I was sold on Matrix as a viable alternative to Discord but recently read this article which made it look not so good.

      • dngray@lemmy.oneM
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        1 year ago

        That is the nature of any federated protocol.

        E2EE works well enough within rooms and that is likely where private data is to be anyway. As long as you Matrix and assume that everyone can see your Matrix ID and room IDs you’ll be okay.

        XMPP isn’t any better in that regard.

          • HughJanus@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            It does matter, because it would be a lot harder to get my information. It’s called reducing your attack surface. Same reason I use an encrypted Swiss email provider.

            • amanneedsamaid@sopuli.xyz
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              1 year ago

              What are you talking about? Metadata is information about your messages besides it’s encrypted content; i.e. time of send and who the recipient and sender are. Matrix has a large weakness, as most users use matrix.org. This is bad because metadata can reveal a lot about ones communications, and most every message sent on matrix (unless it is in a private message with someone not using matrix.org) is passed through matrix.org. This pools a lot of metadata in one place, and there are other messengers do not have this issue, or if they do, they do not have it as badly. Metadata is not magically hidden because your server is located in Switzerland.

              • HughJanus@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                I’m very aware of what metadata is. I’m not sure what’s confusing you.

                If my data is not on matrix.org, no one can get my data from Matrix.org.

                If my data is on a Swiss server, the government can’t get it, even if they have a warrant.

                If I have some data on matrix.org and some data on a Swiss server, they can only get my data on matrix.org.

                This is called reducing your attack surface.

                • amanneedsamaid@sopuli.xyz
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                  1 year ago

                  Yes, but Matrix leaks way more metadata to other servers, negating more of the benefit of using a Swiss server compared to if you used XMPP for example.

                  • dngray@lemmy.oneM
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                    1 year ago

                    Yes, but Matrix leaks way more metadata to other servers

                    FUD, Matrix doesn’t leak any more data than XMPP in that regard. Admins of either service can know what rooms you’re in and information about events such as time they were sent.

                    XMPP isn’t any better in this regard.