Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory

https://element.io/blog/verifying-your-devices-is-becoming-mandatory-2/

by LorenDB • 8 months ago

210 242 8 months ago

What exactly does this entail? I'm willing to be charitable in assuming that their use of "verify" isn't the modern usage of "give us your ID!" but I'm not enmeshed enough in the ecosystem anymore to know.

ranger_danger2• 8 months ago

My understanding is that there's two different types of verification.

Self-verification means that any new secondary devices you log into your account with will need to be verified by an existing login by way of an automatic popup that asks if you trust the device. It used to just be a Yes/No button but I think now they've added QR codes and/or emoji matching.

The other kind is verification between two different people, like when starting a direct message conversation, you might get the same emoji matching window to verify each other.

xethos2• 8 months ago

Respectfully, not even close. Verification is when I sign in from a new device, I use an existing device or second passphrase (either-or) to ensure that yes, it is me on both devices. I never have to reveal my ID, name, phone number, or email address to anyone. Not to Element, the Matrix Foundation, or the person running my home server where all my [encrypted] messages live.

josephcsible3• 8 months ago

Yeah, IMO "verify" was a poor choice of wording for what this is. It has nothing to do with remote attestation or any other form of Treacherous Computing, and it has nothing to do with your real-life identity. It's just "go on your old device and confirm that the new device is really yours."

goku122• 8 months ago

If you don't mind reading an essay, here is mine from the same discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45989744

tripdout• 8 months ago

What is verification? What does it involve doing? A lot of information on why it's useful, but how is it implemented? I hope it's not something like the Play Integrity API, but with no information to go on, I can't say either way.

olivia-banks2• 8 months ago

Yeah, I was wondering this as well. At the very least, this appears to be an Element requirement that was just enabled by a Matrix protocol update, so moving would be possible, but afaik Element is extremely popular as far as Matrix goes.

ThePinion• 8 months ago

In the current state, it's basically just a self verification. When you use a new device it shows a series of emoji on each device and asks you if they're the same, then the device is verified.

mroche• 8 months ago

You can also use a generated security key to verify as a type of second-factor.

totetsu• 8 months ago

https://element.io/en/help#encryption-device-verification

After Alice logs in on a new device, she uses her cryptographic identity to demonstrate to Bob that the new device genuinely belongs to her, rather than being added by someone else with access to her account. She can do this either by entering her recovery key (which gives the new device immediate access to her cryptographic identity ), or by carrying out an interactive verification from an existing verified device.

navigate8310• 8 months ago

So is this like the Signal PIN which is required when installing on a new device? If you forget, the cryptography changes and old contacts are warned that signatures are rotated, right?

foresto4• 8 months ago

In this case, it's what you do when signing in from a new device (or browser) to attest that it's yours. It avoids warnings to you and your contacts that a device has gained access to your account without your approval.

It involves doing one of these things:

- Comparing a short sequence of emoji on each device and confirming that they match.

- Using one device to scan a QR code displayed by the other.

- Entering a recovery key (a line of text) that you were given when you first set up the account.

Pretty quick and easy in most cases, although some clients can be glitchy in this area and require trying again.

(Gripe: The recovery key approach was unfortunately made painful and error-prone in recent Element releases, by disabling the option to choose a passphrase instead, but most people can simply use one of the other two approaches.)

g-b-r3• 8 months ago

Pretty quick and easy in most cases

The experiences reported here seem to say otherwise...

As others, anyhow, I haven't tried again recently

(Gripe: The recovery key approach was unfortunately made painful and error-prone in recent Element releases, by disabling the option to choose a passphrase instead, but most people can simply use one of the other two approaches.)

I last tried Element about six months ago, but for years using the recovery key was either impossible or close to it, and mostly just for idiotic UI mistakes that were never corrected (something like you had to enter the key where they wanted the passphrase or the opposite).

To my recollection the version from six months ago worked better in that regard, but it was still asking to enter the passphrase where you actually had to enter the recovery key.

SilverElfin• 8 months ago

Maybe I’m missing something but why does this service need this process while Discord or whatever don’t?

tcfhgj22• 8 months ago

The recovery key approach was unfortunately made painful and error-prone in recent Element releases, by disabling the option to choose a passphrase instead, but most people can simply use one of the other two approaches.

honestly it's the best thing ever they have done:

- I have heard of someone who failed to use Matrix, because he got frustrated of having not a secure enough passphrase

- people don't choose secure passphrases

- it provides options making things more complex (especially when guiding others)

- you know you won't memorize it, so you are more likely to put it down

solarkraft3• 8 months ago

(I think) It transfers (access to) your keys for end-to-end encryption between devices.

Aachen• 8 months ago

I was afraid of that as well given the wording but, no, it's nothing to do with third parties at all. Just when you log into a new device, you confirm it on your old device so it knows it can transfer encryption keys for old messages to the new device

This has been in Element/Matrix since forever and I found it the easiest verification mechanism of all the encrypted messengers I've tried. I'm not surprised they're making this part of the standard process, but the wording in 2025 is... unfortunate. Or perhaps that adjective should be applied to the rest of the world since it's not the Matrix Foundation which changed. For the reader to decide ^^

joecool10295• 8 months ago

I’m a server admin and I still couldn’t tell you why when I sign new endpoints in and verify for cross-signing it still also asks me for a recovery key.

For encrypted search on desktop it has to fetch batches of messages and this is configurable in settings. It just had a number? what is that? how large the batch is, how many ms? no clue! good thing we can’t do encrypted search on mobile/web.

josephcsible3• 8 months ago

Thankfully, no, it's not anything evil like Play Integrity is. The simple explanation is that the first time you log in to an existing account from a new device, you need to go on one of your old devices and confirm that the new one is yours.

DrewADesign• 8 months ago

In my case, it transferred my willingness to self-host a chat server to something else.

bfkwlfkjf• 8 months ago

Is this the ritual of getting together with a person and checking that their fingerprint match what you see on the app?

If this is that case what will happen is that people will start verifying everyone (because they might want to text to strangers that they can't bother verifying because the stakes are so low) and so verification will lose all meaning.

ranger_danger2• 8 months ago

Isn't this how TLS itself already works? "trust on first use"?

treyd• 8 months ago

With PKI you're trusting a certificate chain up to a CA you already trust, by way of your OS or browser vendor.

