Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home

https://element.io/blog/element-home/

by decrypt • 5 years ago

215 166 5 years ago

element.io

1MachineElf3• 5 years ago

I would gladly pay $10/month to support Element and Matrix.

regnerba2• 5 years ago

So why don't you?

1MachineElf3• 5 years ago

As you probably saw in the blog post, the ability to do this is currently only offered via the desktop app, which I do not use. I only use the web interface, the Android app, and a non-Element matrix client. Element said in the blog post that it will add this option to the Android app, and once it does, I will use it and subscribe. Hopefully that answers your question.

Esras• 5 years ago

If you (or anyone else reading this) are okay with Patreon, they do have one at https://www.patreon.com/matrixdotorg. If you don't like Patreon for some reason, they are also on Liberapay, PayPal, and accept BTC and ETH.

They have some minor benefits and flair, although the page hasn't been updated in awhile, so I don't know how many are still valid.

derin2• 5 years ago

I was on their Patreon for a while, but had to hop off because of financial fun.

Sadly none of the rewards are updated and the flair is no longer given out; at this point it makes sense to just see it as a donation.

regnerba2• 5 years ago

Why home vs nickle? Nickle seems to be the same with the addition of your own DNS for the same price.

1MachineElf3• 5 years ago

What you are referencing sounds interesting. Would you please provide a link with more information? Googling "nickle matrix" does not yeild useful results, and it's even worse for "nickle element"

decrypt4• 5 years ago

Nickel is one of their existing plans, and Home is their new plan. Both offer the same features, except that Nickel offers an ability to use custom domains and is aimed at businesses. More on their pricing page [1]

[1] https://element.io/pricing

argvargc2• 5 years ago

This genuinely makes no sense on Element's part.

The exact same features are listed for the same price, on the feature comparison page - https://element.io/pricing - except Nickel has one extra.

Why would anyone choose to have one less feature, all-else being apparently equal?

Either the comparison page is wrong/missing something, or...?

jeroenhd2• 5 years ago

The link to "Nickle" actually goes to the subscription page for "Silver". Their product listing seems to be broken?

If it's just an option that can be turned on or off in a control panel of sorts, the plans might just be different pre-provisioning configurations. For many people, especially the non-tech users, custom DNS isn't really something that they want or even should be using.

HolidayHuckle11• 5 years ago

Hi - I head up Element Matrix Services (EMS), so hopefully I can answer some of these questions for you.

Element home is really aimed at helping to get less technical users up and running with their own home on Matrix as quickly and easily as possible.

Under the hood Element Home servers and our smaller / Nickel products are pretty similar (similar resource allocations etc.). The main differences are in the setup process.

With Element Home we've created a whole new setup process and have tried to reduce the number of configuration steps, selecting default options wherever possible.

The trade-off for this is that while many of these options are changeable after setup, some (like custom DNS) are not. So, if you're a bit more technical and want things like custom DNS, then you're better to start off with a Nickel host.

estaseuropano2• 5 years ago

The day the element and jitsi projects marry and offer a single $10 plan for secure chat and group video all the commercial providers can pack up... But I fear the day may never come.

zaik• 5 years ago

I think Jitsi is build on XMPP for chat right? XMPP already offers federated and e2ee chat.

kitkat_new5• 5 years ago

Element has group video calls using Jitsi integrated

gorgonzolachz3• 5 years ago

This seems like a great move forward for Element, looks like this is angling to replace the New Vector offering they had a while back?

The pricing is certainly odd, though. For 5 bucks a month I run my own server with almost a dozen folks on it, which requires basically zero maintenance (I can count the number of times I've had to go in and restart it over the past two years on one hand). Double that for a limit of 5 users (with another $2/user surcharge) is high for what I'd expect is a logical separation of tenants under the hood.

I know some of the Matrix folks pop in to HN threads from time to time, and I'll readily admit my woeful inexperience in all things business. That said, could someone enlighten me as to how the pricing strategy was determined? It seems like the better route would have been to create an obscenely cheap plan on the low end for groups/families and push for enterprise adoption (perhaps even with increased prices, $75/mo for 25 users seems on the low end at first glance).

