How Matrix is becoming the communication standard for Public Sector
(www.youtube.com)
Arras to 
Open Source
Matrix was built to become the open communication of the web and serve everyone. But, as the Internet and email did, its network effect started with governments. Today, and as proven by the audience in the room, most European governments and several others are either using it or looking at implementing it for their communications. This talk will tell the story of how we got there and why.
Criticism of the matrix protocol: https://hackea.org/notas/matrix.html.
I will not access the posted video as it's hosted on hostile infrastructure. I request that the author share their videos in a way that honours freedom. Continuing to use the current provider is to enforce the existing monopoly on video distribution and is counter productive to libre software. I will list some viable alternatives: Mediagoblin: https://mediagoblin.org/; Peertube: https://joinpeertube.org/; or via BitTorrent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent.
I will not use the matrix protocol due to its origin with Israel's intelligence community. Its design is nonsensical in the contexts of liberty, privacy and cryptography. However the design is strikingly coherent if the goal was to design an encrypted communication protocol that was 'decentralised', but still auditable by external agents. This design is why government agencies would consider its adoption, but knowing its origins I can not endorse it.
ugh matrix sucks and I wish it wasn't the preferred form of communication for everyone on fedi.
once fluxxer gets federation I'm gonna be done with matrix forever.
Personally I'd prefer XMPP. They way it caches data between instances is way less bloated
Speaking from experience, matrix is still kinda rough around the edges if you have a 100+ person group with non-technical users.
More broadly, pretty much all of the secure messengers currently have an ~O(N^2) problem with state sync in groups. The only one that isn't deeply frustrating is Signal and that's largely because it has very few features and can't be self hosted.
It sucks because it feels SOOOO close. I had my own server setup but setting up a client was so very hard. And it was hard to explain to friends/family how to set it up.
My CPU on my tiny server was being used like crazy for matrix.
Now for comparison's sake, try snikket, or even barebones ejabberd on a (featuresfriendliness) vs (admin overheadserver resources) basis. Mix in some https://mov.im/ if you must.
Were you running Synapse?
I tried a couple. Synapse was the one I did the longest if I recall.
I've said that before, but the O(N²) issue with E2E encryption only exists in an ideological sense. If your group chat is large enough that the overhead is unbearable, you don't have a private and secure group chat to begin with, just because a group chat of this magnitude is very much public by definition.
With that said, you can keep server logs encrypted while avoiding the payload/key rotation explosion by using static keys (available since forever with PGP in XMPP) or wait the decade (but most probably, the eternity) that it will take for MLS to be bolted on top of Matrix (and the new protocol design that this entails due to the absence of guarantee about messages ordering)
Appreciate the discussion. I really wish they'd prioritize UX.
Video is a year old, but still relevant I think.
Here's this years discussion: https://youtu.be/cQjUjM_OAcw
