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I feel like I need to clarify some things as this whole conversation is very confusingly worded for people who aren't already aware of how Riot works.
Riot is not a protocol. It is not a replacement for Slack, Skype, etc. Riot is just a client for the FOSS federated messaging protocol named Matrix. Riot is just the most popular and most full-featured. Riot is designed more like Discord than anything else, and likewise has a self-hosted web app you can deploy for users to connect through a web browser.
Matrix communication is done over a simple HTTP API. You can host your own server, or connect to existing servers. The protocol is federated so you do not need to be on the same server with someone to communicate with them. Server can have bridges installed, allowing connections with other protocols from Matrix chat channels. All the external service has to have to easily communicate is some sort of API. Here's some official documentation on creating bridges, with a example specifically for Slack.
So Riot can connect to slack, but it has absolutely nothing to do with Riot. You'd have to have a Matrix homeserver set up with a bridge to a Slack server through the Slack API. You can't just install Riot and connect to Slack, IRC, or XMPP servers.
Yay, more fragmentation in the IM ecosystem.
Listen, it's good that it's open source and self hosted, but the problem with all the messaging "products" doesn't come only from the fact that they're proprietary, it comes from focusing on making single client solutions. IRC and XMPP have a lot of issues, but they are protocols, so anybody can write the clients they want (graphical, command line, bots, ...) and use that with any service that uses those protocols. By creating new domain specific client-server protocols, you're just giving people less choice.
Right now, the only approach that seems to go in the right direction is Matrix.org. But to be honest, there are a lot of modern XMPP and IRC clients around now, so if you want to write a fancy UI, why don't you just write a good client for those?
Also agreed.
Over at /r/jellyfin we've used Matrix since day one, and only grudgingly (and with much flakiness) bridged it to IRC (and Discord... shudder).
I get that IRC is this historical thing for the "internet/computer geek" community, but people need to face that it's antiquated and a big barrier to entry for new users (it's not about being "hard"; it's about "now I have to figure out and join another Chat program just to get help?" and this being a barrier) and accept that better, modern alternatives like Matrix exist, are well used, and are an improvement.
For those who don't know, Teamspeak is (was?) a very popular application among gamers and the like for voice communication.
The Matrix protocol is an open source federated / decentralized communication protocol for stuff like text, voice, video, commands and other things. Its strengths are properties like extensibility and high availability of chat history.
It's pretty exciting that it's now being developed with the Matrix protocol in mind, this means it can federate with the entire Matrix ecosystem. Pretty cool if you ask me.
Something the Riot blog misses here is the Matrix half of the story - specifically that the E2E Crypto has had a public security assessment by NCC Group. https://matrix.org/blog/2016/11/21/matrixs-olm-end-to-end-encryption-security-assessment-released-and-implemented-cross-platform-on-riot-at-last/ and https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/our-research/matrix-olm-cryptographic-review/ have the details.
Matrix uses their own implementation of the "Double Ratchet cryptographic" ratchet. It's the same kind of encryption that Signal, Whatsapp and the like use. You can find the source here.
I believe this particular discussion and decision is quite old and settled. The use of phone numbers is a usability and reliability trade-off that users need to be willing to make with Signal. If that's not fitting of your threat model, may I suggest https://matrix.org/
Its a way to bridge WhatsApp messages over a different messaging protocol called matrix. Matrix is a decentralized and federated approach to messaging and both the clients and servers are open source. If you run your own server you can install various bridges that let you forward messages from one platform over matrix so you can avoid installing many permission-wanting and tracking-laden apps on your phone. For example, I run my own server using this ansible playbook and it includes scripts to set up bridges for WhatsApp, messenger, groupme, discord, slack, and many other services. Its a great way to transition off of a service without getting rid of it completely, allowing you to keep in contact with people who use the nonfree platform without needing to interact with it directly.
Matrix is definitely the way to go in terms of private, encrypted messaging IMO but it requires a little more work to set up than something like signal.
Here's their blog post - https://matrix.org/blog/2019/04/11/security-incident/
I spun up a matrix VM about 1-2 weeks ago to give it a try because I was losing faith in discord. Not gonna lie I was a little concerned at the timing of this but I'm still going to go ahead and set it up when I get some free time. This wasn't a fault of the matrix software - just lazy sysadmin work.
