this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2024
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Privacy
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Federated protocols are not centralized in principle. It might not scale to one user-one server (which probably even Lemmy can't handle) but if you're signing up for a central server, you're doing it wrong(tm). Don't do that. The nice thing about Matrix client is that it allows end to end encryption, including groups. So that greatly limits what Mallory can do in principle. As to servers being costly to run, given what documented Synapse requirements are, you're looking at less than 5 EUR/month for a single server. Which can be shared among several users, obviously. This is in the same range as costs for a monthly VPN.
The default links many folks/projects share specifically log you into Element & on Matrix.org as well which advertizes more folks to be on that centralized node. Furthermore, Matrix provides hosting for some of the other big servers as well even if they are not using matrix.org in the address.
Well, yes, but privacy in the current world is not free, even if it involves some own thought and planning. Being wary of defaults and being aware of implications one's choices bring is of course too inconvenient for many. But these do not get to complain.
Synapse boasts about 50,000 concurrent users on a node. Ejabberd has been tuned to 2,000,000 concurrent users which shows how efficient & scalable the setup can be. €5/mo is a lot for many folks.
Poor people (who still can afford the end devices and an Internet plan) can of course share the costs in a community, or use one of the many free servers, as long as they are aware of the tradeoffs. Beigers not being choosers, and all that.
You can also choose to use technologies that aren’t such resource hogs. The eventual consistency model of Matrix alone & storage costs causud many medium-sized operations to shut their doors. Distroot.org for instance had to move to XMPP to deal with costs—& I have personally seen others.
My uploads folder is mounted with noexec. It’s easy to set your storage usage & upload quotas in Prosody or Ejabberd.
Yes, the eventual consistency model works more like a blockchain. Sliding windows are only hiding this fundamental flaw of data usage. It has an advantage against censorship, but it isn’t worth it & chat is better treated as ephemeral than permanent (look at how much info is lost behind proprietary Discord communities).
Does XMPP have feature parity with Matrix? I presume that bridges exist?
They are called gateways https://sr.ht/~nicoco/slidge/ https://biboumi.louiz.org/
You can do basically everything except multiuser encrypted calls (we use Mumble for this anyhow). But even then Jitsi (& proprietary Zoom & WhatsApp) are built atop XMPP for the backbone of their protocol using XMPP to negotiate connections before handing off for calls.
Thanks, useful information.