Edit: Just re-read the first paragraph and caught this: "You can just enjoy the fact you know you chose someone you trust (us!) with your data." The whole reason I'm using element is because I don't trust anyone else with my data & social connections, and so I'd like to own as much of that scope as possible. I'm sure it's just a poorly worded marketing zinger, but it's unfortunate nonetheless.

anotherboffin• 5 years ago

I also think the explanation could use a bit of work. If I have more than 5 users, do I need to switch to Nickel? Get another Home plan?

HolidayHuckle11• 5 years ago

Up to 5 Monthly Active Users are included in your subscription. After that you can add additional users at an additional $2 per user per month.

It's worth noting that the Monthly Active bit can be quite important. What this means is that you're not charged for the number of users registered on your server, but the number who are actively using the server. Users are only considered as "active" and counting towards the number that you pay for if they use the account for more than two days in a rolling 30 day period. The aim here is that you're not penalised for occasional or "drive-by" users of the service.

(Disclaimer -- I head up EMS (Element Matrix Services))

hiq• 5 years ago

I had the same thought, but do your dozen folks use video calls on your instance? Does it work well enough? I'd definitely expect to be able to host a text-only instance for $5, but maybe they also need to provision for more demanding features?

I only use Element / Matrix as an IRC replacement for now so I couldn't tell.

teraku• 5 years ago

AFAIK, Matrix does not support Video chat yet?

But the VoIP/audio chat is using WebRTC, so Matrix is only the signalling server and the audio is p2p between the participants. As such the strain on the hosting server should be minimal

thedanbob3• 5 years ago

I host a Matrix server for my family and we regular make audio calls to Australia. I had to try a few services before I found a $5 VPS that worked well, but network was always the limiting factor rather than server specs. The unavoidable latency makes video calls unpleasant so I can’t speak to that.

3np• 5 years ago

You can just enjoy the fact you know you chose someone you trust (us!) with your data.

That stood out to me as poorly phrased, as well. They're assuming I trust them. Even if I do/would have, it's a turn-off.

nightowl_games• 5 years ago

I agree completely. I thought the point of element and matrix was that I don't trust anyone, and that the messages are e2e encrypted. I guess maybe metadata is still accessible by Element?

177tcca• 5 years ago

You'd better trust them with your metadata, unless I'm misunderstanding their protocol.

notyourday5• 5 years ago

You can just enjoy the fact you know you chose someone you trust (us!) with your data.

Yeah, no. Blast from the past:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19642554

This is the entity/company who decided to revoke clients keys because not because the users messed up but because they messed up and therefore destroying access to the users messages and defended that as the approach!

sodality24• 5 years ago

Their quote related to the incident and deleting keys (GPG release signing keys on prod machines, no locked down servers, etc leading to the hack):

You might have lost access to your encrypted messages.
As we had to log out all users from matrix.org, if you do not have backups of your encryption keys you will not be able to read your encrypted conversation history. However, if you use server-side encryption key backup (the default in Riot these days) or take manual key backups, you’ll be okay.
This was a difficult choice to make. We weighed the risk of some users losing access to encrypted messages against that of all users' accounts being vulnerable to hijack via the compromised access tokens. We hope you can see why we made the decision to prioritise account integrity over access to encrypted messages, but we're sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused. [1]

I think this shows they simply revoked keys to avoid the hacker accessing messages. Had messages been breached, that would have been significantly worse for an E2EE federated messaging platform.

[1] https://matrix.org/blog/2019/04/11/we-have-discovered-and-ad...

sriku• 5 years ago

With you. Something more like "element family" where all kith and kin can use it would be more valuable. 5 users for a household is ... weak use case.

rkangel• 5 years ago

For 5 bucks a month I run my own server with almost a dozen folks on it, which requires basically zero maintenance (I can count the number of times I've had to go in and restart it over the past two years on one hand).

Yes, but how much work was it to get set up in the first place? There's a reason that people pay for Wordpress subscriptions, even though you and I can set up static hosting off Gitlab pages (for example) for free. I do think the pricing is slightly steep but you can charge a premium for making it usable by the masses.

gorgonzolachz3• 5 years ago

Anecdotally, it took me about an afternoon. I realize that I'm more technical than the average person, so setting up the certs and installing the python deps was a breeze because I've done it before; the documentation for the synapse homeserver was also quite good.

