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.
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I have a hard time feeling sympathy for tatsumoto because every interaction I had with him was absolutely despicable. He was always a massive jerk, banned anyone who used matrix.org, frequently posted loli on matrix, and links to tons of pirated content on his site.
Was gonna say.
cutefunny.artraises some concerns.
"When I noticed this happening, I messaged the server’s admin. At the time, I was using the cutefunny.art homeserver. Here’s what he told me:
“I can understand how it feels a little intrusive, but it doesn’t invade on peoples privacy, private conversations stay private.”
what the fuck lol?
Btw, what kind of events were sent to the room? I suspect that’s important to know when judging if that’s been power abuse or simple server maintenance.
I thought the same at first, but honestly, there’s probably nothing that warrants impersonation. If it’s a system announcement or change from the host, it should be labeled as such.
Sure. I haven’t looked into the technical details. Impersonation often is a crutch to deal with technical shortcomings. Though in this scenario it changes the whole story, whether the admin does someone a favor or is acting maliciously. And I’m not even sure if this allows to break encryption. At least in the old days, Element would ask me to verify each new device. And the admin doesn’t have access to the encryption keys, since they’re stored with the client. So I’m not sure what’s happening here and I’m also not sure about the implications. Just seemed kind of fishy to me to omit that kind of information in a longer article. Can the admin do more than thange the room version and maybe kick or ban people? Because that would be well within their job.
Yeah, the good old matrix hate. It remains the strongest fediverse chat to date and has no equal in terms of features and encryption while being federated.
If you want to be completely safe, you always need to host your own. If you are on a hosted service, you have to trust the admin or use 1on1, end to end encrypted rooms with the option of only trusting explocitly trusted devices.
Before someone starts to complain again: yes, that makes the experience other than 1on1 barely usable. welcome to the real world, neo. Something something eating and having cake…
We really need to not announce every fediverse service we dont use anymore every five minutes. It is a completely individual choice based on what you like, what your threat model is.
Most of us have the need to not be transparent to corpos and our government without special reason (eg you are on gov watchlists because that requires A LOT better persec than using an android or ios phone, windows computer, etc).
This is easily achieved by asking your trusted friend to host a matrix server for 5-10 friends or doing it yourself.
Joining matrix.org or any other major instance (which is against the idea of the fediverse btw) will always open you up to a couple more avenues for exploitation.
But that is absolutely not the threat model of a user coming eg from whatsapp, fb messenger, etc.
“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.
Where is he getting these stats from?
What do you mean? He’s the room owner. He can see the member count, and the activity.
Oh, by community he means room! OK. I’m pretty sure the matrix community as a whole is more than 5000 people 😅
FOSS communication app moment.