That's interesting, I could have sworn they were targeting Matrix? https://matrix.org/blog/2017/08/24/the-librem-5-from-purism-a-matrix-native-smartphone/
Was there a decision to move away from Matrix or is it still used somewhere?
yup, we've just finished a successful audit from NCC Group. The report should be available and publicly published around the end of October (which is also when the SDKs for iOS & Android will support it, and thus apps like Riot will have E2E on web, iOS & Android).
The E2E uses two different ratchets:
Olm (our implementation of the double ratchet) for 1:1 communication: https://matrix.org/docs/spec/olm.html
Megolm, a new ratchet expressly for handling Matrix group chats with history which can be (optionally) replayed. The novelty here is that you can select how often the ratchet is replaced, thus configuring the secrecy of the history (at one extreme, you never replace the ratchet and the room essentially has the same key throughout its existence. at the other extreme, you replace the key for every message, giving you perfect forward secrecy). https://matrix.org/docs/spec/megolm.html.
I have no idea how Apple has designed or implemented all this, but here's what I suspect the core problem is: whose timestamp are we talking about?
You might be interested to check out what sort of hoops Matrix had to jump over to get all this sort of working: https://matrix.org/docs/spec/intro.html -- check out "Event graphs". I'm (again) guessing that Apple opted for something more simple when they designed iMessage and are now paying that debt and are semi-forced to trying to fix it with hackery.
I would be interested if Mozilla adopted matrix and developed matrix clients that don't suck, along with a privacy conscious homeserver. A major product embracing matrix could really change how people communicate over the internet. Firefox hello could not integrate with other services (only other browsers) and did not have the option to remove it from the browser, so flopped nearly instantly.
You should also consider Matrix. It is open source and secure, but does not lock you in to a single provider. The Signal app will only talk to Signal's own servers, everything has to flow through them.
Matrix is a federated protocol, like email. So anyone can set up a server and different servers can pass messages between them. There are a range of clients for different platforms.
Depends on what functionality you want, for strictly text chat and voice chat TeamSpeak or Mumble work great. If you want a more Discord/Skype like alternative I think Matrix using Riot as the frontend is your best bet
riot.im requires neither phone number nor email. it uses matrix protocol, there are plenty other clients
wire doesn't require phone number if you register not on mobile
i use riot (and arch linux btw)
I might be missing something, but doesn't Riot (& Matrix protocol generally) leak a lot of metadata to the network. So basically anyone running a server on the network can know who is communicating with whom and when?
E2E encryption is great, but without protection of metadata it's meaningless for privacy.
It's not a problem that riot/matrix is particularly designed to, or interested in, solving: https://matrix.org/~matthew/2015-06-26%20Matrix%20Jardin%20Entropique.pdf (e.g. see slide 49 below)
>Matrix is all about >pragmatically fixing today's >vendor lock-in problem. >You can't bridge existing >networks without exposing >who's talking to who.
I'm sorry, I don't want to be that guy, but I will anyway because the terminology matters here: Rizon is an IRC network, consisting of IRC servers that users can connect to. Those servers are then connected to one another and share all info between one another to form a network, but most of the time, what server someone is on doesn't matter at all - usually networks just provide one address to connect to, from which you get automatically forwarded to a server. Freenode is a separate and unrelated network, using its own servers. Libera is also a separate network.
Aside from that, using IRC as an example of the pinnacle of decentralised FOSS communication is laughable - it's an old as shit, slowly dying platform that has always had its limitations, as much as I love it and hate to admit this. Matrix is a much better example of what modern technology is capable of. Fully decentralised to the point where anyone can spin up their own instance and connect to the global network, and there is a large variety of clients, most with modern GUIs comparable to Discord, Slack or what have you.
The "behind the scenes" aspect is a common pain point for all volunteer organisations, and can be avoided with clever planning ahead - this wasn't a thing people concerned themselves back in the '90s when the internet was still mostly a hangout for nerds and there was no need for official bodies for... pretty much anything. Libera has set itself up as a registered organisation with a full set of bylaws in Sweden, with all staff being required to join as a member (and hence be bound by the bylaws). This makes any kind of hostile takeover much more difficult to organise than in the case of Freenode, with a LLC created under uncertain circumstances and no clear established rules on what the LLC owns exactly.
They just recently deleted all my archived messages. So I'm not sure they are a good choice either.
Check out Matrix. It's still not at 1.0, but it's an open standard, federates between servers (no "get on my IRC network" problem, more like email or SMS), is all FOSS, and has all the nice Slack-y features. It even has integration bots into IRC and most of the modern silo chats.
> I wish there was some way through which people can communicate with other apps, this way everyone will have choice to use what they want and still able to communicate.
