ActivityPub and Mastodon brought new incentives into the world of decentralised communication platforms, even so far as I would call it a serious alternative to platforms like Twitter. But all efforts made by hundreds of individuals every day – administrating servers, developing software and moderating communities – have a weak spot which needs to be addressed in the near future: who has control over the underlying computing infrastructure of the Fediverse? And are users aware of the conditions?
Interesting fact about Matrix.org (a protocol mostly focused on decentralized instant messaging while ActivityPub is more for social networks):
“One thing I love about @matrix is how independent of a server a room can be. It requires at least one server for now, but it’s easier to see it as a “a room in the Matrix universe”. It has one main door, but can have many other doors, all leading to the same room. Each door lives on one server, but the room lives on several servers at once.”
Source: https://mamot.fr/@thibaultamartin/105861724585009325
From a privacy perspective, this is a big problem.
How? Matrix private rooms are e2e-encrypted by default.
Not all rooms are private. When joining a public room, many users assume that only Matrix users can see the content, similarly to IRC. Instead, it’s equivalent to writing on a public website.
Plus, people make mistakes, e.g. typing in the wrong room. The built-in edit mechanism is unable to handle this issue because everything is made public immediately. Deleting a message can even give people a false sense of security.
These are not problems of Matrix but of the UI/UX of the clients you are using!