HACKER Q&A
📣 leona408

User- and privacy-friendly selfhosted alternatives to Matrix?


Dear HN,

We are a small community server, providing infrastructure for a handful of local projects in our town. We are looking for a messenger platform/protocol that - can be selfhosted - doesn't violate users privacy - enforces E2EE - has a UX userfriendly enough for non-tech users - offers groups w/ +100 members - if possible, offers "modern" featuers (chat-history, VoIP, typing indicators, etc.)

Matrix is being disussed, but we have serious privacy-concerns. [1] XMPP is being discussed, but people are afraid that the jungle of clients wont talk together.[2]

What are your experience with on-boarding non-tech people to modern XMPP-cliens? Is it doable or too much of a struggle?

---

[1] "Notes on privacy and data collection of Matrix.org" https://github.com/libremonde-org/paper-research-privacy-matrix.org/blob/master/part1/README.md

[2] https://xmpp.org/software/

[EDIT: Typos and formating]

  👤 Arathorn Accepted Answer ✓
The privacy concerns you’ve linked are 4 years old, and were questionable at the time, and thoroughly outdated by now. We addressed the more valid criticisms in Sept 2019: https://matrix.org/blog/2019/09/27/privacy-improvements-in-s....

So, don’t believe everything you read on the internet. The sibling comment is right in saying that Matrix’s encryption still has rough edges though, and we are chipping away at that constantly (eg just rewrote the crypto on Element iOS in Rust; about to launch the same on Android; Web/Desktop next month; etc - so at least we only have one codebase to find the remaining bugs).

👤 ailurooo
I've used & self hosted matrix and it's... alot to manage and managing the encryption per each device is a headache. It's getting better, and it's getting towards the end of a rewrite using go for it's backend (dendrite) and rust( i think) for it's front end clients (element x). Personally having something that's "modern" and supports all of the silly chat stuff people come to expect, like custom emoji, emoji reacts, and stuff going to ease alot of people into using this rather than xmpp.

I have friends that use xmpp and it's liked for being boring and stable however i doubt non-techy young people will want to adopt it without all of the modern niceties that you have with like discord or matrix.