I introduce you to Matrix, likely the future of communication.
I think, the future is Matrix: https://matrix.org/ It’s privacy oriented, open source & used by governments in Europe. I use it for couple of years, by hosting your own instance (like me) it’s bridgeable with others IM.
tmsu, really nice file tagging software. Lets you tag files and you can even mount the tag database as a filesystem so you can easily browse the tags from any program. Really useful if you want to keep track of large collections of music, images, videos, etc. For example I'm working on tagging my music collection so I can generate "dynamic playlists" from the tags. So I could instantly have a playlist of all music that features a certain musician, or all music that fits a particular mood. Then I don't have to manage the playlist manually (and possibly end up with duplicate tracks in it, etc).
I'm also really excited about Matrix and Guix/GuixSD, but I think both of those have gotten a decent amount of attention lately, in this subreddit at least.
Decentralised messaging, you can set up your own server or use a public one, they have bridging so you can interact with a lot of different messengers
Look into matrix.org. It has bridges to Telegram, Discord, IRC, SMS, Slack and a bunch of other. I only use the bridges to IRC and Discord and they work pretty well, but they are to my knowledge also the most polished so your mileage may vary. The most popular client for matrix is Riot.
>Matrix is an open standard for interoperable, decentralised, real-time communication
>
>Matrix defines the standard
>
>The aim is to provide an analogous ecosystem to email - one where you can communicate with pretty much anyone, without caring what app or server they are using, using whichever client app & server you chose, and use a neutral identity system like an e-mail address or phone number to discover people to talk to.
We also wanted to do better than Signal, which doesn't handle group chats which need to be synchronised across multiple devices (including new devices) particularly with optionally replayable history. Hence https://matrix.org/docs/spec/megolm.html.
Matrix.org lead here - please see the update at the bottom of https://matrix.org/blog/2019/04/11/security-incident/. The rebuilt server was not pwned; this was a DNS defacement which has been dealt with.
I hesitate to wade into this, because a lot of people are passionate about these protocols because they love the idea of an open, extensible protocol (which I do too), but basically, yes. But both of these specific protocols have problems that limit one's ability to do some of the things people love most about Zulip (e.g. IRC doesn't even support multi-line messages! There's no compliant way to do our markdown formatting on top of that.). Further, using those protocols to communicate between a browser and the server (or mobile app and the server) would involve lots of unnecessary RTTs, making it impossible to have a high-performance user experience for a full-featured chat application that could realistically compete with Slack.
Zulip does support mirroring content with IRC via matrix.org, but there's a reason nobody's building products on top of those protocols: they were designed decades ago, without many of the features people expect today in mind (persistence with full-text search, efficiency mobile network, etc.), and have not changed to adapt to modern reality (and that's been true for a decade or more, so I wouldn't count on that ever changing).
HipChat is AFAIK the most recent chat platform to be "based on XMPP", but they hacked it up enough to not actually be compatible, and an engineer I met a couple years ago who worked on HipChat complained about countless problems with it, e.g. using XMPP as the basis for their protocol for their mobile apps to talk to the server made it impossible to make the apps perform well in organizations with thousands of users in a channel (because it had to first sync the presence data for everyone before anything else could happen).
We aren't connected to any security agencies, and we are no longer connected to Amdocs (given they cut off our funding last month: https://matrix.org/blog/2017/07/07/a-call-to-arms-supporting-matrix/). And even though we were historically funded by them, we operated as an entirely separate unit and have had zero input from them on Matrix. [source: i work on Matrix]
If you have a matrix.org account or server, there's a matrix <-> Steam bridge that can be used with any Matrix client (element, fluffychat...)
Using Element with matrix.org is not much different than using any other centralised chat app. The main differences are in the protocol (so, for example, Signal encrypts far more data and metadata than Matrix does) and in the trust you place on the people who run the server (e.g. you might trust the Matrix.org people more than you trust the WhatsApp people).
Self-hosting a matrix server, especially if you don't federate, means you can have a completely private chat server, solely for the use of you and your friends/family, and fully under your control, so you don't have to trust anyone. Technically the clients and/or server could still be sending your data to matrix.org if it were malicious, so a review of the code would also be good practice.
I think the decentralized and federated platforms (like matrix) yet to come will be the real heroes. Reddit is a naive approach, and like traditional forums only really works when it's just a bunch of nerds. Now that they're courting a very mainstream audience, the pain points are obvious. No fucking adult should be subjected to "Locked cuz y'all can't behave, sweaty". Reddit is kind of a disaster of a social experiment.
