier. That's not how I personally interact with things, and I like that there's the choice for that. I feel like I'm forgetting important things. It's free software. It's, you know, all that stuff. So I feel like it's not, like, the best at anything, but it's generally good enough all-around, and I think that this is the thing that might actually be, like, usable and friendly enough that people actually -- normal people might actually want to use it.
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J: Yeah, exactly.
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tc: So, in this conversation about messaging, which is very much influenced by network effects. What are -- What people are using is what is useful, right? In that conversation, I think that Matrix plays an important role because I think it has a lot of potential to get people actually using it in a general sense, not just for niche use cases, and consequently, I think it's an important project.
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J: I think that's a very nuanced and thorough analysis of the situation, and I agree.
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tc: I also feel like it's worth mentioning that you and I arranged to talk on this show using Matrix. I mean, we've been talking on both Matrix and the Fediverse, but... we are both Matrix users...
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J: Yes.
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tc: ...and we have been using that with each other for this show.
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J: And it's my main chat platform. It's -- I've managed to get all but one of the people I talk to regularly onto it, and as soon as I get that last person on there, I am deleting Discord forever!
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tc: Nice! XMPP is still and probably will always be my primary thing, but Matrix is overall, I think, good. Despite all the many complaints I have with it, overall, I think it's good. And I think that's where I'll leave that.
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J: Yeah.
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[Outro]
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tc: You've reached the end of this episode of trash cat tech chat. Check out the show notes for links and other information. This podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio.
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Links
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Credits
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Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio
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