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Comment by lima | Hacker News Reader

How are they supposed to make money?

I distrust for-profit messenger apps, no matter how good their intentions are. Sooner or later, they'll sell my data :(

The reason we can trust Matrix is that it's free software, and it's decentralized.

I share your distrust, which is one of the reasons I'm not a big fan of Discord. I don't know where Riot's revenue will come from, but Matrix [1] (and Riot by extension [2]) support end-to-end encryption. As others have said you can also set up your own server.

[1] https://matrix.org/blog/2016/11/21/matrixs-olm-end-to-end-en...

[2] https://medium.com/@RiotChat/exciting-new-riot-release-get-r...

I absolutely wish Matrix could crush Discord. An entire generation of users came out burned by programs like Skype, Hangouts, MSM, Facebook Messenger, etc and then threw themselves eagerly into another closed ecosystem messenger just because it was one of the first to manage a really performant web client.

I think it can, but it will take time. It is up to the community and userbase to adopt it as much as it is up to the team behind the software.

Yeah I think the potential is there, but Riot will probably need features like Push to Talk and other gaming-oriented stuff.

We are not going to sell your data, nor can we (especially if it’s end-to-encrypted or sitting on someone else’s server)! The plan for making $ at New Vector is to provide paid hosted services of various kinds instead. (I work on Matrix).

The original plan was to sell related software and services to telecoms companies. The parent company that funded development of Matrix already has similar business relationships with them. Think e.g. a Brazilian phone company.

I think the idea is that those phone companies are scared of WhatsApp and Messenger. It's to their advantage to fund an open, federated messenger bus, so their attempts to compete with them work well globally.

This B2B market has the virtue that it allows improvement and maintenance of an open, consumer application, without contradicting revenue from business uses.

I'm not sure if this is still the ultimate revenue plan, would love to know!

I'm not sure.

But I'm also not sure they need to have any of your data.

The riot.im client lets you connect to your own Matrix server rather than an "official" one, so they're not really able to monitor your usage or know who you are unless the app is phoning home.

Maybe it's collecting analytics data? Would love to know. I only use the Riot.im app on mobile and use other clients for desktop usage.

Analytics is there, depending on platform it's either opt-in or opt-out. Android is opt-out for now, desktop seems to be opt-in. Not sure about web.

web and desktop are opt-out, but it all is very minimal and redacts anything personal

- Dev who wrote Riot's Analytics

Also the latest development version adds transparency as to exactly what it collects

Does riot.im will support 2FA?

> Sooner or later, they'll sell my data

Digital oil. Makes the world go 'round.

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