A domain can layer on HSTS to that, which directs clients to additionally refuse to trust a new cert for a domain until the one you currently trust has expired.

pavon• 8 months ago

Not in current practice. That is why you have to get a certificate from a trusted CA. If your CA isn't in the browser's cert database they will reject the connection even on the first time. If browsers allowed TOFU we would still be able to use self-issued certificates, without manually distributing certs to anyone that uses your service.

SSH is an example of TOFU.

syntheticnature• 8 months ago

It is not; I know we don't read articles here, but...

lousken• 8 months ago

"The authenticity of this encrypted message cant be guaranteed on this device" both sides verified, but this still randomly pops up, what happens then? will i lose those messages in the future?

Arathorn4• 8 months ago

No, it's just a warning that your client can't prove that the message was really sent by that sender. These will eventually go away once https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/404... lands.

jerrythegerbil• 8 months ago

As someone whose devices randomly became unverified just a few months ago, signed out, and then tried to use my recovery keys: I was authenticated, but unverified.

When attempting to verify iOS, Desktop linux didn’t work. When attempting to verify Desktop Linux, Desktop Windows didn’t work. When verifying Android, iOS didn’t work. Every verified official client for every platform was verified, tried a different verification method than expected, and failed.

All of this to say, this isn’t the first time this has happened to myself and others. Forcing verification is otherwise known as unexpected “offboarding”. If some verification methods have problems, publish a blog about their deprecation instead.

I love element, but this can’t be done without prior work to address.

tcfhgj22• 8 months ago

are you using your own server?

I have never heard of such issue and not experienced it despite intensive use, so it's a bit strange that you and people you know have experienced this repeatedly.

Aurornis3• 8 months ago

I went through the same frustration recently. I only occasionally use it, but every second or third time I have to open it up to talk in some channel I lose 30 minutes chasing my tail trying to work through the latest set of problems.

I like the idea, but the effort to reward ratio for using the product has not been good. It has caused visible churn and attrition in the few channels I’ve tried to participate in and it’s become a problem for the OSS projects I’m part of that try to use it for their communication. Of course, there are some people who like it that way and think making communication spaces difficult to access is a bonus, but that’s another topic.

Groxx• 8 months ago

I've had constant problems with the verification ever since it was introduced. As far as I can tell it hasn't improved at all. Sometimes it works, sometimes it repeatedly kicks me out moments after succeeding, and it's still prompting me to verify some old devices that I removed Element from years ago and I can't find any way to make the constant pop-ups go away (when they feel like appearing again - sometimes they go away for a couple months).

All this will do is make me lose EVERY profile.

hedora• 8 months ago

I don’t use Matrix, but if it’s E2EE, then how is it possible in the current design for an unverified device to even exist?

It has the keys, or it doesn’t, right?

kevincox2• 8 months ago

Matrix has E2EE support and many clients are pushing it as the default. But it also supports rooms that are only encrypted in transit.

prophesi• 8 months ago

That's correct, but E2EE also allows for unverified devices[0]. Key distribution and device verification are separate issues, and the former doesn't enforce the latter until April 2026 as they've announced in the HN article.

[0] https://matrix.org/docs/matrix-concepts/end-to-end-encryptio...

bigstrat2003• 8 months ago

You don't have to use E2EE if you don't want to. I personally don't because I don't care about it, and it adds extra difficulties to the experience.

throwaway290• 8 months ago

If you don't need e2ee, are there features that make matrix better than xmpp?

toastal3• 8 months ago

I tried out an alpha client once & can’t get the stupid pop-up about unverified devices to go away now. Another client didn’t have the verification flow even set up—this will end up being yet another barrier to entry for new clients. With the clients (yes, multiple) crashing often, constantly syncing for ages, & feature sets not on parity + without graceful fallbacks, I do not like the Matrix client space (nor the server space, but that is a different topic).

There has never been a better time to (re)embrace XMPP as your decentralized chat option. The clients are less buggy, handle missing features gracefully, & best part is, not being built on an eventual consistency model, you don’t have the constant syncing issue with delayed messages. If you wanted you could make an XMPP client in a day since the base spec is small/simple—& features like device verification would be seen as mandatory in the base specification.

mxuribe4• 8 months ago

I used to consider myself a HUUUGE matrix fanboy....while i still respect what the teams have done over time, I have been feeling a little, i don't know, deflated maybe? Maybe its the UX/UI aspect, i don;t know...i have not run a homeserver since like maybe 2019 or so? But nowadays, i have less interest in running a homeserver, and as far using the various clients: meh. Element feels bloated, and others either might be more snappier but might have an odd bug, or don't implement all features that might be expected, etc.

So, last year i tried to play briefly with Prosody server to re-acquaint myself with xmpp...and it wasn't so bad. Not as great as i expected for this day ana age, bbut not terrible. The server setup felt like i needed to study a bunch of different docs...and ultimately was smoother than expected....so i think documentation is either outdated, or was written a little less clear than expected. That being said, the low resource usage was ridiculously pleasant compared to matrix homeserver! The fact that an xmpp server allows for such scalability on such low resources is a great testament! And, that was prosody, which some folks state is not even as performant, scalable as ejabbered....so they say...so wow, that's impressive if that's true. Regardless, xmpp servers that can run on such low resource hardware but enable so many users to chat...is quite awesome!!! The client side of xmpp was a different matter; i wasn't so happy. I blame myself because maybe there might have been plugins that maybe i didn't install correctly on server side, i don't know...but it felt not as easy as i expected. The clients were a little disappointing; again not terrible but not great.

Maybe i'm spoiled? Or, maybe i did too much wrong? But if that's the case, the maybe there's an opportunity for better documentaiton? I don't know....i really like both matrix and xmpp because both live in the realm of free and open source software.....so i really want both or either to succeed. I want to live in a world where we are not beholden to only proprietary options, like whatsapp, crappy sms/text messaging, etc. I want to give props to all the folks who made and maintain all aspects of xmpp...as much as i am whining, i don't want to take away from all the hard work that they have freely given; super props to them!!!

What i really want is a modern, free and open source version of IRC, with plenty of modern features (E2EE, file uploads, presence detection, etc.), decent desktop and mobile clients, easy server installation and management, and said server-side software would ideally not need such beefy hardware to run...Or, is my wish too far fetched?

chickensong• 8 months ago

I think we all want that. The fact that it doesn't exist is an indicator that it isn't trivial to build. All those modern features are at odds with performance.

toastal3• 8 months ago

can run on such low resource hardware

This is what frees a barrier to decentralization & actually owning one’s data. A few of my friends are now running their own single-user or small XMPP servers since it doesn’t use much in terms of resources or storage in comparison.

