I wanted to find a proper Marxist Leninist instance/community to ask this, because everywhere else people may not care.
I’ve been slowly moving my close people and even the people I work with to Matrix for messaging, and I have been suggesting that they download Element for it. And for me this is beyond privacy reasons. It’s to stay away from Meta, Google, and the like.
But recently I’ve been doing some digging and Element has been proudly posting about it’s work with NATO, US armed forces, and German armed forces. They also have an “ethics” page that clarifies that they don’t just work with anyone. For example they said they don’t work with countries sanctioned by the US, EU, or UK. They’ve also mentioned they don’t work with governments that have “human rights issues”.
I’m feeling very conflicted about this whole thing now and I’m not sure what to do. It might have been even fine and I might have written off Element as a private entity and just switched apps if not for the Matrix Foundation also being closely working with Element, sharing resources, people, and also boosting each other on social media like Mastodon.
I even questioned the Managing Director of the Matrix Foundation on mastodon and they first said they don’t see how NATO is imperialistic, then said anyone using Matrix is a good thing because we need to fight “authoritarian enabling Big Tech”. Which I agree with if they weren’t actively collaborating with said authoritarians.
Please redirect m e if this is not the right place for this.
XMPP is what you want. The clients are less polished but the server is much simpler to host and much much simpler to admin.
I can’t recommend the switch enough.
I set up Zulip for some friends a while back, and I can very much recommend that as well. It’s a bit like Slack in terms of use, but every conversation is threaded by default. This makes it really nice when you check messages now and then and want to see if there are any interesting conversations happening.
Yeah I’m finding the clients hard to navigate. I can do it for myself, but to recommend to people, I’m unable to decide which to pick.
Edit: What did you mean by can’t recommend the switch?
Edit: What did you mean by can’t recommend the switch?
I’m not the commenter, but the saying means they recommend it so much that it’s not possible for them to recommend it more than they’re already doing.
Monocles is the best client I’ve found. It’s the one I recommend.
And yeah, the other response has it right. I meant XMPP is so much better that I am unable to make the argument to switch with enough emphasis to do it justice.
Monocles chat is a fork of Conversations, and afaik the latter hasn’t updated OMEMO 2 for a couple years since this issue was created. This blog post from August 2024 mentions various clients that haven’t updated from OMEMO 0.3.0 to 0.4.0 at the time, and Conversations still seems to not support AES-256-CBC since the commit for this file hasn’t changed for 4 years.
I’m plan to use Profanity (code), but as far as I am aware and have heard, the only other clients to have updated their OMEMO implementations are (KDE desktop app) Kaidan (via QXmpp) and (Windows UWP app) UWPX (code) (also archived January 28, 2024). It would be nice to have a native Android/iOS GUI app that I can recommend to people to use with XMPP and implements OMEMO 2 or at least AES-256-CBC, but I don’t know of any at this time. If anyone here can recommend me such an application, I would be happy.
So based on this table, it looks like aTalk and Moxxy for Android exist, and both have OMEMO 0.8.3 implemented.
From my comment in lemmy.ml in regards to security issues:
Many Signal alternatives also have security issues of their own, often making them less secure than Signal. This includes Matrix and XMPP. In the blog post regarding XMPP+OMEMO, the author replies to a question about which would be better than Signal, Matrix, and XMPP with this suggestion:
Anyone who cares about metadata resistance should look at Cwtch, Ricochet, or any other Tor-based solution. Not a mobile app. Not XMPP. Not Matrix.
In regards to Ricochet, not having a mobile app version makes it difficult to recommend to less tech savvy people.
Credit to @electric_nan@lemmy.ml for pointing me to the blog post.
I agree with you. I also saw that the list of “off limits” countries comes from the “Freedom House”.
A non-profit, “pro-democracy” organization, which lists “israel” as a ‘free’ country.
Their former president (just left to work at Voice of America) is Michael Abramowitz, and while he isn’t a raging genocidal zionist (at least from what I’ve read Here) he is a pro-west dog, and it’s pathetic Element, and Matrix use this NGO as the voice of truth.