And hoping I ain't late I too want to plug Matrix.org and its client Riot, a decentralized messaging platform that, like with mastodon, you can host an instance of it and communicate with anyone at any instance, focused on privacy.
It's going to be federated, so that means that users of that app will be able yo communicate with users of other apps that support the same federation (Matrix). This is a great step forward, not a stupid decision by the French government like many are painting it out to be.
The server hosting the article seems to be having some issues: Here's a cache for those who haven't read it yet: https://web.archive.org/web/20170707130404/https://matrix.org/blog/2017/07/07/a-call-to-arms-supporting-matrix/
here's the link: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/bridge/mautrix-whatsapp
If you look down other comments in this post I've answered a few questions on this bridge.
How the UK's Online Safety Bill threatens Matrix
> The proposed bill aims to provide a legal framework to address illegal and harmful content online. This focus on “not illegal, but harmful” content is at the centre of our concerns - it puts responsibility on organisations themselves to arbitrarily decide what might be harmful, without any legal backing. The bill itself does not actually provide a definition of harmful, instead relying on service providers to assess and decide on this. This requirement to identify what is “likely to be harmful” applies to all users, children and adults. Our question here is - would you trust a service provider to decide what might be harmful to you and your children, with zero input from you as a user?
(Matrix is like a decentralized version of apps like Discord / Slack)
Did you hear that the french Government just publicly adopted Matrix and is committing to an Open Source Riot like client for all major Government communications. Its amazing. r/https://matrix.org/blog/2018/04/26/matrix-and-riot-confirmed-as-the-basis-for-frances-secure-instant-messenger-app/
Give Matrix a try, it's a decentralized, open and federated instant messaging service that supports both text and voice. Its feature set is close to what Discord has, though a few things need work, namely:
- Room permissions (has a basic set for moderation - mod perms, muting etc...)
- Available clients (building a new one is not the easiest thing because the spec is incomplete, they just add stuff as they go)
- Server software performance
>What can we do to not let Slack(electron garbage) to take over this thing of ours?
For the masses, IRC is simply outdated (and even though I still use IRC, I also see it that way). For example, the average user does not want to install a bouncer just to track the history of a channel. And so on. The operators of Matrix have summarized it quite well (https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#comparisons).
matrix.org is an open-source protocol/network that's decentralized, end-to-end encrypted, can be self-hosted, it has a web/mobile/desktop app, and is all-around great
i'd use it if literally anyone else i knew did
I like pidgin and I've used it for quite a while, but OMEMO support is spotty and the sip plugin is not that great in my experience.
There are a few good XMPP clients, most notably conversations.im (on android) and chatsecure (on iOS) but I've moved on to matrix/riot. Riot is a better skype for business replacement in my opinion, it includes way more features than skype does.
If we could get him and other well-known and trustworthy tech giants to push an alternative it might encourage a migration which may make Facebook sit up and take notice.
Standard plug for https://matrix.org
Another one? Do we rly need all those apps on different protocols when there is https://matrix.org ?
Make a kickass client for Matrix everyone will want to use, don't reinvent the fuckin' wheel again, all those new apps fails cause of this fragmentation of procotols.
WhatsApp/Facebook is still MITM. You are better off not trusting it. www.Element.io is better, there are overlapping encryption and without the decryption key plus password even new sign ins have no history plus you can deploy your own Element [matrix] server and nuke/zero it out as needed beside deleting messages or setting group conversation settings making history unavailable.
Wo wir schon am WA verlassen sind, warum nicht Matrix? Von der Idee her ähnlicher zu E-Mail, es kann viele Server geben und alle können miteinander kommunizieren. Kann man auch selbst hosten.
None of them are privacy friendly, especially Discord and Snapchat. They are well known for spookiness. If you want something privacy friendly apart from Signal and Telegram, maybe you should try Matrix.
The only thing Telegram has going for it is that it isn't owned by Facebook. It's still a centralised messenger owned by a single company.
Matrix is better. It's decentralized like Mastodon.
They "bridge" matrix chat to other services, such as Whatsapp, facebook messenger, instagram, IRC, etc... So you can chat with your friends that use those apps, without actually having them.
Single device way: Isolate it with Shelter (available in F-Droid), lock it down using Xposed & XPrivacyLua.