I see where you're coming from, but is this offering geared towards people like that? Looks like there's a significant push to get people who've had their own servers running to adopt this new service, and Element as a whole is geared towards the techy DIY crowd. I know there have been concerns raised in other threads about its UX problems, and from personal experience most of my friends don't share the same concerns that I do about data security or bootstrapped personal infrastructure.

pedro22• 5 years ago

This is probably a stab at BeeperHQ, judging by the price.

kitkat_new5• 5 years ago

Hasn't this offer already been existing for a while?

pedro22• 5 years ago

Maybe. If so, I wasn’t aware. I always thought the cheapest plan was pricier than €10.

erohead• 5 years ago

I chat with Arathorn pretty regularly and I'm quite sure that we're not competitors, at least not yet . Beeper is focused in hosting and maintaining bridges between Matrix and other networks. EMS is vanilla Matrix hosting.

Arathorn5• 5 years ago

Work on Element Home predates Beeper's launch by a few months, and is in no way a response to it. EMS does have some paid bridges too, but the emphasis is on the Matrix rather than the bridging, unlike Beeper.

luplex3• 5 years ago

Good stuff! Now we just need to get the cost down. I got email hosting for free with my domain, that's the price point I would like for Matrix, too.

decrypt4• 5 years ago

May I ask which registrar it is? The ones I know only offer email forwarding for free, not a full-fledged email account.

illuminated• 5 years ago

Not OP, but I'm getting the same from Gandi [0].

[0] https://gandi.net/

luplex3• 5 years ago

It's Strato.de

Depending on the specific package, I get 1-unlimited email accounts on my new domain

vbezhenar3• 5 years ago

"Dedicated server" mentioned 4 times in that article. In hosting world, dedicated server means real physical server. I wonder if that's just marketing speak and in reality it's virtual server or they really install a separate server for every customer.

jtsiskin• 5 years ago

Its $10 a month - unless they're using raspberry pi's, I think you can assume virtual servers.

its-summertime• 5 years ago

server as in the server daemon, not server as in the physical server.

readflaggedcomm• 5 years ago

I would phrase that as 'server instance.' Their language like "you’re sharing minimal infrastructure with anyone else" does reinforce the idea they mean physical server.

Maybe "dedicated" and "infrastructure" are being abstracted into meaninglessness as cloud computing matures.

privacyonsec• 5 years ago

they could have used "personal server" instead ?

foobar333332• 5 years ago

My understanding of it was that it would be a dedicated instance of the matrix server software using your own domain and not the shared matrix server.

crazypython10• 5 years ago

A dedicated server seems like overkill. A shared VPS works fine for many realtime applications, even fast-paced games that host 50 players concurrently that send out updates every 32 milliseconds, like agar.io, diep.io, or vnav.io.

If I wanted lower latency, I would add WebRTC-based P2P chat for those who support it, to connect directly between servers.

crazypython10• 5 years ago

I wanted to add: "Dedicated server" in the cloud business refers to a 1-to-1 mapping between server and physical computer. A "virtual server" is one that maps onto a physical computer when it actually needs the CPU. There are generally two types of virtual servers: A very low-end one running ARM or Intel ARM slower than your typical 1.3GhZ laptop, and a very high-end one typically used for CPU-bound applications.

The cheapest dedicated host on AWS costs $370/month: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/

So Matrix is misusing cloud terminology when it says "dedicated server."

vbezhenar3• 5 years ago

I agree, I just think that this particular wording introduces unfortunate confusion. Virtualized cloud solutions should work just fine for most uses.

e12e3• 5 years ago

I think this bit of marketing speak was popularized by discourd - and inspired by team speak and ventrillio - all of which talk about chat "servers".

Its particularly odd with discord, as they clearly mean "instance" not "server".

