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by miloignis 23 days ago
Neat, thanks for the writeup! I think a single creator-admin for small groups is a nice, simple, and practical design point.

I did want to point out that Matrix does do distributed eventually-consistent authorization, which is their key invention IMHO. (Rooms are distributed among the homeservers, none of which are privileged over the others. You could (and their long-term plan from back in the day) was to run a tiny little single-device homeserver on every device to achieve P2P.)

It's tricky, but a very cool algorithm! Several entities (including myself as a hobby project) are working in combining the Matrix eventually-consistent CRDT with MLS for encryption for a no-compromise distributed E2EE system. It's possible, but very hard, as you might imagine.

Edit: Here's one academic paper writing up the abstract algorithm behind Matrix https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3381991.3395399

2 comments

This is genuinely cool (and weird that I haven't heard of it). I released the 1.0 version today, but I'm already thinking about improvements for v2. Hopefully you will figure it out and I can implement it for v2 haha

Best of luck!

P2P Matrix (and Matrix over DMLS) is back as of a few days ago: see https://arewep2pyet.com and in particular https://arewep2pyet.com/assets/pdf/2026-07-09%20DWebCamp%20P... :)