this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
168 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37735 readers
54 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The main problem with Matrix is that the protocol is too big. There's no server and client that's feature complete, other than Synapse and Element.
Encryption key handling is horrible. It makes Matrix a terrible choice for non-technical users.
As a replacement for IRC, it's fine. Bridging is limited to a small handful of platforms, or a limited set of fairly technical users with access to money to run cloud services and the willingness to take on maintenance of a hodgepodge of software services and the corresponding network security risks. I'd argue that this part was poorly thought out. It puts the core value features out of reach of the majority of the population.
It would have been better to focus on a client-side bridging design. Or, something more accessible. And the fucking horrible encryption design, oy.
What do you mean specifically by encryption key handling? You log in, confirm it with one other device, done. Don't see where I ever used technical knowledge?
I agree there are weird glitches und sometimes bugs, but they mostly get fixed. Mostly :d
You log in, confirm it with another device (better hope it's nearby! That first setup of a 2nd client is a doozy of a feel bad, if it isn't), then a few days later it just stops letting you do anything, doesn't really tell you what to do about it, and you have to reconfirm with a 2ne device all over again (which, again, had better be nearby).
Your devices don't have to be nearby to verify them. You can enter a key backup passphrase instead.
That's not normal. Looks like you ran into a bug. Did you report it, so it can be tracked and fixed?
I gather from their weekly reports that they've been fixing encryption bugs lately, and that the clients now in testing (the Element X code base) seem to have them solved. You might want to try those, or one of the third-party clients.
The new Rust library is really solid. Once things start moving to that instead of rolling their own, it will get a lot more smooth.
Can you tell me more about this? I’m running a synapse server at the moment, but if there’s about to be a smoother Rust option, I’m interested!
It’s a client library only. Keep running Synapse. :D
There technically is Conduit , but it's still in beta.
Yeah, I do wish they just let you disable encryption for all rooms at a server level. But years ago people gave the team so much shit for not supporting encryption that they added really good encryption, but it makes things harder. Nothing is free.