Sure, it's a chat server daemon (like you could get a web server daemon) - but I think "dedicated private instance" would be better. Should probably drop the misleading bit about "not sharing resources" as I assume instances aren't that isolated?

neiman• 5 years ago

Could anyone TL;DR this? I honestly struggle with understanding what exactly is the offer.

foobar333332• 5 years ago

You get your own instance of the matrix server to use which is faster than the shared free instance. Saves you from having to host it yourself.

e12e3• 5 years ago

Imagine if you paid for email accounts - this is like paying 10usd/month for up to 5 email accounts (with eg fastmail).

Only its not email, but text/voice/video/group chat.

teruakohatu• 5 years ago

I believe they are asking twice as much as they should be. Hear me out.

At $1/month/user, they would make $12/user/year. I would say most people have extended ~10-20 family members they communicate with, at $20 -$40/month on the lowest priced plan, that would be a fair expenditure that would fall on one family member, because trying to get everyone to chip in if usually unrealistic. Now outside of the USA it begins to get really expensive.

If they could offer it at $1/month, they would have significantly greater uptake. As for the bandwidth and hosting costs, are they not paying for that anyway through the default Matrix server?

I get they want to make money from businesses, but they are pricing out a lot of families who have Facebook-fatige.

azornathogron3• 5 years ago

I agree. They're competing against free services. For many if not most family-and-friend groups there will only be one person knowledgeable about matrix and actively interested in using it (there might be more interested in using "something that's not Facebook", but matrix isn't the only option there). This needs to be priced low enough that one person can buy it without thinking and get their family and some friends on the thing. Maybe start at $40/year or $25/six months, up to 15 accounts.

Pay six months or a year to start so there's no subscription, then give an option to pay for another block or switch to monthly.

Also needs to include bring-your-own-domain (ie, let the customer point DNS at the service), because if you're interested in matrix and want to have your own homeserver then you know you also want to properly own the domain to avoid being locked into a particular hosting provider.

(All just my opinion, I have no relevant experience, etc etc)

pimeys• 5 years ago

Does this include all the bridges? So the users of the instance can combine other platforms to the same app, such as signal, instagram, twitter, whatsapp, irc, telegram and all that?

kevincox3• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure it doesn't. But my real question is can you run your own bridges with this homeserver?

ibraheemdev• 5 years ago

Is there a whatsapp bridge?

kitkat_new5• 5 years ago

Yes, but it is not being offered as a hosted service atm: https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-whatsapp https://element.io/element-matrix-store

SecurityLagoon• 5 years ago

Is that the only base domain? ems.host (I assume element matrix service?) is so uninspired and sounds like a back end domain rather than what you want your identity tied to. Could they not have gone with something a bit more catchy and on brand?

Tepix• 5 years ago

Well i haven't really gotten used to the name "Element" yet, it's as bland as it gets.

bogwog• 5 years ago

And vague. At least "Telegram", "Signal", and "Whatsapp" suggest that they have something to do with communication, whereas neither "Element" nor its logo/icon suggest what it is. Unless they know what it is already, most people would probably scroll past it, assuming it's like a boring CRM thing or crappy drop-shipping store or whatever.

But I guess it's too late for them to reverse that decision. Maybe the logo will change, but the name is probably here to stay.

plainoldcheese• 5 years ago

not sure i understood from the article, is this supposed ot host a server locally on your device rather than use someone elses server? (that would make it function almost like a peer to peer system.)

or is it just a way for them to market their own hosting for matrix servers?

ucha2• 5 years ago

Back when WhatsApp's business model relied on subscriptions rather than ads, it sold for $1/year. What justifies this being 120x more expensive? Is it just economies of scale?

mariusor2• 5 years ago

WhatsApp was selling you access to your account. Element is selling you access to an instance which you can share with as many users as you want.

ucha2• 5 years ago

The pricing page says you can only share it with 5 users for the $10/month package. Am I missing something?

zaggynl• 5 years ago

The terms of service are interesting:

This agreement does not apply to Matrix servers run by anyone else - Matrix is an open network like the Web and this agreement only applies to the server provisioned by the Customer and provided by Element.

What do other Matrix servers matter to my hypothetical Element Home server or my selfhosted matrix-synapse server?

The Customer must ensure that all Authorised Users are at least 16 (sixteen) years old to use both our Hosting and Communication Services or such greater age required in their country to register for or use our Hosting and Communication Services.