The server setup felt like i needed to study a bunch of different doc

I believe this is what the Snikket project is trying to be. That said, XMPP servers are used for a lot more than just chat which is why most of them don’t have good defaults for merely chatting with friends since that isn’t the only or a generic enough use case (XMPP is behind Zoom, Jitsi, Fortnite, etc.).

The clients were a little disappointing; again not terrible but not great

True. But I appreciate that there are many options & most features gracefully fallback even on TUI clients (like ‘reactions’ just being a message reply with a single emoji). If Element adds a feature (like polls), the other clients, the new feature just doesn’t show up. For a web client, the NLNet funding is really giving a boost to Movim as a reasonable alternative to Discord that is self-hostable & federated so users—taking back the meaning of “join my server” to literally mean someone’s server & without needing to create another account just to join that server.

As for the wish… this is what XMPP MUCs are—IRC with niceties like moderation, optional encryption, & file uploads. You said yourself the resources for servers is small & for your stated use case, most existing clients can handle being IRC+features while also not being centralized unlike IRC.

leetnewb• 8 months ago

One thing I would note on the client side of xmpp - there does seem to be a lot of work happening under the surface. Snikket is working on an SDK to streamline modern client development. There are a couple of alpha stage clients written on it already, and maturatoin of the SDK should lower the bar for pushing clients forward.

Also independently, Movim keeps advancing and Libervia is doing a ton of cool work. I'm sure I am missing others.

tcfhgj22• 8 months ago

I tried out an alpha client once & can’t get the stupid pop-up about unverified devices to go away now.

Open app with device management (e.g. Element Desktop) and remove the unverified devices you don't intend to verify.

Regarding XMPP: With the lack of Cross Signing, key backup and consistent storage of messages, it can't be expected to provide the convenience Matrix does for the foreseeable future - just my personal opinion. The matrix-rust-sdk should it also make easy to get started with a client.

seszett• 8 months ago

I like XMPP and I use it with my family (with the Conversation client) but the web interface (converse.js) if pretty rough.

I would like to replace Matrix at work with an XMPP server, but to convince my colleagues I would have to show something better than that :/

Bayaz• 8 months ago

I have a private matrix server for a few friends. Whenever someone logs on with a new device or client it lists them as being unverified. Eventually it goes away. I really have no idea at what point verification occurs.

jeroenhd5• 8 months ago

They verify their device. Usually means opening Matrix on a other device, clicking the pop-up, and scanning a QR code or matching emoji. One device signs proof of verification of the other and exchanges encryption keys so the new device can read encrypted conversations.

Unverified devices are indistinguishable from a hacker logging in through credential stuffing/password leaks until verification is done.

It's a process similar to adding devices to Signal or WhatsApp, except with Matrix you can still log in without having physical access to another device. Useful if you only ever visit unencrypted rooms perhaps.

iqihs• 8 months ago

I think Matrix as a protocol has been pretty ineffective, as their top priority seems to be keeping data permanent and duplicated. Both performance and privacy are at the bottom of their priority list. The one good thing I can say about it is that encryption of message contents is enabled by default in conversations and available in groups, but that's about it - nothing else is, or can be, encrypted. In other words, every participating server knows who is talking to who, and how much, and when, and in what rooms, and what those rooms' names are, and what those rooms' descriptions are, and who moderates them, etc.

Meanwhile, an app like Signal can do none of that, and that's by design.

If you're looking for a privacy oriented messaging system, you'd best look elsewhere.

I'm new to Matrix and found this comment on reddit. How much of it is accurate and does it actually contribute to whether or not the future of the protocol is promising?

kachapopopow• 8 months ago

it's pretty on point, it's mostly a "trusted" platform as long as you trust the host with the messages between two people (or more?) being (optionally) encrypted.

xethos2• 8 months ago

@Arathorn would be an objectively better person to discuss this, but the Redditor isn't completely off the mark: metadata is (currently) not nearly as well-guarded on Matrix compared to Signal.

However, work is ongoing to improve the situation; more importantly, Matrix is a different threat model (in my opinion), and allows for different trade-offs.

When I use Signal, I have to trust Signal's servers and their admin team. With Matrix, we get to keep trust circles smaller (friends and family on smaller servers, where we already trust the people running them). We have no hard requirement to federate either - if I want something just for people I know, we leak less data than Signal does to the outside world. We also get to host Matrix servers in areas we're comfortable with, whether that's our living room, or any nation that isn't America.

Matrix isn't perfect, but I appreciate how quickly they're improving, and the areas they're focusing on.

tptacek5• 8 months ago

Matrix and Signal have very different objectives. Matrix wants to be an encrypted IRC or Slack. Signal wants to be a secure messenger you can entrust your life to. They are both worthy projects; there's not as much overlap as people think.

Gigachad3• 8 months ago

In the real world friends and family aren’t running their own matrix servers. At most they are signed up for whatever random one came up first in the search results.

So you end up with a similar problem to Mastodon where either you are facing problematic or inexperienced admins, servers shutting down, and everyone centralising on the main server.

Klaus234• 8 months ago

It's pretty accurate. I was a bit shocked when I saw that room names were not encrypted. I thought that was such a basic privacy requirement, and it's not hard to implement when you already have message encryption.

Matrix seems to have a lot of these structural flaws. Even the encryption praised in the Reddit post has had problems for years where messages don't decrypt. These issues are patched slowly over time, but you shouldn't need to show me a graph demonstrating how you have slowly decreased the decryption issues. There shouldn't be any to begin with! If there are, the protocol is fundamentally broken.

They are slowly improving everything, with the emphasis on "slowly". It will take years until everything is properly implemented. To answer the question of whether the future of the protocol is promising, I would say yes. This is in no small part because there are currently no real alternatives in this area. If you want an open system, this is the best option.

jeroenhd5• 8 months ago

The decryption problems I've experienced have a been fixed a while ago. There was a push to fix these last year or the year before that, and at this point I'm pretty sure only some outdated or obscure clients with old encryption liberties still suffer from these problems.

The huge amount of unencrypted metadata is pretty hard to avoid with Matrix, though. It's the inevitable result of stuffing encryption into an unencrypted protocol later, rather than designing the protocol to be encrypted from the start.