Far better (albeit multi-device) way: There's a Matrix bridge available, so you can transparently use WhatsApp through Element (or your favourite Matrix client): https://matrix.org/docs/guides/whatsapp-bridging-mautrix-whatsapp In this case, WhatsApp runs in an isolated Android VM, and the bridge is accessing the WhatsApp Web API. Your actual phone won't have any trace of WhatsApp/Facebook and their tracking.
Could be nothing, but the Matrix.org and Riot.im servers went down for emergency maintenance just before Assange was picked up.
If you haven't heard of Matrix, it's a decentralized open source communication protocol that can be encrypted end to end. It's likely the kind of tool Assange & Wikileaks would use, and the timing is suspicious.
Stop using Google. You don't need Gmail, Google Search, Google Docs or most of the shit they fucking make anyways. Use alternatives.
- List of alternative email services
- Matrix: Discord alternative. Also is capable of bridging other chat applications like IRC. This should act as a replacement for all of your communications applications except email.
- Operating System: Basically any *NIX distribution that isn't MacOS, Ubuntu, ChromeOS or SteamOS
- Browser: Firefox or Ungoogled-Chromium. No other viable options.
- Browser addons: uBlock Origin/AdNauseum (don't use both), Decentraleyes, Cookie Autodelete, HTTPS-Everywhere, NoScript & uMatrix (use NoScript for its advanced passive abilities and uMatrix for its complex blocking abilities).
- Web search: DuckDuckGo (has a Tor onion service, proxies image searches and YT vids), Startpage/Ixquick (has a feature to access web pages via proxy with disabled JS), SearX.
- Video hosting: BitChute
- Maps: OpenStreetMap
- DNS: OpenNIC, Namecoin, your VPN providers DNS. Just don't use your ISP's, Google's or OpenDNS servers
Not a problem. I've been playing around with various Matrix implementations myself and it's very cool, but it really has a marketing problem. People just aren't aware it exists. It's not their fault, it just isn't plugged. It doesn't help that the reference Matrix homeserver is still more a demo, and the "next gen" high performance server written in Go is still very much incomplete.
Here's a nice index of Matrix-powered software including clients, servers, bots, and bridges.
If you want a true Slack replacement that's open source, Mattermost is aiming for that goal. I haven't used it personally, but it looks like they take the Xen Server approach to open source by locking features in the official releases behind enterprise pricing.
It's not so much moving to Riot.im as it is moving to Matrix as there are quite a few oteher clients you can use. Although probably not all as stable.
I'm confused by the question. Discord is not on the LBRY protocol, it is a completely separate company. I'm also not sure what you are asking when you ask 'is there a reddit like on LBRY protocol' - do you mean to ask if there is a LBRY client which only shows text posts or something? If so, that is actually an interesting question, which I don't know the answer to.
If you're asking if there is a protocol like LBRY but that does what reddit does, then I'm not sure.
If you're asking if there is a FOSS protocol like what Discord does (because you somehow think Discord is similar to reddit?) then Matrix is what you want.
It bridges with IRC just fine, so you can communicate with those wizards. The speed is entirely reliant on the homeserver, which the default matrix.org homeserver is painfully slow. I definitely recommend a different one for a much better experience, my messages are instant.
Similarly its an end-to-end encrypted messaging platform. The difference is Matrix is decentralised - while there's the main server at matrix.org its possible to run your own. And yeah, you can communicate across servers
Sad to see, but I've been waiting for this moment for years.
My first "real" job was as an intern on the Yahoo! Messenger team where I worked on both the Windows and Mac versions more than ten years ago.
Back in those days while I had been sad that XMPP never took off, I had accepted that if you wanted to make cool IM client interfaces and get them in front of a lot of real people, you had to work on one of the big popular proprietary ones.
It was an amazing experience working on it. When I went back to school after the internship, I observed people at school who I never met using features I wrote during my internship! How cool is that? Given that experience, I've always had a soft spot for Yahoo! and dreaded the growing inevitability of today's announcement.
In the years since, my passion for IM has been a largely sad one. I promoted Google Talk heavily when it came out due to it being based on XMPP, only to see Google bait and switch us. Then I resigned myself back to proprietary IM hell for a while as getting people to use XMPP seemed increasingly ridiculous as its user experience lagged further and further behind Hangouts, iMessage, etc, etc...
Then eventually the Riot IM client came out and I got excited about IM again. One of many clients built atop the new Matrix protocol which styles itself as a successor to XMPP, Riot was the first IM client I'd ever used that felt like it rivaled the big players in IM in terms of user experience.