So no using it with your younger family or school for example?

I appreciate a service being offered but would prefer a solution that enables an out of the box package for self hosted consumer NAS systems. Maybe something to provide dyndns, a domain and a quick setup.

callahad• 5 years ago

What do other Matrix servers matter to my hypothetical Element Home server or my selfhosted matrix-synapse server?

Matrix is federated, like email. Once you send a message to someone on another server, what happens to it is out of your / your server's control.

(E.g., Google's Terms of Service apply to Gmail, but you can use Gmail to send mail to someone at Yahoo... at which point it's beyond Google's reach.)

chacha2• 5 years ago

This would be insane for anyone outside of HN. $10 a month for a 5 person chat? They know everyone can get this free elsewhere for decades now? A 5 person Signal group would even have higher security.

feanaro3• 5 years ago

A 5 person Signal group would even have higher security.

Why is it higher security?

azornathogron3• 5 years ago

Fewer ways for it to be misconfigured?

In Matrix you've got to remember to turn on the encryption, and verify each of your clients. At least that's my understanding, maybe that is out of date.

luplex3• 5 years ago

The beauty of matrix is the interoperability: you can actually talk to other users on other servers, like email. You can join large public groups, too.

BugWatch• 5 years ago

While I love Matrix and support their mission, this pricing is quite a bit steep, as well as the 5-person limit being too restricting. They will price out large majority of people who actually could/would want to switch.

HolidayHuckle11• 5 years ago

Hi - Yep, we totally get that this won't be for everyone. We're currently looking for ways to be able to increase the efficiency of these smaller servers and to be able to pass those cost reductions on to customers. We've also got some projects in the works aimed at being able to offer single account / single user "homeservers" and obviously the pricing for these would be much lower, but we're not quite there yet. More info. on this as soon as we have it.

In case it's not clear, it isn't a 5 person limit for Element Home servers, it's just that up to 5 (active) users are included in your subscription. You can add more users at any time for an additional $2/month. Also bear in mind that you're not charged for everyone registered on your homserver, just the ones that are using it :)

(I head up Element Matrix Services / EMS)

crazypython10• 5 years ago

What hosting provider are you using? AWS, GCP, and Azure are several times more expensive with the same performance as smaller providers, of which DigitalOcean provides the worst performance. (50% less) https://vpsbenchmarks.com

kevincox3• 5 years ago

Keep in mind that this doesn't mean you can only chat with 5 people. You can chat with anyone who uses Matrix. You can only have 5 people with addresses at your server. Basically identical to email hosting with a 5 account limit.

HolidayHuckle11• 5 years ago

Yep, as you say, you get to chat with anyone in the Matrix ecosystem (or even further afield if you use bridges).

You can only have 5 people with addresses at your server

Actually, it's better than this. You can technically have as many people / accounts as you like registered on your server, but you're limited to 5 active users by default. Users are considered "active" if they've been logged in to and using your server for more than two days in a given 30 day period.

kdmytro• 5 years ago

I wonder if tye price is truly steep, or if I am just spoiled by free IM services offered by data harvesting companies?

$5 per month is a big entry cost. And I am not sure how well this price will work in the long run when people begin using the server a lot. Perhaps pricing based on message throughput or used storage capacity would make for an easier and fairer entry.

sneak• 5 years ago

You can just enjoy the fact you know you chose someone you trust (us!) with your data.

Isn't the point of decentralization that I don't have to choose some centralized party to trust?

jeroenhd2• 5 years ago

You can pick another Matrix host if you want, if there are any. Element being the first to host the services they develop commercially makes sense. If another Matrix host stand up, you're free to go with their competitor instead and still chat with the same people.

The biggest downside of this kind of hosted service is that they use subdomains of their own service. That means that you can't take your exact username to another service if you do end up switching. For most people, this makes switching from Element Home to something else as much of a problem as switching from Whatsapp to Signal.

The same is true for other federated services like email, of course, but the service would be a lot more portable if, for example, you could buy a domain, have the folks at Element set up the necessary DNS config (they can require one particular domain provider for their API services for all I care), and then later be able to switch to another host with the same contacts, usernames and services. Because of data portability laws, Element is forced to make this possible in the EU anyway, so it might as well be a feature of the Matrix ecosystem to be able to transfer your domains and accounts without hassle.

