Comment by fsflover

2 years ago

How about switching to Matrix? (I already did and am happy.)

My parents, in-laws, grandmother-in-law, and entire extended family is on Signal. It's the extended family group chat, video calls with grandparents/great grandparents, and the baby photo feed. That's mostly because you just install it and it works.

I have no idea how to get my extended family on a Matrix homeserver without extensive handholding. I can barely figure it out myself and I was a huge XMPP nerd that ran my own ejabberd server for years.

For users who want strong security in messaging, yet an easy way for anyone to use the platform Signal has a much better user experience. Over 95% of my messaging is on Signal. Almost none of those users will benefit in any way by switching to Matrix. While it's a great ecosystem, it's also too much work for people who don't want those features or flexibility.

  • For users who want strong security is messaging signal should not be considered because they lie to users about their risks, and they store sensitive data in the cloud. It's easy to use and not a bad chat/IM system, but I would never trust it to protect your data.

Matrix doesn't have the same threat model as Signal, and isn't a 1:1 replacement for it. Matrix is great (maybe optimal) for things that would otherwise be Slack channels.

  • I don't understand which different threat model you mean. Could you elaborate? To me, it's the same: private, end-to-end encrypted chat with rooms.

    • Signal:

      * Gives the servers virtually no control over communications between parties.

      * Goes through huge pains to minimize serverside metadata storage.

      * Is a sealed system end-to-end; the client and the server are part of a single coherent design that together make promises about privacy and security that apply to every user of the system; Matrix is a protocol ecosystem.

      A good example of this is group messaging: Matrix servers control group membership. In Matrix, group membership is key management; a Matrix server decides who can decrypt your group messages. That's not how Signal works! But I don't think anybody seriously thinks Signal is a replacement for a large Slack.

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