While my career has moved on from coding IM clients, I am glad to say I've helped the Matrix/Riot folks a small amount with coding and localization. And most importantly I cheer them on publicly and privately every chance I get.
> - calling does not work reliably, needing several call attempts and/or restarts of the client to finally go through
I think this might be a connection issue, because I only experienced it under bad signal conditions. I agree on the rest. Also, notifications and syncing kinda suck (using the F-Droid version, can't tell about the Play Store's).
My personal reasons to support it are mainly its federation and the workforce behind it. Sure, it has enough features to compete against many IM services (even if it lacks lots of polishing), but these two reasons are enough for me. Besides, recently they posted a feature roadmap which includes P2P Matrix and that's very exciting.
> Beyond these immediate priorities, we have a long feature roadmap lined up too (highest priority first): Reactions, Message Editing, improved Widgets (e.g. Sticker Packs), Threading, Decentralised Accounts, Decentralised Identity, Decentralised Reputation, Peer-to-peer Matrix and more.
>Wait so let me get this straight, you're telling me that Matrix can act as a client for WhatsApp?
Not directly. Matrix supports bridges, that can interact with APIs of other messengers (e.g. mautrix/whatsapp previously used the WhatsApp Web API and now uses the new multi-device API). https://matrix.org/bridges/
>Does it provide the same features?
https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp/blob/master/ROADMAP.md
>Also what about read receipts? Does it count as read if I've not seen in the Matrix Client but the Bridge is running?
No. For mautrix/whatsapp you can either enable sending read receipts when you read the messages in matrix or disable sending read receipts completely. You'll always see when your WhatsApp contacts have read a message.
>Also, can I use Matrix Client on my phone to use the whatsapp installed in that VM?
The bridge connected to your matrix homeserver interacts with WhatsApp installed in the VM. Your phone interacts with the bridge via your matrix homeserver.
>Why am I so confused when this literally sounds like what it does.
This one I cannot answer.
The good news is that seen as Matrix is just a protocol, it can be supported by more than one app, such as nheko and Quaternion.
Nein, wer es Ernst meint verwendet https://matrix.org wie zB unsere Bundeswehr oder der franzözische Staat. Die einzige langfristige Lösung für IM ist ein dezentrales System. Deswegen hat sich ja auch die Email durchgesetzt, verschiedene Anbieter können miteinander konkurieren und so Fortschritt bringen. Das ist weder bei Threema noch Signal der Fall.
Aber ja, Telegram ist in der Tat ein Rückschritt.
>So much so that the military trusts Element's security for top-secret communications.
I use and love Element (Riot) but big CITATION NEEDED here.
The closest thing to this I could personally point to, as a huge Riot fan (I hate the name change damn it! Fuck you Riot Games for literally a laundry list of reasons from your game sucking to your board being full of sexist pricks and now fucking over Riot!) is that the French government chose to make a fork of Riot to develop a secure messaging service for French citizens to communicate with French government officials.
The true solution to this is open source software, with a chat protocol that anyone (including Discord) could implement. That way, no one company maintains access to your data.
I would personally recommend Matrix, which also has easy-to-use bridges to Discord. (You can even do DMs if you're willing to run experimental code, but otherwise, bridging servers works quite well.)
Check out Matrix and the primary client Riot. Self hostable, open source, federation so there's no "which network do I join" problem for newbs, server-side bridges into everything from IRC to Slack to Gitter, it's pretty awesome. The primary server implementation right now is a Python prototype so it's fairly resource intensive, although nowhere near the mind numbing insanity of the Lync server requirements, but there's a Golang server implementation in progress hat's designed to scale well horizontally for use in containers.
Matrix ( https://matrix.org/ ) is a good approach from the non-centralized side. It is currently not the easiest setup thoughbthey are working to make that better.
Regarding centralised services I think Signal is the most profound choice. It's also relatively widespread.
Look into Riot.im:
open source
runs on top of open federated protocol Matrix
end to end encryption
voice and conference calls
full support of general open source community
unlike other open source and decentralized chat apps Matrix.org is a protocol that can be used by plenty of services and they just got 5 million funding.
EDIT:
Holy shit, this just in - The French government plans Matrix-based e2e encrypted communication across all entities by forking @RiotChat :)
This is simply wrong and you obviously have no idea what you're talking about. There are no multiple chat protocols involved or anything magical. Feel free to read https://matrix.org/bridges/ if you are interested in how it actually works.