Kinrany• 5 years ago

Generally it's enough to have multiple providers with equivalent offerings and near-zero costs of switching and starting your own provider

adamcstephens• 5 years ago

I got excited for a cheaper offering when I saw the headline. If I was wanting to pay $10/month that was already an option. Sadly this is just marketing and not anything more appealing.

adidalal2• 5 years ago

For those interested in self-hosting the home server, I would recommend https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy - the documentation is fantastic and it’s very well maintained.

nerdponx• 5 years ago

I'm personally waiting for Dendrite. Apparently the beta is usable now, setting it up has been on my to-do list.

40four2• 5 years ago

I self host Synapse for personal use, what are the expected benefits of Dendrite? Is it mostly the performance gain of Go versus Python, or are there other reasons to be looking forward to Dendrite?

jaggs• 5 years ago

The minute you mention Github, you lose 98% of human beings? This is clearly aimed at those who just want something to work out of the box, surely? HN is not the target audience I guess.

kenmacd2• 5 years ago

My main issue with self-hosting has been federation bandwidth requirements. I joined the very quiet `#homeowners:matrix.org` announcement room, but because almost 600 other people are in there my server was inundated with presence messages (just in case I wanted to know which of those 600 were online right now).

Oh, and there's no way to prevent receiving these messages. They arrive on the same endpoint as non-presence messages, and you can't signal to the sender to stop sending them.

gen3• 5 years ago

I’ve been hosting my own matrix server for just a few months now. I have a small handful of users. Bandwidth hasn’t been a problem for me, as I’ve only served 5GB in the last 30 days. It’s the sheer number of requests that the server handles that I find staggering. In the last 30 days, my server has handled 1.3mm requests!

It seems like everything polls for data, which I see as wasteful. I recently saw they were adding socket support in a recent MSC... hopefully that will help.

adidalal2• 5 years ago

Unfortunately not a solution for federation with other servers, but you can disable presence on Matrix servers you control.

For this playbook, use these variables:

  matrix_synapse_use_presence: false
  matrix_client_element_enable_presence_by_hs_url: {"https://matrix.yourserver.com": false}

crazypython10• 5 years ago

I have one large concern with this. It's not a FLOSS service, it's SSaaS. Let me explain.

While Matrix is open-source, Element Matrix hosting gives you no option to modify the source code, not letting you install add-ons or modifications. There's no way to say, "Hey, check out this cool chat patch, just install it on your homeserver!" With proprietary service, if you want a feature, all you can do is say, "Ugh, I wish they would add it." With a freedom-respecting service, you could just hire someone to add it.

Therefore, EMS is not a freedom-respecting service. It's as freedom-respecting as proprietary ElasticSearch.

The headline explains that it violates the most fundamental principle of free software:

- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

It does not even attempt to give you this freedom:

- The freedom to... change the program so it does your computing as you wish.

OSS that's not FLOSS doesn't have any of the ethical benefits: A locked-down Android phone is "open-source" but not free software, as you can't modify it.

There should be a way to be able to upload patches onto your server. If corruption ensues, Element Matrix Services should not be held responsible. Let users be responsible for their software! Stop treating them like babies.

It also generally makes it much harder for open-source contributors to experiment, as you must go through a centralized repo to gain adoption.

miloignis2• 5 years ago

It's a SaaS offering hosting for FOSS. If you want to be able to patch and change and manage the running homeserver, than you're just manually managing the homeserver, which would be self-hosting! Which is a great thing to do, but then there's no point in buying this service, just rent a VPS. The entire point of this service is that they do the management for you - if you would rather do the management yourself, you totally can. People running their own homeserver are very much first-class citizens on the Matrix network, and managing it yourself is cheaper. The extra expense here is entirely to get them to manage it for you, which seems to be the opposite of what you want.

crazypython10• 5 years ago

The entire point of this service is that they do the management for you - if you would rather do the management yourself, you totally can.

I want them to manage it and also let me upload patches.

