What ultimately pushed me to leave Matrix was discovering that my homeserver’s admin was using my account without my consent.

In an encrypted room even with fully verified members, a compromised or hostile home server can still take over the room by impersonating an admin. That admin (or even a newly minted user) can then send events or listen on the conversations.

…, I’ve decided to move my conversations over to SimpleX.

For the past few months, the Matrix community has been largely inactive (despite having over 5,000 members), while the Telegram community has remained much more vibrant. This is disappointing given that I have been a strong advocate for using Matrix and have promoted it widely. For some reason, people are not moving to Matrix at the rate I had hoped.

  • onlinepersona@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    edit-2
    10 hours ago

    “Unencrypted chatrooms can be modified by an admin”. No shit? And you’re sure that hasn’t happened on Telegram? Or IRC? Or any other unencrypted messenger?

    For the past few months, the Matrix community has been largely inactive (despite having over 5,000 members),

    Where is he getting these stats from?

    In an encrypted room even with fully verified members, a compromised or hostile home server can still take over the room by impersonating an admin. That admin (or even a newly minted user) can then send events or listen on the conversations.

    How? They don’t have the keys to do so, do they? I can’t imagine that the private, unencrypted keys are stored on the server. That would be nuts.

    It’s shitty that he had such a bad experience, but again, any unencrypted messenger will be susceptible to account takeover by an admin. Signal has groups. Whether their moderating tools are good or not, I can’t tell as I’m not an admin of such a group, but moving back to Telegram is no better than going to Discord.

    Anti Commercial-AI license