Federation / interoperability will be crucial if new social media platforms wants to make a noticeable dent in the user base of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. One new platform wont stand a chance on it's own, but if multiple projects are compatible across many platforms, I think we might see some interesting results after a few years. I'm quite optimistic regarding Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed etc. There are some other "facebook-killers" built on more radical decentralized tech (blockchains and IPFS), but they suffer from the same problem: it's practically a walled garden.
EDIT: My ideal facebook-like social network should have the following features:
- Subscribe to a wide variety of people/content across many platforms (through RSS, Atom, ActivityPub, PubSub etc).
- Instant messaging system built on the Matrix protocol (which is compatible with many other IM protocols)
- Have a decent event/calendar system, built on open protocols
- Possible to self-host as well as joining a public server/instance
What more do you need, really?
Matrix really seems to be doing well as an open communication standard, though their hosted IRC bridge for freenode has run into scalability issues due to high demand.
Wenn alle einfach dezentrale Messenging Netzwerke with Matrix nutzen würden hätten es staatliche Behörden noch schwerer Verschlüsselte Kommunikation zu blockieren. Außerdem könnten die auch nicht mehr Terroristen als Begründung nehmen, da die Terroristen ja nicht über den Heimserver einer Privatperson kommunizieren.
Ich hoffe die Bekanntheit des Netzwerks nimmt weiterhin so zu, um da nochmal nachzuhelfen:
!!! Verschlüsselter Dezentraler Messenger ! ! !
> Just don't put everything on facebook
Same goes for Google, Microsoft, etc. The problem is that people seem to put all of their data in a handful of companies, which makes for a good user experience but really hurts competition.
I'm not really sure what the solution is here, but it's not necessarily anti-competitive since you have choice, but there's also not much innovation in social media lately. People will only commit to a platform if their contacts use it, so there's a huge chicken and egg problem here.
Perhaps the solution is to push for a common platform to connect the various services together. There's Matrix for chat/VoIP and Signal integrates with WhatsApp, but neither is big enough to really offer a platform to facilitate choice.
Matrix (Riot.im, which the guy you were responding to mentioned, is one of the available clients). It's literally Discord but federated (so you can host it yourself, like email), FOSS, and has end-to-end encryption. One of these weeks it's even getting "communities" support, which Discord calls "servers" for some god unknown reason, grouped rooms.
Looking at the Bridges page, I don't see one for Fax.
You could jury-rig a Fax ⬄ Email bridge and Email ⬄ Matrix bridge together, but you'd need someone to write the glue.
Well, since matrix is just a free protocol, I think the best way to handle bots is just to either register an account at some instance that allows non-human accounts and then just implement the client<-->server spec (or use something like Matrix SDKs).
However you can also implement your own server and then just talk with other instances directly. This has the benefit that you can generate and remove users as you wish. (Most matrix briges to other chat apps use that to "create" new matrix accounts that send the stuff they wrote from the briged room to the matrix room as the specified user.)
>I don't see what advantage using an app like this could have.
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>a new universal chat app that’s an attempt to unify 15 different chat platforms into a single interface.
Literally the first line of the article
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Also, they don't ship a Signal client in their app, they use a bridge server side, which support encryption. https://matrix.org/bridges/#signal
Though you're right, you need to trust their server. It's always a tradeoff between trust and ease of use. Being opensource means you can also selfhost and trust no one.
But if he actually ACTUALLY cared, he could have spent the last 4 years and the endless resources of the USA to build such a public service or tech for the public to use and own. That was totally possible, a decentralized speech-positive messaging network or some shit.
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Instead he's just gonna start a new business for himself, milking everyone whose been banned from every other platform on the internet. So that ultimately, he'll have the same power as the people at Twitter, because power is his goal. Dude sucks, all centralized communication systems will have the same outcome tho.
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Good question. matrix aims to fulfil a similar role. It's still in its early-ish days. You can give it a shot using the Riot web client. It's a free/libre spec, and it's decentralised. It's slowly seeing adoption; for example, last month, the state of France chose it as the base for its communications, to get rid of WhatsApp, Telegram and the like.
What would make Telegram a better alternative? I think matrix would be a better alternative. It's decentralized and you can encrypt group chats (or rooms). So, if encryption is enabled, they shouldn't be able to tell what information is exchanged and whether or not it should be removed.
> what would be the perfect messaging platform from the point of view of the free/libre community?
That would ideal be some federated system, which people could add their own servers to without hierarchy (like email). https://matrix.org anyone? XMPP but trying to appeal to the masses. Much of the featured and software are still in beta though.