I've had similar issues with other protocols too, though. XMPP wouldn't decrypt my messages (because apparently I used the wrong encryption for one of the clients), and Signal got into some funky state where I needed to re-setup and delete all of my old messages before I could use it again. Maintained XMPP clients (both of them) seem to have fixed their encryption support and Signal now has backups so none of these problems should happen again, but this stuff is never easy.

tcfhgj22• 8 months ago

These issues are patched slowly over time, but you shouldn't need to show me a graph demonstrating how you have slowly decreased the decryption issues. There shouldn't be any to begin with! If there are, the protocol is fundamentally broken.

This is wrong, because afaik these errors happen due to corner cases and I really don't like the attitude here.

this_user• 8 months ago

I think part of the problem may be that Matrix is just pretty complex, because of its modular and decentralised design. Meanwhile, Signal is much more centralised and monolithic. And while they have added a few features over the years, its core functionality is relatively simple, and they were initially just focussed on getting that right.

Gigachad3• 8 months ago

I remember reading some of the pdf on state management in matrix. The math and logic behind working out what the current name of the group chat is made my head spin.

AJ007• 8 months ago

The "decentralization" of Matrix is true in some respects, and false in others. Which would be ok, but if all of the complex architecture and issues are in the support of being decentralized, then this seems like an early planning failure.

My suspicion is the real problem that exists now originated from the bifurcation of desktop and mobile. Mobile broke the true p2p decentralization which was easy on desktop, and the split between Android and iOS makes it worse. Users expect an experience on iOS and Android which has parity with desktop. And the entire thing has to be as good as Discord.

I've taken a hard look at all of the truly open source alternative messaging options, and almost nothing handles multi-platform very well. Even when you expand it to commercial options, for a very long time, all of the Slack clones had mediocre mobile apps -- which basically was a death sentence if you weren't Microsoft. This is true today, but I expect it will change in 2026 and onward with the rapid increase in software development driven by AI agents.

sroerick• 8 months ago

Pretty crazy, right? It almost seems like a honeypot

the_gipsy• 8 months ago

To be fair: signal means everybody trusts one central authority. Doesn't matter that it's a foundation or non-profit or whatever.

And: a phone number is still required, a PIN is not, so by default it's susceptible to phone/SIM spoofing attacks. This one really boggles my mind, it's not that I personally am afraid of this vector, but I don't understand why they would insist on phone numbers at this point.

RicoElectrico• 8 months ago

I wish FOSS communities that want an alternative to Discord or Slack ditched Matrix altogeter. It sucks for that. Better use Zulip or Mattermost, both of which are self-hostable.

Edit: I looked up and apparently Mattermost would be out of the question for their feature downgrades in the community version as of late...

broken-kebab2• 8 months ago

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe Zulip's licensing de facto restrict self-hosting solution for 10 users (others won't see notifications on their mobiles or something like that). This is important for non-commercial communities.

jrm4• 8 months ago

Okay so -- this and Bluesky.

REALLY feels like no one talks about how "permanent and duplicated" is very much an anti-feature if autonomy and safety and freedom is your goal?

Like, no actually - automatically saving everything all the time is bad. I thought we sort of already knew that.

unbolted3032• 8 months ago

I decommissioned my server 3 months ago and migrated my community back to IRC. I still had the IRC Podman containers kicking around, so that was easy.

I dealt with ~monthly issues around my devices not being correctly verified, messages not correctly decrypting, and various other rough UX edges. There seemed to be a lot of velocity in the beginning but the last couple of years have addressed approximately nothing in terms of the UX and it's a crying shame as Matrix/Element (I no longer fully understand the difference/relationship between these entities) had a lot of potential.

colordrops• 8 months ago

The rough edges are too much for even very technical users and admins, so there's no way we're going to get friends and family to adopt this.

solarkraft3• 8 months ago

but the last couple of years have addressed approximately nothing in terms of the UX

This sucks to hear. I thought they had made massive improvements in the last year or so (I don't know because I feel too burnt by past experience).

OberstKrueger• 8 months ago

Unfortunately how I feel about it too. I gave an honest effort at getting into the ecosystem and tested it out with a few close friends. The rough edges brought the experience down compared to other stuff that “just works”, and losing community support for the IRC bridge took a huge use of my own away from it.

Sanzig• 8 months ago

Let's not forget the shock image spam issue. Public Matrix channels are plagued with horrendous shock images (including CSAM). The development team seems to not care, they have a proposal for "policy servers" which is still incomplete and not supported by all server implementations.

joecool10295• 8 months ago

It’s terrible. I had to leave most channels on the matrix.org namespace because they won’t properly moderate their own server from CSAM. I dropped to 7 day media retention to lower legal liability on my own server, since there’s no way to know when one of my users will be in a channel hit with abuse.

At this point the majority use case I have for matrix is to bridge to IRC with heisenbridge and be able to use signal on my laptop through mautrix-signal and nheko. The number of native channels I’m in continues to shrink.

teekert4• 8 months ago

Let's not forget a team making a great free product. Yeah we can complain about filthy materials but imagine you working hard to build something as nice as Matrix/Element only for these low-lifes to do these horrible things to it. How annoying it must be to have to spend time battling such things.

BrenBarn7• 8 months ago

It's kind of wild to me that they haven't prioritized this more. This issue has been open for almost exactly 6 years: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/565 . This one even longer: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/836 . The Matrix permission system still doesn't even have a way to say "sending images is not allowed" (either per room or per user).

tcfhgj22• 8 months ago

policy servers show that they indeed do care

irusensei2• 8 months ago

Considering the thread context I'm curious how would IRC help with that other than people running command line or TUI clients?

Also do you want the development team to moderate self hosted chat servers? How would that work?

selfmodruntime• 8 months ago

I still can not blacklist homeservers by domain instead of ever changing IPs. Great stuff.

