[pkulak]

I trust my life to the server I host in my own closet. People can lecture me all day long about the superiority of Signal's encryption, and I'll just slowly rotate my chair to point my index finger at the Dell OptiPlex behind me.

[tptacek]

That's fine. You'll pardon me if I'm unwilling to trust my own safety to your Dell OptiPlex. Whatever you think about Signal, the fact is that Matrix --- which is what the thread is about --- makes decisions that serve the IRC/Slack use case at the expense of the "absolute most possible safety" use case. That makes sense: some of larger-scale group chat's goals are in tension with "absolute most possible safety".

[dwohnitmok]

I wouldn't characterize Signal as "absolute most possible safety" as you are implicitly doing here.

I would probably characterize Signal as "most possible safety for the average nontechnical user" which entails trade-offs against absolute safety for certain UX affordances (and project governance structures that allow for these decisions to be made), because if said affordances are not given, the average nontechnical user either simply won't use Signal or will accidentally end up making themselves even less secure.

[tptacek]

I couldn't be less interested in arguing with you about Signal. My point is that it doesn't make as much sense to compare Signal and Matrix as people think it does. Large-scale group chat is intrinsically less safe than the kind of chats most people use Signal for. You can substitute whichever other secure messenger you prefer.

This "average nontechnical user" stuff, though, miss me with. For 2 decades people have been encouraging the "average nontechnical user" to do incredibly unsafe things on the premise that any kind of message encryption is the best alternative to sending plaintext messages. No: telling people not to send those kinds of messages at all, unless you're dead certain the channel they're using is safe, is the only responsible recommendation.

[JuniperMesos]

I have started using Signal for large group chats in the past year or so, after spending many years using it as an encrypted replacement for SMS texting. Signal has gotten noticeably better at the UX of group chats during that time, although I am still annoyed that they basically require you to use their client to access the network in the name of security. I can't easily run a legitimate 3rd party Signal client on my server, and when I've tried I've accidentally broken my access to my account on my phone, which is quite annoying since I use Signal pretty frequently.

I want there to be something like Matrix that is designed first and foremost as a large-group realtime chat program (really, as a meaningful FOSS alternative to Discord), and it should make different tradeoffs than Signal. I'm actually willing to entirely forego encryption, at least at first, to make this happen - IRC wasn't encrypted and Discord isn't either, and these are things I want to replace with something better. Matrix's UX is still noticeably worse than Discord's, and I'm skeptical that the ostensible security gains from the encryption are worth it, especially given the problems with device verification UX, metadata leakage, and the fact that as the number of people in a group chat grows the possibility that they will take a screenshot of the encrypted message sent to them and leak it to the press grows higher and higher.

[dwohnitmok]

> This "average nontechnical user" stuff, though, miss me with. For 2 decades people have been encouraging the "average nontechnical user" to do incredibly unsafe things on the premise that any kind of message encryption is the best alternative to sending plaintext messages. No: telling people not to send those kinds of messages at all, unless you're dead certain the channel they're using is safe, is the only responsible recommendation.

Eh. You misunderstand me. I don't really have too much of a view on this personally. Unless you specifically think that the term "average nontechnical user" is a bad term.

N.B. for other readers of this thread to flesh out my initial point:

Signal specifically didn't do that recommendation until they got sufficient critical mass of users in 2022. In particular Signal gracefully degraded to unencrypted SMS if the other side didn't have Signal.

Likewise Signal required phone numbers until 2024 when it shifted over to usernames, with all the security vulnerabilities that entails.

Signal has repeatedly made trade-offs that prioritize UX over absolute security even in 1-1 chat settings. That's not to criticize those trade-offs, there's a variety of reasons why they make sense or don't. But Signal has consistently demonstrated that it is not willing to make severe compromises to the UX and understandability in the name of absolute security and that it will balance the two.

[tptacek]

I disagree with basically all of this but none of it is on topic for this thread and none of it has anything to do with the point I was making.

[dwohnitmok]

The point of HN comments are for tangents, so I'm happy to hear why you as a domain expert disagree with any of what I raised there.

Also to your point

> For 2 decades people have been encouraging the "average nontechnical user" to do incredibly unsafe things on the premise

Sure I can agree with that. But that wasn't my point either? Unless again you specifically object to the term "average nontechnical user."

[Forgeties79]

This is basically the same logic for why I often recommend Plex over jellyfin to people. Yes Plex is not proper self hosting. Yes Plex the org is making increasingly questionable decisions. But for people who want to get away from the major streaming services and maybe even want to dip their toes into something that resembles self hosting, there really is no other option like Plex. It’s so insanely turnkey and easy to install on every device. You also don’t have to worry about exposing your network if you don’t know what you’re doing.

If nothing else it’s an incredible foot in the door for a lot of people to make the leap to something like jellyfin later.

[NegativeK]

I obviously can't speak for you, but there's not a freaking chance I'd trust my life to the servers I run.

To go maybe too literal: when I'm working on machines that could physically eat me, I don't trust myself with just one off switch -- I want redundancy. And since computers are horrible piles of ridiculous complexity, the closest I can get (and not really get close) is trusting some of the top minds to overthink the crap out of it in a way that I can't do with the systems I manage.

But again, YMMV.

[pkulak]

Well, when US-EAST-1 went down, my family was still chatting. Same with Cloudflare. Even if I lose internet, we can all chat so long as we’re on the network.

That said, the uptime is still probably worse than Signal. I didn’t mean trust the reliability. I meant the security.