> Practically speaking, that means that people and organisations running a Matrix server with open registration must verify the ages of users in countries which require it. Last summer we announced a series of changes to the terms and conditions of the Matrix.org homeserver instance, to ensure UK-based users are handled in alignment with the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA).
At least you can self-host matrix and messages are end to end encrypted, unlike IRC.
Practically speaking, I would just ignore this requirement. The UK government has no jurisdiction on this side of the pond.
Anyway, my main experience of Matrix is "failed to decrypt message". It's... not great. I wish it were better.
Unable to decrypt has improved quite a bit fwiw
There are a few IRC clients that support OTR. irssi-otr is one [1] weechat-otr is another [2]. Pidgin though I have not used it in a very long time. Hexchat using an always work in progress plugin. There may be others.
OTR could use some updates to include modern ciphers similar to the recent work of OpenSSH but probably good enough for most people.
E2EE aside having chat split up into gazillions of self hosted instances makes it much harder for chat to be hoovered up all in one place. It takes more effort to target each person and that becomes a government scalability issue. Example effort: [3]
[1] - https://github.com/cryptodotis/irssi-otr
[2] - https://github.com/mmb/weechat-otr
[3] - https://archive.ph/4wi5t
Additionally, OTRv3 does not allow multiple clients per account, which makes it unusable for anyone who wants to chat from two devices.
(In my case, all the old broken guitar pedals and vintage computers littering my house have no bearing on the state of my workstations and gigging setup)
Why not provide the URL
Some people cannot access archive.today sites
These sites also serve CAPTCHAs. They block users who prefer not to use Javascript for non-interactive www use, e.g., reading documents
The source URL is at the top of the page as is for every archive.{is|ph|today} snapshot.
- notes left there for work, family organization, etc basically things for which an email is "too much" but a small scrap of text seen by some serve the purpose well
- calls, whether audio-only or audio + video
For social use, I see Lemmy or Nostr/Habla more than Matrix. But for all of this, there's a major lack of a single app that is easy go install-able, pip install-able, or cargo build-able without a gazillion dependencies and a thousand setup problems, to the point that most people just choose Docker, using stuff made by others that they know almost nothing about because setting up and maintaining these solutions is just too complex.
In that kind of environment, end to end encryption really doesn't add value.
Even without registering my nick, I would expect a modern protocol to keep my pm communication private by default.
Now you can cryptographically check to who you are talking.
No other party can read your plain text.
You can pick any cryptographic property you like future proofing or deniability, etc.
Becouse IRC is just very nice transport.
And clients can be very easily scrypted to encrypt and display just human readable text.
You can even relay messages to wherever you want, HR lady, video player, anywhere.
Try that with Matrix or Discord ;)
However server side... :) Looked probably twice to hosting Matrix server and Java part was fat no no. And Discord one-click "servers" ? :)
Edit:
Ok, can't find any Java in Matrix servers context... Must be I messed it with Signal server.