Matrix was also made by an israeli company, I don’t know about you guys, but I can’t trust anything made by that regime. They invest all their money into this industry, especially with the protocol being used by militaries abroad, I don’t trust what backdoors can be hidden, even if it’s open source.
Yeah as soon as I read the sanctions bit I knew they must be using some shitty Cold War list from somewhere.
Which company involved is Israeli? That’s the first I’m hearing of that.
Edited to correct typo
Thank you! Also, what do you use for messaging?
Element sadly 🥲
Don’t know what genzedong’s appetite is currently to switch over
What is your actual concern here? Are your concerns that the security and privacy of these protocols and/or software may be compromised? Or are you concerned about something else? Because this sounds rather like a purity fetish thing. Almost everyone in the imperial core is like these people, so if you need your software to come strictly from anti-imperialists then you may be waiting a long time.
Somewhat relatedly: Why not Signal? » Good Alternatives
I don’t see how being safe, rational and properly paranoid is being purity fetishist
I’m concerned about the software again playing into capitalist, imperialist spirals like we’ve seen with everything else so far. I am also concerned about supporting such an organization/company by doing “marketing” for them through my circles. The whole reason I started this was as part of the BDS movement and it doesn’t make sense to just jump from one highly problematic ecosystem to another.
And if you’re okay with “lesser evils”, sure. I’m not. I believe continually choosing lesser evils instead of building good things is why we’re in this mess in the first place.
A couple of points.
We’re talking about open source software here, right? They’re not as susceptible to capitalist enshittification, and they can always be forked.
I don’t see using some particular open source software as an endorsement or support for the ideologies of the people who made it. I’m not subscribing to an ideology, I’m just using a tool. There isn’t even a consumer activism argument to be made here, because these are free tools.
As the other person who responded to you mentioned, things can get bad. At some level, trust is always going to be a factor with these things.
-
Matrix.org is still the most popular server - if I just tell people to download Element, they’re going to pick matrix.org. Automatically, this builds a sort of lock in with the “default instance”. Even if I host my own server, that’s not something I can recommedn to everyone, nor do I have the resources to make it a public server.
-
Already there’s trouble with hosting your own Matrix server due to how heavy the software is apparently. This coupled with point 1, things concentrating into the hands of the foundation is not a good thing.
-
Following from that, for example, what if they suddenly decide there’s too many people with “radical” ideologies that are against their masters, the imperial powers? They have metadata (even if not content, because encryption) through the public servers they host that they can use to surveil.
The issue is not just that it’s built by people with poor ideological rigour. It’s that it’s both a fragile structure that depends on trust and the people we’re trusting have poor ideological rigour. That seems like a bad combo to me.
Imagine if they just wrote and worked on the protocol. That’s it. No official apps, no official public servers. Then I wouldn’t care coz it doesn’t matter. People can check the protocol for suspicious stuff but that’s it. Nothing else is in these organizations’ control.
-
Okay now talk about vendor lock in after the thing goes close sourced and your friends are locked into it.
Sure, I am not a fan, but I don’t see any huge issue with this. Unfortunately, quite a lot of projects do stuff like this. If you are really concerned you can use matrix without using anything from matrix foundation (aside from the protocol) there are alternative clients like cinny. And even alternative servers like conduwuit.
https://lemmy.ml/post/26015584
I made some comments here about this
matrix and signal are both CIA
proton too.*NED.
And I don’t think this is enough to discredit them as not secure and private.
Organizations like the NED or the CIA benefit immensely from private encrypted chats for conducting regime change operations and preventing their adversaries from being able to compromise espionage cells.
Just as the CIA produces good intel for itself, despite being the world’s foremost powerhouse at speeding misinformation, it is a simple case of interests aligning. They don’t mind a few Western libs having off-the-grid discussions if it furthers imperialist and regime change projects.
…or they could be honeypots, we may never know for certain, even if I think it is far less likely than wanting to discreetly communicate with assets embedded in foreign countries. If Matrix was a CIA honeypot, it would work better.