BrenBarn7• 8 months ago

I feel they underestimated what the MVP really is and started touting Matrix as great before it was really there, which has backfired and led to disappointment. They also went a bit too overboard on the overgeneralized idea of it being "a decentralized eventually consistent JSON database", which led to a lack of focus on its concrete usability as a chat system. I still use it and it's not bad in some respects, but it's a long, long way away from being able to attract a mass of ordinary users.

amluto• 8 months ago

You did better than I did. I installed the recommended Element app, created an account on matrix.org, tried to send a message to another user, and… gave up. Every try got stuck and eventually created an empty room or whatever they call it. I have literally never succeeded in sending or receiving a single message.

trueno3• 8 months ago

There really is no winning in the org comms/chat apps space when it comes to OSS. Matrix+element, rocket, mattermost, Zulip and so on.. feels like there’s either massive gotchas on free/self hosted or it’s wildly complicated to configure and set up. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Hosting a private irc server and you lose out on rich embeds and will need your own pastebin-like service to use, video conferencing is probably a big challenge, the need for a mobile app at many workplaces. Bleh. I look at something like slack and I’m like damn that is literally irc+ and I just hate that I don’t have the skills to build up something completely free that I could host at my org. Teams literally owned everyone when they started bundling it in and rug pulling slack. Ofc the execs at my workplace were like “hell yeah this is great” but so did my IT dept. I was so pissed. Out of the box it’s just instantly compliant which was a major driver then of course at the time it was seen as a free offering (I know they’ve since had to decouple that) which completely nuked slack at our org. I can’t even believe I’m saying this but teams actually makes collaborating slower. No one on my team uses the channels we all pin chat groups and exclusively use that. It’s literally garbage. I guess I’m just venting, I really hoped I could find something in the oss world to supplant this and I think the bar for organizations is: compliance, chat, video conf and sigh the ability to schedule in outlook.

nine_k• 8 months ago

If IRC suffices for your purposes, then Matrix, with its encryption and all, is apparently overkill.

If I were to upgrade an IRC-based community to something newer and richer, I'd go with Jabber, well-known, well-established, with a ton of various clients and several servers. Yes, it's not ideal, but it's still a massive upgrade compared to IRC, if your server supports a good list XEPs and your community members agree to use non-esoteric clients that also support them.

ErroneousBosh2• 8 months ago

If IRC suffices for your purposes, then Matrix, with its encryption and all, is apparently overkill.

IRC has encryption too. You run it over TLS.

bigfudge• 8 months ago

It’s that hard even with a user in the loop to press buttons. Verifying bots is even worse and the docs are either non existent or wrong. This is such a shame because element otherwise does exactly what we want but it makes me nervous it’s so badly supported and buggy.

Timshel• 8 months ago

Anecdotal but running a server with multiple bridges for multiple years. Had such issues initially but none recently.

tcfhgj22• 8 months ago

There seemed to be a lot of velocity in the beginning but the last couple of years have addressed approximately nothing in terms of the UX and it's a crying shame as Matrix/Element had a lot of potential.

It still has.

And with Element X they have greatly improved the UX.

Plus utd errors have been reduced by a lot.

That said, I haven't ever had issues with devices not being correctly verified ( I use that feature since it was released - and can still recover the encrypted messages of that time).

phantasmish• 8 months ago

When I looked into it the complexity of standing up and admin'ing a Matrix server was clearly either a massive "architecture smell" so bad the project was likely long-term doomed, or a deliberate choice to make it terrible to get people to pay for managed hosting.

In either case, that's a no for me dawg.

solarkraft3• 8 months ago

This is a good thing. It is (was?) all too inviting to leave clients unverified because verification is (was?) hard and annoying.

The code examples I'm aware of for clients using the first-party library also leave verification and E2EE out, FWIW.

octoberfranklin2• 8 months ago

This is supposed to be what decentralization looks like?

iamnothere• 8 months ago

It’s still decentralized. If you read the article this is about cryptographic verification, not anything about ID.

pkulak5• 8 months ago

Despite all the gnashing of teeth in this thread, this seems reasonable. This seems to only prevent you from logging into your account, with only a password, NOT verifying it (by dismissing all the prompts asking you to do so), and then sending (and receiving new!) encrypted messages anyway. I've never used an unverified Matrix account in the 6 years that I've been an active user. Verification used to be a bit finicky, but it's pretty seamless now. And once the QR code login stuff is better supported, it will be dead easy.

IlikeKitties2• 8 months ago

Despite all the gnashing of teeth in this thread, this seems reasonable

I think it's not the requirement itself that's the crucible of discussion but the issues are rather that the blog post should have explicitly defined what verification is in it's second sentence and that matrix/element still is barely useable even for reasonably technical users.

pkulak5• 8 months ago

barely useable even for reasonably technical users

My entire family (including my elderly mother) would be very interested to learn how technical they are!

Gigachad3• 8 months ago

Doesn’t verification also exchange encryption keys, letting you decrypt messages from before you logged in? I remember that being a huge issue where you would see unable to decrypt messages.

Probably just bad UX to let people skip the verification step.

pkulak5• 8 months ago

Yes. If you don’t verify, every conversation is empty.

tcfhgj22• 8 months ago

Doesn’t verification also exchange encryption keys, letting you decrypt messages from before you logged in?

if you use key backup

Aurornis3• 8 months ago

Despite all the gnashing of teeth in this thread, this seems reasonable

I empathize a lot with the negative experiences shared in this thread.

I think the problem is that every little decision in Matrix might be reasonable to the people who have complete context about the decision, but all of the churn and rough edges have added up to a very bumpy ride. Not only that, but it has been a poorly communicated and documented ride as many in this comment section can attest.

I suspect all of these issues and changes feel like no problem to people who are active in Matrix every day and have a support network to chat with where they all get through the issues by sharing tips and info. For the rest of us who are casual users who only occasionally log in it feels like I’m rolling the dice every time I have to use it. Some times it works like it did last time, some times I have to go on a 30 minute adventure with Google and play games across devices to get it back into a working state again.

snerbles• 8 months ago

Not only that, but it has been a poorly communicated and documented ride as many in this comment section can attest.

The guides are written for cryptographic infrastructure nerds and not regular normal users that have a habit of forgetting their own passwords after six months. Not to mention the fact that the Element UI tends to churn a lot.

I didn't even know that they deprecated creating new passphrases, and that's what I was telling my users to do!

ikkun2• 8 months ago

seems like it's just that element (the official, and most popular client) will ignore messages from unverified devices, but since it's part of the spec, other clients that want to be spec-compliant will implement this too. I don't think most other clients follow the spec that closely though.

I'm in favor of the change, the only downside I can think of is users with esoteric clients or simple bots that don't support verification won't be able to post to encrypted rooms with element users.

I feel like I'm alone in having good luck with matrix. I've been self hosting for nearly a decade to a handful of users, and it was a bit rough troubleshooting the encryption problems back when element was still called riot, but it's been a number of years since any of us have had a single encryption issue, and we added a new user recently with no trouble. we're still on 'element classic' though, the new 'element x' is a bit of a mess and loses the background sync feature, you need to set up a unified push server which I'm not looking forward to.

prurigro• 8 months ago

For what it's worth, I've been using element x with unified push for a month or so now and I get notifications with message contents without any delay. Maybe they fixed the issue you're worrying about?

