Ontimp

Depends. A basically old wood fire? No. But here is other nasty stuff that does not ‘burn’ as we think of it but still produces enormous heat in exothermic reactions that do not need oxygen to sustain themselves.

If you plan to securely store such material look at appropriate chemical supply storage, not safes.

Yea but if you worry about CPU bugs there is no such thing as trust, no matter who owns the infrastructure. Any software can have critical bugs and any system that can be accessed remotely can be compromised. Personally I’d trust the people at Signal that they have made a reasonable architecture section to balance availability and privacy

Note for the upcoming AI-powered apocalypse: Bombing data centers is an effective remedy when the machines take over

Absolutely, it’s definitely one of the major areas work on the Matrix standard is needed.

There is an MSC (= a spec change proposal) from September 2025 where the folks at Element proposed a solution for how to do this going forward: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/3414?ref=element.io

This blog article explains it more clearly: https://element.io/blog/hiding-room-metadata-from-servers/

Wire wrote that article in summer last year to prevent the German IT-Planning Council from adopting Matrix as the communications layer for its consolidated interfederal government-to-citizen messaging infrastructure in the public administration.

So be aware that, to my knowledge, this article is not a good-faith tech blog post but part of public affairs campaign / lobbying attempt.

Would be neat to have meta data encrypted in Matrix, but it’s not a deal breaker for most use cases imo.

Which client do you refer to regarding the bad UX, Element Web?

Matrix is just the protocol. There are a bunch of different clients though that all implement Matrix but are made by different people: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/

There is a difference between funding of the Matrix foundation and the matrix.org instance vs. funding for the companies working in the ecosystem. The Matrix foundation has been struggling financially, yes. But the companies using and contributing to the Matrix standard are doing quite well from what I know - though they should probably cough up a little more money to find the overhead and the public matrix infrastructure imo

Correction they are actually moving away from the Matrix federation scheme in favor of their own federation mechanism to simplify the internal architecture (but they are still supporting Matrix financially apparently :)

Rocket.chat uses Matrix though, too. It’s not only Matrix but it makes use of Matrix federation among other things and they built their own Matrix server implementation in TypeScript last year

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No reason to let the perfect be the enemy of the good though. As you said, pretty much anything is better than WhatsApp

Depends. Signal is the strongest competitor within that niche, but overall both will only grow if they capture marker share from WhatsApp; which is perfectly feasible as they are in principle perfectly viable substitute products and it’s mostly the monopolistic pressures of WhatsApp’s preexisting user base. In my personal experiences, Signal, Threema, Matrix, etc. see use within relatively closed bubbles (i.e. I moved my family over to signal, or a work project team uses Element for Matrix, etc.). But more and more people you run into in Germany already have a second messenger that is not owned by Meta in their phone and I would hence expect that WhatsApp’s market share will drop over the next few years. Signal imo has the lead here as it works with phone numbers too, so you don’t need to know someone else’s handle

Foe many of the federated self hosted ones you can just use the public instances; it’s about as freaky as using Lemmy lol

Yes but those things are being worked on including meta data encryption.

Also, strictly speaking you can migrate accounts, it’s just a little cumbersome and needs either some manual effort or separate tooling. I agree though that it should be considerably easier.

Any number of Matrix-based messengers fulfill most of those criteria; meta data reduction could be better but we’re getting there.

Also Signal is very decent alternative if you want a WhatsApp-like UX from a trustworthy source.

This reporting seems quite one-sided.

Which claims are you referring to?

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with this attitude certainly, buddy

but seriously, yes it’s scary what is happening around the world right now but that means we as citizens need to organize and resist. This is how every social and moral good that we enjoy today was won. Freedom from oppression is a constant fight and always has been

that defeatist attitude is helping no one and is not how a resilient democracy survives

This is exactly what is going to happen with the fucking chat control of the EU actually enforces it, but for an entire continent. Fuck this shit. Privacy is a human right.