Weird how they are good at digging up the past relationship between the matrix team prior donators with the mosad. but failed to mention not even once that matrix’s biggest advantage is its federated nature.

So imagine you have a selfhosted matrix server and you want to invite a friend over for a chat but this friend already has an account at his other friend’s server. in Matrix he doesn’t have to make an account on every server their interlocutor is in, he just sends his messages, like its done over email, or here on lemmy (fediverse). this is an advantage other software like fluxer of stoat don’t have. and I doubt they will able to add it anytime soon, as the work needed is probably huge and would need years of work to make a proper secure e2e federate messaging solution.

EDIT: changed to more accurately represent how Matrix operates.

The issue is that due to the way Matrix is structured, it essentially spreads copies of unencrypted metadata to every instance participating in those rooms, So it’s federated, but difficult to actually keep metadata from being spread around even if you don’t federate with the main Matrix server, if any server you do federate with dies, it’ll get spread there. You’d have to be extremely cautious who you federate with to avoid that, or not federate at all, which defeats the purpose.

As an alternative, Movim, which uses XMPP and is also federated, does not spread meta data around like that.

I’ve had matrix and element set up on my personal domain for a while, but I’ve only used them for evaluation so far. The system and network resources used are HUGE…

I’ve been setting up movim and a seperate xmpp server for a little while, and I have some initial opinions:

• xmpp (prosody) appears to be much better optimised than matrix (synapse)
• matrix and element are much easier to set up
• movim is a huge PITA to deploy yourself (especially in a container… you’re basically on your own at the moment)
• xmpp requires tcp ports and ssl certs that should be easy to set up… unless you’re on a cgnat network. Matrix can be set up through a cloudflare tunnel with https no problem, but xmpp requires some networking elbow grease.
• the mandatory certificates probably make the xmpp network safer?
• Even with the mautrix discord bridge copying the exact layout of discord channels into element, movim seems more familiar to me. I haven’t really had enough time to evaluate movim, but it seems like it’s trying to appeal to discord users, and element is clearly not. Element feels like a well funded enterprise tool that is doing its own thing.
• commet (with 2 m’s) chat is a very faithful discord clone for matrix, but it’s very barebones.

Either way, I am gonna deploy both and let my friends/discord channel users decide what works best.

I’m rooting for xmpp at the moment, but I will be happy with anything that is self encrypted and federated.

Hopefully I don’t end up having to maintain both protocols with a bridge!