Hello fellow c/privacy members.
I’m not new to privacy related things but I had a hard time persuading my family members and friends to switch to Matrix/Element. It is a reponse to UK’s Online Security Bill and Investigative Powers Act that may soon in effect.
While it is just a preperation and planning in case those actually became law, I already face resistance from them. When I ask them would they switch, their first reaction is “Why one more app?” then follows with “That’s cumbersome.” or “I don’t want to learn a new app.” and suggest something more popular like Line, Telegram or Discord. Sometimes they would “Install WhatsApp because X is on there and he/she won’t install one more app just for you.”
What can I do to persuade them to use a new platform? Thanks in advance.
EDIT: I think I should elebroate more of what Online Security Bill and Investigative Powers Act does[1]. As far as I understand, OSB will break E2EE by require scanning data on client device, like CSAM but much more generic. IPA requires companies to submit security funcition to the government for approval before releasing, and disable such feature upon request. Apple[2], Single[3] and WhatsApp made the announancment of exiting the UK market totally or partically if two were signed into law.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/thenextweb.com/news/uk-investigatory-powers-act-default-surveillance-devices-privacy
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2023/07/21/apple-threatens-to-pull-facetime-and-imessage-from-the-uk
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20230809125823/https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-65301510#2023-08-09T12:57:48+00:00
You don’t need to speculate what they’re doing. It’s entirely open source, and you can validate every line of code they’re putting in. Is there any actual parts of the matrix protocol or app you’re specifically warning against, or are you causing general FUD?
Again, we don’t need to speculate, the entire platform is open source from server to client, so if there’s an issue with legislation then you can see it reflected in the code.
I am not speculating about anything. Are you personally ready to develop & maintain a fork of a Matrix homeserver or client? There is of course Conduit and Fluffychat etc. but they chronically lack behind in features and have all sorts of incompatibilities.
If Element is forced to implement the privacy invasive features required by this proposed UK legislation you will have little choice but to follow along as the entire ecosystem is over-engineered and designed to give Element a competitive edge over other competitors trying to use the same protocol. Like with Chromium it doesn’t matter much that it is open-source.
You list multiple alternative server software and then claim it’s unachievable at the same time lol. You are proving yourself wrong. Also there are a ton of other good Matrix apps out there besides Element.
You are speculating because you are speculating something could potentially go wrong because they’re in the UK, therefore the entire FOSS ecosystem and company they built just be untrustworthy.
honestly I don’t think at all that it is over engineered. I see that alt implementations can’t keep up with the new features (or at least that was what I remember from a year or 2 ago, but now that I looked into it, conduit development gained some momentum), but that is not because it would be over engineered, but because the devs of the alt implementations all do this in their free time.
Conduit got a nice update today, which makes it only about 2 years behind Synapse or so ;)
It is true that they are mostly hobby projects and that is part of the reason why they are lagging behind, but a regular chat server is actually not that hard to write. There are multiple hobbyist written XMPP servers (and multiple enterprise written ones as well) that are up to specs and work well. Granted, they had a bit more time doing so, and Conduit might eventually catch up as well… but similar to Google and Chromium, it is not in the business interest of Element to have anyone come up with a fully viable alternative to their reference implementation.