From an associated blog post
> The URLs of the widgets are stored in the state of the room with some high-level layout hints, and the idea is that any Matrix client will be able to expose the widgets for the current room to a user. For a simple command-line client this could just be listing the URLs of the widgets so the user can open them in a browser; for a web client like Riot/Web they’re embedded via iframes; for a native client like Riot/iOS they could be shown via a WebView – or there’s always the chance of the native client recognising the URL being requested and swapping it out for an optimised local native implementation instead.
So it seems that they're at least aware of your first concern. I think this is a reasonable compromise for the current widgets, but might change my mind if later widgets are more tightly integrated...
Sounds like a nice idea. A Tor or i2p hidden service would probably be the most private and secure, but more difficult to setup. Otherwise you're just reliant on the person hosting it yet again.
Something decentralized such as IRC or Matrix (https://matrix.org/) might be a good idea.
I think reddit is good enough, though. If you are careful with the information you post and don't do anything illegal, there is not much they can even get from you. In my case they'd just get some inane comments linked to a couple IPs and personal information I am willing to share anywhere.
Canonical usernames in matrix take the form: @[username]:[<code>server.example.org</code>]
So, if your old username was Bob, and you had an account on matrix.org, your username would look like this: @bob:matrix.org Identities ar typically searched for through a local user directory first, and then checked against the identity server at vector.im. You need to consent to their terms of use before you can become searchable though. It is likely that you never did that with your old account. Identity server preferences can be found in the security section of the user options on Element.
The protocol that this app is based on, matrix.org, is arguably the protocol to rule them all. It is a legitimate successor to things like xmpp/jabber and has most if not all modern messaging features as part of the core protocol. Matrix is trying to be to messaging what email is to well, electronic mail.
Google rcs is not a proper open standard unlike matrix.
Im actually working on one right now. Not for only over tor but normal usage aswell, with proper encryption. Im planning on using matrix.org, which afaik is probably the most secure. The app itself is written in flutter. I will be open sourcing it once i get the first build working.
Host * ForwardAgent Yes
One month ago at matrix.org, they were severely compromised because their team thought this was a good idea (and they only trusted their own infra while at it). When using SSH agent forwarding, you're making a compromise of your bastion host equal to a compromise of all your systems. That's the exact opposite of what you actually want to achieve with a bastion host, right?
You have to use ProxyJump or -J if you're gonna have a bastion host. You don't want agent forwarding. In fact, you should probably just forget that it even exists.
An official openSUSE Discord room? Eew, an open-source based company should not flock too such a proprietary messaging tool. Why didn't they go for Matrix, XMPP, or hell, even IRC, instead?
Riot.im on the Matrix protocol works pretty damn well (webrtc). The homeserver can be self-hosted, and can federate with other matrix homeservers.
The Riot app also has an android, Mac, Windows, and web clients.
/u/sloppypenguin225 ^^
So, let me expand on my concern, since you asked.
The software itself is not evil: https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#what-is-matrixs-mission
However, it can be configured in a multitude of ways, based on the host. So, for the same reason that Skype is dangerous, this is. Skype is dangerous because you can easily capture IP addresses of the person you can communicate. Based on the information of the software, it seems to be easy to set up a channel that would allow me to mine that information.
There's another possibility that there is a known exploit in that software, allowing more advanced attacks. If that sounds crazy, I suggest you read about this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/tor-attacks-nsa-users-online-anonymity
Anyway - just a word of warning. Feel free to go there if you wish!
It's called "federated messaging". I think the best known example is Matrix. It's messaging that works like email: you sign up on a provider/server, use whatever client you'd like (Element, Riot, etc), and you can talk to nearly anyone else on any server.
The downside is the Catch-22 of any messaging system: the person you want to talk to must also be a user but Matrix won't become popular/usable without already being popular/usable.
One option you have is grabbing either the pinephone or an off the shelf android phone, and bridging it to Matrix. Once it's bridged, you can respond using a matrix app like Element on any device. You would have to keep your base phone plugged in to power all the time.
Also, this is supposed to run on Pinephone now, which would work better than trying to bridge android. Eventually, you might be able to run something like a GPD Micro with a cellular adapter and text from it using the software developed for pinephone. I'm sure linux based texting will take off pretty heavily with pinephone.
Matrix is an open source messaging protocol supported by a sizeable number of off-the-peg apps.
It supports end-to-end encryption with wholly private keys and can bridge to other apps like WhatsApp, Slack and Signal, if required.
It does not require your messages and encryption keys to be hosted on a privately owned server outside your control.