Matrix was built to become the open communication of the web and serve everyone. But, as the Internet and email did, its network effect started with governments. Today, and as proven by the audience in the room, most European governments and several others are either using it or looking at implementing it for their communications. This talk will tell the story of how we got there and why.
Honestly the only real problem that’s holding me back from using Matrix for everything is that it’s really inconvenient (for non technical people) to set up an additional device, as you have to verify it.
I’ve had to walk too many people through this.
Interesting, how does that verification process work? I’ve never really used matrix so I’m curious.
(Sorry about the length, I’m rather passionate about this. The second half can be ignored)
Essentially, the key to decrypt your old messages is tied to your session. On your (presumably) first session, you can get a recovery key, which is a long hexadecimal string, and a recovery passphrase which you can decide yourself.
If you start a new session (i.e., you log in on another client), for your opd messages to be visible on the new one and your new messages on the ols one, you need to “verify” the new session. There are three ways you can do this.
Alternatively, if you forgot your key and your passphrase and logged out on all the other sessions, you can reset your recovery key, creating a new one and making your old messages unreadable.
(The following are just my thoughts on this) The recovery key is a PITA because most non-technical people I know don’t use password managers. Even if they did, though, it’s not like any password manager (afaik) offers to save your recovery key. You need to manually put it in there, separate from your account password, and manually enter it when you’re connecting a new client.
The recovery passphrase somewhat mitigates this, as they could simply use their favourite “use it everywhere” password, but I don’t think I need to point out the problems with that.
The emoji thing is cute and works quite well, but somehow people still get confused and justifiably vaguely irritated that they have to do it at all.
You just can’t expect normal people to understand that these are important security measures, they just want to log in and be done.
That said, most people log in once on their phone, very maybe twice to also have it on their laptop and then never have to think about it again. That, however, is a problem in and of itself, because at some point they’ll get a new phone, chuck the old one, try to log in and realize they have no idea what their key is.
I’ve just telling my normie friends who join to disable end to end encryption. If they’re on my homeserver it doesn’t matter, as we’re all communicating internally, and if their account is on m.org… Well… Just mind what you say? No different than chatting on Discord or WhatsApp, IMO.
People get annoyed about the setting up of devices, but that’s literally tied to a new type of feature you probably don’t need. And e2e shouldn’t be by default for most people who can’t even remember passwords - I still remember losing all my signal messages because I didn’t backup my recovery key and my one phone with it installed decided to, helpfully, clear out my data :)
Tl;DR being unintentionally forced to engage in e2ee is always going to be a bad experience. Our non-technical friends are coming from platforms without it, just forego it for the time being. (yes, I don’t care if WhatsApp or whatever claim to have it, if they own your keys it ain’t e2ee)
I disagree. In an age of such intensely pervasive spying, I think it’s only prudent to use encryption wherever possible. I think in the next decade or two, we’re going to start seeing the full implications of all the spying and data harvesting, especially with fascism rising in so many places. Just because your host and the country they operate in are trustworthy today doesn’t mean that can’t change and make your logs worth monitoring.
The person I was responding to was basically complaining about the complexity of enabling and working with crypto for non technical folk.
It’s always going to be hard if you’re trying to move people to a new platform and teach them e2ee best practices. .
If you disagree, then that means you’ve had more success with convincing your non technical friends and family to verify devices, e2ee passwords, and back them up! Great.
But for those who can’t seem to do so, seeing as how their friends and family are already offering up their data to the highest bidder by default, bringing them over to a homeserver you own and manage - without the use of e2ee locally - is absolutely a step up compared the alternative of just giving it all to WhatsApp.
Same, I have a discord community and it is been impossible to get people to move to Matrix or anything else. The one person who really tried ended up messing up their encryption keys and gave up.
Exactly!! This really needs to change.
Security is important, of course, but it’s not like vodozemac is that good anyway…