Self hosting the call/video feature became a lot more complicated though (and it's incompatible with the old system).

ikkun2• 8 months ago

my issues with element x are with the client itself, mostly missing features and bad UX. the main reason I don't want unified push is, it's just yet another thing for me to install and maintain, plus all my users need the client app installed. the ntfy server app even defaults to having a full web interface, fortunately it's possible to disable but it's just so much stuff to replace what used to be built-in to the app, to supposedly solve a battery life problem that I've never experienced.

I'm still going to get around to it, because element classic will be deprecated eventually. one of my users is on iOS and has a well-known bug with images not loading, which will probably never get fixed because they're focusing on the new client. and unfortunately I do have users that expect voice calls to work, so it sucks to hear that'll be annoying too.

tcfhgj22• 8 months ago

no, you are not alone, though I don't host

eTomte2• 8 months ago

I've had mostly good luck with Matrix too. Been self-hosting since 2022 and while there have been frustrations it has been pretty stable for basic chat.

g-b-r3• 8 months ago

One of the super confusing things is that even if you only use a single client it can be verified or not.

That's confusing even for very technical people; because, it simply doesn't make sense.

Saying "verified or primary client with recovery keys generated" seems too long, so they should just say something like "less secure" on the "unverified" sessions.

rabf• 8 months ago

Does anyone have any experience with Keet as an alternative?

https://keet.io/

eTomte2• 8 months ago

Is Keet Open Source? Last time I looked into it (admittedly a few years ago) it was not.

grishka4• 8 months ago

"Now the end-to-end encryption will leak into the UX even more and you better like it"

I'll say it again: E2EE will never become mainstream unless someone somehow manages to implement it such that it's completely transparent to the user while keeping all the features that people have come to expect from IM apps, like server-stored conversation history or support for multiple devices. By "completely transparent" I mean that the user doesn't have to do any extra actions whatsoever to make it work.

joecool10295• 8 months ago

I mean we’re there for Signal. The parts that suck still are regarding access/retention of old messages which is an area Matrix is ironically slightly better about. But Signal we don’t need to think about verification, at worst it says this asshole has a new identity and then I have to tell them I’ve reset my iPhone for the 4th time this week…

Normal users do find retention important even if privacy/security minded users find value in ephemerality.

BrenBarn7• 8 months ago

Can you use Signal across multiple devices?

josephcsible3• 8 months ago

If that's true, then E2EE will never become mainstream. Consider this scenario: "My phone got lost/stolen/broken, so I just got a new one. I haven't logged in to this app since I got my last phone, so I forget my credentials for it. I'll reset them through my email. What do you mean my conversation history is gone?"

That's not really far-fetched. If you can get your conversation history back in that scenario, then so can the server operator so it's not real E2EE, and if you can't, then by your statement it won't become mainstream.

grishka4• 8 months ago

If that's true, then E2EE will never become mainstream

Yes? :)

Given the choice, the vast majority of people would pick convenience over the kind of security that requires this much effort.

BrenBarn7• 8 months ago

I more or less agree. And I also agree with the other commenter who says this may mean e2ee will never become mainstream. I think a lot of e2ee enthusiasts don't realize that the overwhelmingly most important feature for a messaging system is "when I log in, I can see all my messages". If there is a chance of that not happening, you're going to lose a lot of users.

I think there's the potential for a slight middle ground, but it would involve giving up a lot of the e2ee bells and whistles that privacy enthusiasts enthuse about (like perfect forward secrecy). You could image for instance a system where you have a single e2ee password and your data is encrypted on the server with that password. When you log in, you supply two passwords: your login password and your e2ee password. Then you have access to everything.

This tends to irritate people on both sides, since you can still lose your messages if you forget your e2ee password, and your privacy guarantees are also weaker, since the e2ee password can be a single point of failure that allows someone to read your messages. But people already rely on this level of security in other contexts. For instance, some cloud backup solutions encrypt your backup with a single passphrase. People are okay with having one password to unlock their entire hard drive's worth of data but not with one password to unlock their chat history?

I think it's worth exploring the space of e2ee solutions to find something that finds the balance between the levels of privacy and convenience that most users want. The thing is that existing apps that tout e2ee often do so to appeal to hardcore privacy advocates or people like dissidents in authoritarian states who are at risk of death if their messages are discovered. This level of security simply isn't a concern for the average person, and so they're not willing to take on the inconveniences that go along with it.

monerozcash2• 8 months ago

E2EE will never become mainstream

iMessage and Whatsapp are both mainstream.

grishka4• 8 months ago

Technically they are, but neither of them fits the strict definition of a E2EE messaging app, while also still hurting the UX.

Whatsapp is very insistent about backing up your messages to cloud services without encryption. To use it on desktop, you have to make everything go through your phone. And, afaik, you still can't transfer message backups between Android and iOS.

Even disregarding the extreme gatekeeping, iMessage relies on Apple managing your encryption keys so there are no confidentiality guarantees. Apple can, at any moment, give themselves a key to decrypt your messages.

Both Whatsapp and iMessage are proprietary, so it's also the case of "please trust us that we've implemented it the way we claim we did".

pfych• 8 months ago

I use Thunderbird as my main Matrix client since it's already always open on my PC and is Lightweight. Whenever I open Element or any other client (Nheko, etc.) they all complain about each-other being unverified.

Clicking verify in any client does nothing. No popups in any other clients - doesn't ever seem to do anything. Sometimes Element will pop up a QR reader but there's no QR presented in the other clients. The UX around Matrix is a nightmare.

beeflet• 8 months ago

I am in the same boat. It is ridiculous and shows no signs of improving.

eredengrin2• 8 months ago

Not sure how often they update these pages, but Thunderbird is still listed as beta on matrix.org clients page [0], and I remember trying it out some time back and it was indeed very beta (maybe not even beta). It didn't feel like it was getting much maintenance so I stopped using it. I think it's fair to expect bugs in beta releases.

rclkrtrzckr• 8 months ago

I hope beeper will continue to work, as it's based on Matrix iirc.

cowhax• 8 months ago

The problem with Matrix adaptation has always been E2EE, or rather, the annoying implementation of it

kogasa240p• 8 months ago

Haven't used matrix for a few years now, last time I used it everything was a slow, buggy mess.

device verification

Kinda weird because it's a protocol, but then again matrix is extremely centralized.

teekert4• 8 months ago

I love Martix/Element, and about the only thing I don't like is that I need moar features!

