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fedpost

Are there any real options in this space for something that is

- E2EE

- Large group capable (100+ users)

- FOSS + self hostable

- Not riddled with security issues

- Relatively easy to use for iOS and Android users (safe for normies)

I help run a Matrix server for people who are at risk from the current administration and I can attest to all of the issues mentioned plus a few more.

I'd rather not move to something as hostile as Discord and while we've tried Stoat it's infinitely more buggy and the lack of iOS apps is causing problems.

Rocket chat is interesting but E2EE is early in development, lots of security issues at last check.

Simplex isn't going to be better for large group stuff, it has the same fundamental sync issues Matrix does and the devs are more interested in crypto than fixing that.

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Nope, just Matrix. Second best option is XMPP with various cobbled together XEPs but that has its own set of problems.

For all the (sometimes rightful) grief Matrix gets, it's essentially the only solution targeting hard problems like multi-device encrypted group chats[0] or truly federated multi-user chats. It can also be a very quickly moving ecosystem, which is difficult to handle when you're an open federated spec. Hence why several of the complaints in this post are caused by old and no longer supported clients and servers.

[0] Infamously, WhatsApp and LINE both support encrypted chats but all the encryption keys are stored on your phone, so you can only have one phone working at a time and desktop access is actually routed through it.

> and desktop access is actually routed through it

I think this is not true anymore. I’ve had it working with while my phone was off.

I'm sure you've tried or at least considered it, but you didn't explicitly mention it so: XMPP? The MUC extension has no problem with large groups (after a certain point you have to disable presence advertisement and reflections and whatnot, but that's way north of 100)

XMPP has several ways of doing e2ee, the most popular being OMEMO.

The challenge will be finding clients that supports OMEMO for MUCs (multi user chats) on each platform. They exist on desktop, at the very least.

This is a non-technical group so the main concern I have is the same with Element vs Element X vs Fluffy vs ......

It's definitely tempting though, it seems to be by far the most flexible solution.

It's an effect of walled gardens that the communication method is conflated with the app. But people understand well that Outlook and Thunderbird is both just email. I think this analogy helps when explaining XMPP.

and to add to that, XMPP has extremely simple and familiar "WhatsApp"-like clients, so there's really not much of a barrier to entry. Especially if you join by a user sending you an easy-invite link (XEP-0401). All you have to do is pick a username and you are good to go.

I would also challenge OP on the relevance of E2EE for very large MUCs: beyond a certain point, the room can't reasonably be considered private. With current (Signal-style, also found in XMPP, Matrix, …) crypto, you are encoding ever message for every user/client joined, which scales as poorly as one can guess, but is still adequate for small groupchats.

MLS stands to rise that threshold (and there's work in progress to include it in XMPP), but that certainly won't address the fact that this is just privacy theater.

Doesn't XMPP check all those, and more? I run my local _ejabberd_ for a decade and some, and I'm joined to a couple 100+-users rooms. On my phone, I have a whatsapp-like experience with _Conversations_, that even the least tech-savvy in my circles use happily. On the laptop, I have _Gajim_, which is more "banquet-style" and serves to follow along fast-paced large rooms, most of which happen to be on IRC, but I don't even mind that, thanks to the _biboumi_ bridge which unceremoniously connects me there as if I was a regular IRC client. I also keep an eye on _movim_ which promises a more discord-like experience: it has gamers-style voice/video/screen-sharing rooms, it has spaces (although the paint isn't completely dry on those), and it's working on scaling-up calls to very large rooms by having galene as a SFU.

What I find also amazing in all this is that all the client/server/bridge names I brought up are independent and healthy projects. XMPP is very mature and decentralized. Not just in theory by nature of its protocol, but practically/politically by its many implementations across many stacks and implementers across many countries.

You‘re describing Wire. One could quibble about the FOSS part but it is open source (gplv3 or agpl). It’s used by a bunch of European governments and agencies, as well as American agencies, has regular security reviews and thanks to MLS, supports groups with more than 2k clients. Self hosting is a bit of a pain, but people are doing it.

Give it a try

I would love to move to wire, but the issue I've run into is that we'd need a custom client to move push notifications off their infra and that's a non-starter for iOS users because of app store policies (thanks Apple).

We'd be happy to pay them to host but for our size we'd be paying many thousands per year which is insane for chat.

We (https://phnx.im/about) are building something new (https://air.ms). The website doesn’t yet mention self-hosting and federation, but we’d like to get there as well. Beyond that, our focus is on combining good UX with state-of-the-art security. It might not float everybody’s boat, but it should satisfy the list above.

We are in an early phase right now, where we test the product with a limited number of people, hence the invitation-only approach. We intend to drop that towards the end of the year if all goes well.

We helped co-author MLS, and we also contribute to the MIMI IETF working group. We’d like Air to be as standards-based as possible.

We are also curious to learn about specific problems that folks think have not been solved yet in the space.

how will federation compare to Matrix?

Maybe Delta Chat?

UX feels less polished yet snappier than Element-Matrix and the project seems pretty active.

https://delta.chat/

Chatto is what I am starting to lean into. Still early in development, but self-hosted version is available and the dev has been responsive and nice to chat to.

Came here to say that. https://chatto.run/

That’s Matrix. Matrix has spent too much time chasing Discord, with spaces, and group video chat, and email with federation. And too much time chasing Slack with threads. But everything you mentioned is core Matrix chat and works great on every client.

Yeah, it's a frustrating situation because we have hundreds of people and the constant state-sync issues and assorted account problems are making it hard for non-technical people to participate.

Matrix still doesn't have a client with built in push to talk as far as I'm aware. The relevant issue on the Element github has been sat there for 8 years now

It does not seem like a serious project, at least not one being developed by folks who have user experience in mind

Same for multi-account support in Element Desktop. However: The new breed of clients (Element X) has this, along with many other improvements. This is probably what the happy user featured in the article was using. They recently (in the last few years) started to focus on UX, with what I would call some success.

They had more important user experience things to work on than push to talk (no offense)

I've never used matrix for more than 10 minutes, but I'd like to counter this with WhatsApp. WhatsApp has a swipe up to talk. This feature when used in a group effectively sends audio from you walking in your pocket to potentially thousands of people.

Internet groups are littered with complaints about this feature. But there is no way to turn it off and meta appears to not give a sh*t.

So, I'm not sure you can really argue that Matrix is not serious when that is the competition.

I disagree. All these things are pretty needed. They had a lot of other projects ongoing that they spent time one, like full time developers for VR and a bunch of other things. But overall its just a tricky thing to run a project like this.

Core matrix is still an insanely complex and clunky protocol that's still struggling to stabilize and scale after more than a decade. That's not on spaces , threads or video-chats (which are mostly client-side features).

XMPP

Email.

keet.io

Might be too P2P for your taste though.

Have you tried XMPP (with OMEMO)?

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