I want the setup, DNS, storage, hosting, all the sysadmin stuff... and still be able to patch the software. I want them to be able to `git pull` an update over my patches, and have it carry forward after updates.

I want the agency of FOSS but still pay for the management, simply put.

It's a SaaS offering hosting for FOSS.

I can't modify the software, so it's not free software. If they provided some sort of "patch app store" or patch download, it would be free software.

tssva• 5 years ago

I find the chart presented to be very deceptive with regards to "Own your data" and Signal. It implies that the Signal servers store your messages and other data which they do not.

Vinnl2• 5 years ago

AFAIK they do, just not in a way that anyone but the sender and receiver(s) can read.

approxim8ion• 5 years ago

Encrypted messages are stored on their servers only until they are delivered, and then deleted.

From their privacy policy:

    Messages. Signal cannot decrypt or otherwise access the content of your messages or calls. Signal queues end-to-end encrypted messages on its servers for delivery to devices that are temporarily offline (e.g. a phone whose battery has died). Your message history is stored on your own devices.

    Additional technical information is stored on our servers, including randomly generated authentication tokens, keys, push tokens, and other material that is necessary to establish calls and transmit messages. Signal limits this additional technical information to the minimum required to operate the Services.

adkadskhj2• 5 years ago

Question for anyone in-the-know of Matrix:

I'm toying with using Matrix or IPFS (my two primary interests atm) as a .. P2P layer. Which is to say, i have an app that shuttles thousands of byte chunks between instances of this app, and i need something in that network layer to do the shuttling. I of course could just use a centralized SSH server, but Matrix and IPFS both have be interested as alternatives.

With that said, doing this in Matrix would involve sending quite a bit of volume through Matrix. double digit GiBs of data every month in 10KiB chunks.

Would using hosting Matrix be bad for this purpose? I could of course self host, but A: i'd like to support Matrix, and B: if this is kosher i'd rather give Matrix my money, than give a VPS my money.

Does Element Home limit message sizes or message counts? Does it throttle? Caps would be bad for me (potentially), but throttling would be fine. I just don't want to abuse Matrix, and i'd like to support them with money i'm spending in this use case.

Arathorn5• 5 years ago

Depending on the data, it sounds like it might be more a job for IPFS. Matrix is best for passing around histories of JSON blobs no larger than 65KB. Whereas it sounds like you might be manipulating files rather than data objects?

Element Home doesn't have traffic limits currently, but all Matrix has rate limits (a few messages/s) to prevent flooding.

adkadskhj2• 5 years ago

The bytes i refer to are immutable blobs, the content in an immutable content store. IPFS would hypothetically work fine, my only concern is having too much needless history. Eg, once all clients are up to date the history could be pruned.

There would be basically no need to store weeks/months old data, as i'd be just using Matrix for P2P not storage.

(just replying for posterity)

e12e3• 5 years ago

You might find this recent (discussion and submission) interesting if you missed it:

Show HN: Hummingbard – decentralized communities built on Matrix

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26277602

40four2• 5 years ago

This sounds cool for non-technical people, who don't have the skills to setup their own self hosted Synapse &/or Element server. Let's be real, for folks who don't frequent HN, that's just about everyone. Seems like a good option for them, and a good way for Matrix to generate income. Great news as far as I'm concerned!

Sounds like some are complaining about the price, but it seems more than fair to me. Heck, I host my own Synapse instance, but I might consider this in the future. Not that the maintenance is a problem, I don't think I've had to touch it since I set it up. But it might be worth it to not ever have to go in and do upgrades, or worry about something going wrong.

vlmutolo• 5 years ago

The only thing stopping me from moving away from the matrix.org homeserver is the fact that I already have an account and chats there.

Sure, I could rejoin all my rooms from a new account on a different homeserver. But that’s not exactly an elegant solution.

I’m looking forward to when account migration is a solved problem. That’s one of the more impressive and daunting parts of the Matrix spec that I’ve seen.

yencabulator• 5 years ago

memorable Matrix IDs such as @yourfirstname:yoursurname.ems.host

Nobody outside of tech will agree with that. Multiple kinds of punctuation, "ems", ".host", and so on.

Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home

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