Is matrix good to use, seen a lot of drama around it. For example hackliberty.org left it because of lacking of security and moderation, do you still recommended it?
Is matrix good to use, seen a lot of drama around it. For example hackliberty.org left it because of lacking of security and moderation, do you still recommended it?
Matrix literally syncs the entire data/metadata history to all other servers where someone pops in; chat is meant to have an ephemeral aspect to it. The whole network is de facto centralized on Matrix.org or the servers they host for others which means one org has access to almost everything—like the issue with Signal.
What’s scary to me is how expensive it is to run this eventual consistency model, which should not be a protocol requirement for this style of communication. It sucks so much RAM, so much storage, so wasteful—which causes medium-sized servers to shutdown on maintenance costs alone which causes more users to leave for the Matrix.org. These are not the characteristics of a revolutionary protocol—revolutionary is users & collectives to reasonably be self-hosting this stuff for their privacy & autonomy.
How else would you expect a decentralized and persistent chat room to work? If that stuff wasn’t synced among the servers that were invited to participate in a room, then it wouldn’t be decentralized; one server going down would kill the room (or at least lose data).
The only way I can think of is not to use servers at all, but go fully peer-to-peer. Matrix has done some proof-of-concept work toward this, but I’m not aware of any service that does it successfully while being practical for most people, yet.
There are use cases where that makes sense, but for general use? No thanks. When I lose my account password or my phone breaks, I want to be able to sign in on another device and still have my message history.
Synapse is indeed a heavy server implementation. Several lighter ones are in development, some of which people are using already.