We have a space with several rooms for our FOSDEM devroom, it's been working flawlessly, including for all our video calls with many participants. Thanx Element team!!

mihaaly• 8 months ago

So compromising identities might happen - this seems to be a leading reason to verify devices - but can device verification be compromised too?

teekert4• 8 months ago

I always use my master key, verifying using other devices does not always work optimally in my experience. Maybe I switched to ElementX too soon...

crossroadsguy• 8 months ago

I am not sure the founder is reading this. I tried googling but couldn't find it - I recall the hn handle being something like Atheon. Not that hn sends mention notifications.

Matrix is something that had my eyes lit after years or being burnt/disappointed by communication apps (Signal included). I had converted/migrated a lot of people to it (I mean of course they didn't "convert" but they had it and were replying to me) from a country where WhatsApp is essentially "basic need" today – along with water, air, food, and shelter and that too in an era when it was not even stable. After that I just didn't know what the hell happened. Matrix, Vector, Riot, Element – things just kept happening. App was never an end user app and it became very clear that it was not the intention either. To be honest it didn't look like a replacement for something like Slack or something like IRC either. It was trying to become something which it seemed/seems has no end goal or destination i.e a clear roadmap. As if the goal is to develop cool features and just put them haphazardly together which I am afraid often results in something Mary Shelley wrote.

I still login from time to time and I don't understand what is happening. Something I see this notification, something that, sometimes I see there's a message pending, sometimes I see I have a chat recovered (old/stale; because there's no one I know uses it anymore), sometimes I see a certain chat is not recovered because some verification or decryption (or something) failed, sometimes I see (or understand it) that I might another active and verified device to recover certain messages. I had created some groups and of course they remain abandoned - but no, few og them were filled were porn and the kind of some was scary because that vector/riot/element account is connected to my real ID including the email and I was scared shitless. I tried deleting them but I couldn't. Next time I will try harder or just try to make it private after kicking everyone out. I will still keep the account. Never say never :)

I sadly have moved from writing enthusiastic to sad to disappointing comments to not even paying attention to it when there's a Matrix/Element news now. I think I don't even notice it. I think that's the worse kind of eventuality in this context. Anyway, I wish you all luck and I am sure you all know what you are doing.

tcfhgj22• 8 months ago

Matrix, Vector, Riot, Element – things just kept happening. App was never an end user app and it became very clear that it was not the intention either.

Element X definitely is.

adham-omran• 8 months ago

Last time I used Matrix for our internal team notifications were beyond broken and we moved to Zulip, verification and authentication were also very funky at the time, I don't dare to try it again.

goku122• 8 months ago

There seems to be a lot of confusion regarding what verification is all about. I'm going to list out what it means, based on my reading of their documentation[1] and on what worked for me. It includes some essential preparations that you MUST TAKE if you have access to your account. This is to ensure that all your devices are verified, that they all have access to all encrypted messages and that you don't ever get fully locked out.

DISCLAIMER: I have no direct experience with Matrix or Element code base. I have no affiliation with them either. So this isn't official and a few errors can be expected. Please let me know if you notice any. I will keep this corrected for as long as I can. Otherwise I'll add the errata as child comments.

1. Matrix has TWO levels of authorized access.

2. The first level is where you enter your regular username and password, that's unique to your homeserver (like matrix.org). It looks like OIDC/OAuth2 to me. On being authenticated at this level, your client (Element, Fluffy, Cinny, etc) is able to access the messages meant for you. At this stage, you're able to read any unencrypted messages. Most community chatrooms are unencrypted by choice.

3. The encryption used for your encrypted messages is end-to-end. Their encryption keys are named 'room keys' in Element (there are several of them). They are not directly available to your homeserver (otherwise, it wouldn't be end-to-end). Similarly, there seems to be an 'Identity key' (presumably a cryptographic private key that makes you the owner of the account and is needed for some account operations). This key is also not directly available to the homeserver.

4. The client app just logged in and the server doesn't know your room keys or ID keys. They're known only to your other clients. So now you need to transfer them from those clients to the new client without divulging them to any servers in between. Once that's done, your new client will be able to decrypt all your encrypted messages and join those discussions.

This process of transferring your room keys and the ID key to your new client is the second authorization step known as 'Verification'. (I presume it's called verification because your new client can now prove its authenticity using your ID key.)

5. Verification can be done in three different ways. The first two are manual methods and are rarely used. We will discuss these two later. The other is using a 'verification request'. This is straightforward. Your new client requests the already verified clients attached to your account for your room and ID keys. Any verified client can respond. However, it needs to first verify that your new client is really yours, and not someone who used your leaked password or hacked your account. To do this, the clients currently offer you two methods - one using a QR code and the other using a sequence of icons.

If you select QR code, your verified client will show you a QR code that you need to scan with your new unverified client. Since it proves that both clients are in the possession of the same person, the verified client then proceeds to transfer the keys to the new client, finishing the verification. Now if you chose the Icon sequence instead, then the verified client creates a random sequence of icons that it sends to the new clients. Then both the clients display it to the user. If the user accepts on both device that the icon sequences are identical, it's the required proof that both clients are with same person. The rest of it is the same as before.

6. So far, so good. If you were able to complete till step 5, the new client is verified and now you can carry on with your business. Now we address the situation of what happens if you are not able to do any of these. Just assume that all your clients got logged out together for some reason (yes, it has happened before). Now none of your clients or the server has any of the room keys and the ID key needed to prove your ownership (crypto authn) or access your encrypted messages, even after you log back in. The only solution is to load the room keys and ID key from a backup. This is why it is IMPORTANT TO BACKUP your room and ID keys.

7. There are two ways to backup the room keys and the ID key. These two methods are also the two manual methods of verification that I mentioned above. The first method is to back up the keys on the homeserver itself. It's convenient because all your clients can access them at any time and keep the room keys updated as they change or new ones are added. This feature is called 'Key Storage' in Settings/Encryption tab of Element. It's enabled by default. ALWAYS keep it enabled.

You may be wondering how it can be end-to-end encryption if the private keys are stored on the homeserver itself. If you're, then you're correct. They are stored in encrypted form on the server key storage. The decryption keys for that is available only to the clients. So while the server holds the keys, it cannot access any of them.

8. Here is your first opportunity to do something about accidental losses. The decryption key for the key storage can be downloaded and preserved in a secure manner. Perhaps write it down on a paper or put it in the password manager. This key is called the 'Recovery key'. You can download or change it from Element's Settings/Encryption tab. ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR RECOVERY KEY.

