Matrix: One Chat Protocol to Rule Them All

battlepenguin.com

4 pointsdjsumdog2 comments

We are seeing more competition over time in social media, which is a good thing in my opinion. But fragmentation of messaging options seems far less beneficial.

I am not yet feeling compelled to pay for Matrix server benefits, but if I was able to pay for some solution like this where I got some trusted managed bridges, I'd be all on board. However I'm not sure what that trust model would look like.

I don't think it'd really be possible considering the way Facebook and Google do security. You couldn't have chat flowing through a paid provider's data center, and it's unlikely either would open up a paid option to their chat APIs unless it were mandated under some type of consumer laws.

In the examples in the post, I have to pump my normal web connections through the VM/IP of the machine that's doing the bridging. Maybe a provider could use a proxy you install on your local machine, but many people these days have laptops they don't keep on full time. You'd have to install the proxy on a Pi and then you've reduced your audience for such a commercial offering quite a bit, to people who know how to do this but don't want to put in the effort to setup the services themselves.

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