To me it lately sounds like Canadians do need to worry a bit about “freedom” being brought to them.

It’s not any worse than the differen’t feature support levels of different Matrix clients. But especially on Android, XMPP has nice modern clients with all the features you would expect, including a/v calls and reactions/stickers.

The main issue right now are up to date Windows desktop clients, but on Linux desktop there are some good options.

There is: XMPP 🤷

There is not much they can do about it short of shutting down the entire server. Due to how matrix functions internally any sufficiently large federated homeserver replicates most of the entire network.

It is a bit counter-intuitive but restricting new signups will not help them much. The way the matrix protocol is designed, i.e. replicating everything on every server, means that clients connecting to their server have only a minor impact. As long as most rooms of the entire matrix network are replicated on the matrix.org homeserver their costs will stay high and there isn’t really much they can do about that other than shutting it down entirely.

Deltachat works ok for 1:1 chats and small groups. It is totally unsuitable for large public channels as it doesn’t really have a concept of group chats and just pretends so by (in email parlance) adds every one in ‘CC’. This only works ok for small private groups.

IRC just needs to get it’s shit together and start adopting IRCv3 features on the larger servers. The problem is really only that networks like libera.chat run a feature set that is at least 15 years behind what IRC can actually do.

This article is nonsense. The Foundation was always a front for New Vector and their board is largely made up by New Vector employees. So of course they knew what was going on.

New Vector simply decided that the strategy to make Matrix appear as an open standard was against their business interests and thus left the foundation to fend for itself with obvious consequences.

Raddle.me and lobste.rs are non-federated alternatives.

Lol, confidently saying stuff you obviously have no idea about and just believing Signal’s “trust me bro” nonsense. Have fun using that honeypot.

(Those “security researchers” you are referring to have no access to the Signal infrastructure and usually only look at the cryptographic algorithms used by Signal, which are indeed good and used by other systems as well these days).

A timing attack is extremely realistic when you control one of the end devices which is a common scenario if a person gets arrested or their device compromised. This way you can then identify who the contacts are and with the phone number you can easily get the real name and movement patterns.

This is like the ideal setup for law inforcement, and it is well documented that honeypot “encrypted” messengers have been set up for similar purposes before. Signal was probably not explicitly set up for that, but the FBI for sure has an internal informant that could run those timing attacts.

There are some mitigations in place, yes, but Sealed Sender on a centralized platform is snake-oil as someone with server access can easily do a timing attack and discover who communicated with whom.

If you are even remotely involved in any activist type of things, you certainly don’t want this US government honeypot have your phone-number and device id.

Apparently this is using face recognition technology from Russia 🤷

Probably not, but you can likely improvise by binding the audio mute to a button in your OS.

You cam try https://jami.net/

But I also think Mumble is the better solution, but of course not p2p.

Many things are very similar on Linux compared to Windows (e.g. Browsing, Steam). One big difference is that people prefer using package managers to install software (instead of downloading and installing it manually).

This. Especially for drivers, always use the package manager of your distro and do not attempt to manually install Nvidia drivers you downloaded from their website.

Also included: XMPP account on the same address, but it would be nice if they would keep their Ejabberd a bit more up to date.

It does work on the latest version of the default interface. There was a fix recently.

Yes in a local database, not a distributed one.

The main difference is that XMPP (like most other federated systems) is based on passing messages, so if a new server joins a chat, it gets send messages from that point onwards.

In Matrix that is different. When a new server joins a chat it exchanges the entire database for that chat, and for DAG consistency reasons this means all the metadata since the chat was first created, often years ago.

Matrix is not really a chat system, but rather a distributed database that pretends to be a chat system. As a result all servers participating in a room get a full copy of the room metadata all the way back to when the room was created, which is a serious privacy issue.

This is not a general problem of federated systems though, and XMPP for example basically only shares the metadata that other participating servers strictly need to function.