this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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You don't need to speculate what they're doing. It's entirely open source, and you can validate every line of code they're putting in. Is there any actual parts of the matrix protocol or app you're specifically warning against, or are you causing general FUD?
Again, we don't need to speculate, the entire platform is open source from server to client, so if there's an issue with legislation then you can see it reflected in the code.
I am not speculating about anything. Are you personally ready to develop & maintain a fork of a Matrix homeserver or client? There is of course Conduit and Fluffychat etc. but they chronically lack behind in features and have all sorts of incompatibilities.
If Element is forced to implement the privacy invasive features required by this proposed UK legislation you will have little choice but to follow along as the entire ecosystem is over-engineered and designed to give Element a competitive edge over other competitors trying to use the same protocol. Like with Chromium it doesn't matter much that it is open-source.
honestly I don't think at all that it is over engineered. I see that alt implementations can't keep up with the new features (or at least that was what I remember from a year or 2 ago, but now that I looked into it, conduit development gained some momentum), but that is not because it would be over engineered, but because the devs of the alt implementations all do this in their free time.
Conduit got a nice update today, which makes it only about 2 years behind Synapse or so ;)
It is true that they are mostly hobby projects and that is part of the reason why they are lagging behind, but a regular chat server is actually not that hard to write. There are multiple hobbyist written XMPP servers (and multiple enterprise written ones as well) that are up to specs and work well. Granted, they had a bit more time doing so, and Conduit might eventually catch up as well... but similar to Google and Chromium, it is not in the business interest of Element to have anyone come up with a fully viable alternative to their reference implementation.
You list multiple alternative server software and then claim it's unachievable at the same time lol. You are proving yourself wrong. Also there are a ton of other good Matrix apps out there besides Element.
You are speculating because you are speculating something could potentially go wrong because they're in the UK, therefore the entire FOSS ecosystem and company they built just be untrustworthy.