You can use the recovery key instead of the QR code or the icon sequence to verify your new clients. There are two differences from the previous method. The first is that you can enter the recovery key directly into the new unverified client. The verified clients are not needed here. The second is that this is possible even if all your clients gets logged out. Again, this is why it's very important to BACKUP YOUR RECOVERY KEY!!

9. Besides setting up server key storage, you can take one additional step. This is the second manual method of verification. You can download and backup all the room keys and your ID key on your local system. This option is available as the 'Export keys' button on the Settings/Encryption tab. When you do so, you'll be asked for a password. This password is used to encrypt the file with all those keys, so that they don't sit unencrypted on your disk. This file can be backed up as such, but you can encrypt it again if you prefer.

You can use these keys also to verify your account. You'll need the above password to decrypt the keys file. However, this method still has one big CAVEAT. I suspect that the keys file need to be updated regularly, since there will be new keys when you join rooms. So if you use this method to validate, it's likely that your client won't be able to decrypt the rooms/messages for which it doesn't have the copy of their key. But this is still worth doing, because it contains your ID key which can be used to verify all your devices again as a last ditch measure (if your homeserver happens to quit or something).

10. Now let's just say that you're a careless ### who didn't do any of the above. You still have the option to nuke it! That is to Reset your cryptographic identity from Settings/Encryption. I presume that this just discards all your previous keys and creates a new private ID key. Since all the clients can now access this key, your account is verified again. But you will not be able to access any of your previous encrypted conversations. And the homeserver helps you along by discarding all your previous conversations, room subscriptions and settings. So now you're left with a cleanly empty account. But hey! You have your verified account back!

So, in summary:

1. Always verify all your clients

2. Setup server key storage (it is enabled by default, don't disable it) and backup the recovery key

3. Backup the room keys and ID keys on your local system. Use it for recovery/verification only in the worst case

4. Don't forget the password you used to encrypt the above file (just sayin)

NOTE: I intentionally left out some crypto details from the above (like session keys) to avoid making it any more complex. If you're unhappy with those omissions, please just leave a comment.

[1] https://element.io/en/help#encryption

Dilettante_• 8 months ago

Can't wait for a bug to un-verify me on both my devices and lock me out of my account.

lysp• 8 months ago

I'm pretty sure you get recovery keys with it also.

sschueller• 8 months ago

I want to switch to SimpleX Chat[1] but at the moment there are issues with battery usage on android devices because of the way notifications are done. I hope this[2] or some other solution get merged soon even if there is a slight impact on anonymity.

[1] https://simplex.chat/

[2] https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat/pull/6205

jbaiter• 8 months ago

I tried implementing a Matrix bot a few months back, and it was an absolutely miserable experience, since Device Verification/E2EE was not working with any of the available open source Python implementations I found.

I then stumbled upon their internal Rust SDK[1] that they use for Element X, which is actually quite nice, and even has FFI bindings for Python and Kotlin[2]. Unfortunately the documentation was really lacking at the time. I managed to put something together with the help of an LLM and the source code and examples to find my way around the various APIs, and it actually works with emoji verification and E2EE (although there are weird bugs around synchronization, but that's probably just an API misuse on my end).

It seems they've improved the documentation since and even provide a reference client[3] to see how things work.

[1] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk

[2] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/tree/main/bind...

[3] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/tree/main/labs...

photios• 8 months ago

Conspiracy theory time...

Matrix is the Firefox of chat apps. Castrated on purpose and kept around as a "see how much worse than WhatsApp things can really be!"

irusensei2• 8 months ago

I had a more pleasant experience with SchildiChat hosted on a web server than the desktop Element clients.

I don't like the way groups/chatrooms are displayed to be honest. Its confusing. It feels like its trying to get away from the "server room/#somechat" model that works well with IRC and even with trendy current products like Discord.

pqs• 8 months ago

I've been using Delta Chat with a lot of success. It is easy, it works, bots are easy and the concept is improving. They even plan to have forward secrecy. So, give it a try. If you explored it a long time ago, try again, many things have improved in that ecosystem.

josephb• 8 months ago

Yeah it's a lot more "just works" than Matrix, still some limitations but improving quickly.

kuon• 8 months ago

I really want to love matrix but it always turned bad/broken at some point. I switched to XMPP. No issue ever, but the clients are not very good.

jones89176• 8 months ago

FYI: here are the videos of the latest matrix conference: [1]. I think there's a lot of interesting stuff going on!

also, instead of hosting your own server or using some (more or less well-financed) public servers, you can simply throw some money at [2] to pay for hosting for your group of friends or family or whatever. (not affiliated, but I like the idea)

[1] https://media.ccc.de/b/conferences/matrix-conf [2] https://etke.cc/

superkuh• 8 months ago

This basically means that Matrix will stop working for my parents and other family: the only people I use matrix for. We started during the pandemic for the video chat element. But Riot.im/Element.io changes to the homeserver over these many years have made it so none of our accounts properly verify. I can't even get my account to properly verify and I'm a huge nerd. We put up with it because of inertia and chat still working fine. But this? I guess it's the end.

Riot.im/Element.io really knows how to shoot themselves in the foot.

chrisjj2• 8 months ago

This security update will give you assurance that when you receive a message from a contact, you can effortlessly assume it’s really from them.

Here's the thing. You can already! Whether you should or not.

nottorp2• 8 months ago

From an outsider's point of view, what is this "verifying"?

Because it sounds like "we'll put them in a database so we can sell it" to me...

tcfhgj22• 8 months ago

cryptographic process to poof that the devices you use in fact belong to you (as cryptographic identity)

nottorp2• 8 months ago

To poof to who?

Where is that data stored?

What happens if I'm on holiday in Paris and drop my phone, which is the only device I have with me, in the Seine?

Sounds like more passkeys security theater/inconvenience to me.

wkat42422• 8 months ago

Ugh.. I loved Matrix but I'm starting to hate the way they force these things through. Also last month they removed the categories (People, Rooms, Favourites) from Element Web just like that. Making it very hard to use as I use it. I had to roll back to an older version. They seem to be focused on whatever commercial or consumer experience but they are ruining it for power users.

My matrix server isn't even publicly accessible and users can't sign up. I don't federate with the network. So these issues are irrelevant to me. There should still be a way to turn it off. Because many of the bridge bots I run can't verify.

Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory

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