Comment by tialaramex

No, a hypothetical option to never communicate with anybody on the network isn't "better protection" in any meaningful sense than a system designed from the outset to actually protect you when you communicate with other people.

When you say we're trying to improve I want to believe you. When you stubbornly declare "we're better" in "many ways" while actually being much worse, what could I conclude? Only that your goal is to deceive people because you're not really interested in improving. Blergh.

Back in February 2015 you did not understand the gravity of the mistake in leaving end-to-end encryption as a TODO item for Matrix and defended this decision as "Pragmatic" repeatedly. Matrix itself is a bit older, mid-2014 I think, but 2015 was the first time I ran into the arguments for Matrix. It's important to underscore those dates. I've moaned (including to his face) about Tim's choice not to do encryption out of the box in his toy hypermedia system, but that was almost 25 years earlier and whilst annoying a lot more understandable. 2014 on the other hand is after BCP #188 ("Pervasive Monitoring Is An Attack") and all that implies so there are no excuses. Matrix was a defective design on day zero. 2020 begins with a promise that it'll be fixed soon, kinda, sorta and then a retreat to old arguments about how it's all worth it for "freedom".

When I say "kinda sorta done" I am not referring to being able to send unprotected plaintext over the Internet in 2020. What's "kinda sorta done" is the basic task of sending messages between participants without anybody else knowing what was said, or preferably who by and who to. It sounds like Matrix's _ambition_ is still that in 2020 this will be the case for certain groups of participants, at least some of the time. Not everybody, and not all the time, and not yet unless you go out of your way which we know users will not do.