Is using an Matrix account from matrix.org private and secure enough to talk with my family members and people in general?

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Unfortunately even with E2EE, the admins of a homeserver can still impersonate you

[email protected]

even with E2EE, the admins of a homeserver can still impersonate you or take over your channel.

As someone who has implemented the Matrix protocol in a client, I'm reasonably certain this is false.

Also, it's not what post that you linked claims, and what it does claim is unsubstantiated. So, can you please describe exactly how you think this is possible?

[email protected]

What do you have to say about this then?

In an encrypted room even with fully verified members, a compromised or hostile home server can still take over the room by impersonating an admin. That admin (or even a newly minted user) can then send events or listen on the conversations.

Perhaps we have a different definition of "impersonate"... not everyone will pay attention to unverified warnings, and afaik they can still communicate with people (just maybe not read old messages)... but I would love to be proven wrong.

[email protected]

For normal end user average usage signal is the best option available, specially for family since they may already be used to the flow and UX of it. Simple and straight forward. All the "bad" things you read are about nerds being annoying and not liking a very particular specific thing and thinking that specific thing should be the only focus.

So just make people use signal. It's the best and simplest way with the most common features for individuals and small groups. A simple download, in a common known place on a store without confusing people with differences between a protocol and a client and with and onboarding experience most are already familiar and ok using.

Even so you still need to make sure that the app does not have battery optimizations turned on, but that applies to all apps used for communication that are not blessed in specific phones (like facebook and whatsapp already having that setting by default because vendors make it so).

[email protected]

a compromised or hostile home server can still take over the room

A compromised server could affect a denial of service attack against its users, of course. The attacker could do the same thing by simply turning off the server. That's true on all platforms that use servers. The solution is generally to switch to a different server.

That admin (or even a newly minted user) can then send events

Exactly what events do you think would be dangerous?

or listen on the conversations.

No. End-to-end encryption guarantees that only the intended endpoints can read the messages. Older Matrix clients have a setting to block the user from sending messages to unverified devices/sessions. I think newer ones (e.g. Element X) enforce that mode; if you're concerned about this, you could check for yourself, but...

not everyone will pay attention to unverified warnings

...unfortunately, you can't fix human behavior. If you need a messaging app to prevent your contacts from doing something obviously foolish, then I suggest waiting until Matrix 2.0 is officially released and implemented in the clients. The beta versions of Element X, for example, looks like everything is locked down to avoid mistakes like the one you're describing.

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I have made so many people use Signal now. I sell it as, "I'm on Android. Signal gives us all of the features of iMessage and facetime" no need to mention the privacy concerns unless they are the kind of person who cares.

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Great for now, better than doomers here, but teaches nothing to protect them from new scams, new anti-libre software.

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I've always been curious with the differences between XMPP and matrix but i can't ever find anything explaining it. Why is it in your opinion better?

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End-to-end encryption ensures that only the intended endpoints can read the messages

But who/what gets to decide who the intended recipients are? Can't the homeserver admin just join the channel and then the other members would exchange keys automatically and now they can see what people say?

[email protected]

But who/what gets to decide who the intended recipients are?

The sender.

Can’t the homeserver admin just join the channel and then the other members would exchange keys automatically and now they can see what people say?

No. Verification prevents that.

[email protected]

I don't understand. How would the sender prevent messages from going to the admin user that joined the room? It sounds like you're implying new users simply can't join a room? That makes no sense to me... I've certainly never experienced that. I see new users join encrypted rooms all the time and they can talk just fine... so what's the deal? And isn't verification off by default?

[email protected]

SimpleX has some interesting ideas, but also some shortcomings for people who want a practical messaging service. For example:

It is funded by venture capital, which calls into question its longevity, and if it does manage to stick around, suggests that it will be leveraged to exploit people once the user base is large enough.
Its queue servers delete messages if they are not delivered within a certain time frame (21 days by default). Good luck if you take a vacation off-grid for a few weeks.
No multi-device support. (This means a single account accessed concurrently from multiple independent devices.) The closest it comes is locally tethering a mobile device to a computer.
Establishing new contacts requires sharing a large link or QR code, which is not always convenient.
No support for group calls.

I would not recommend it for talking to family members and people in general, which is what OP requested.

[email protected]

How would the sender prevent messages from going to the admin user that joined the room?

It wouldn't matter if a rogue admin eavesdropped on an E2EE room, because they would see encrypted blobs where the message content would be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_encryption

How would the sender prevent messages from going to the admin user that joined the room?

You're conflating multiple things. Joining a room does not grant access to encryption keys.

I respect your curiosity, but I think you're going to have to familiarize yourself with the software and concepts to get a detailed understanding of how all this stuff works. If you're technically inclined, I suggest reading the protocol spec, or at least the parts that interest you.

[email protected]

I have read the spec, used the service and also implemented my own clients before, that is why I'm so confused by what you're saying, because this has not been my experience at all. If a user joins a channel, whether they are an admin or not, whether it is encrypted or not, then unless the channel is explicitly setup to only allow verified users to talk (not the default), my understanding is there is nothing preventing that new user from seeing all new messages in the chat.

[email protected]

I think there is campaign to get people to use signal, while servers are proprietary and other things are questionable.

It is a great operation for convincing the majority.

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Who told you to not use Signal, and what reasons did they give? I'm very curious.

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Molly also has some quality-of-life improvements - such as allowing to enter a device pairing link manually instead of scanning a QR code (thus allowing use in a VM for registration without a smartphone), or being able to use a generic Socks proxy instead of Signal's own solution. Not only does that allow running Signal over Tor without using Orbot as a "VPN", but is also more versatile (I wouldn't want to set up a separate proxy just for Signal, and also their implementation is apparently inferior to some advanced obfuscation solutions).

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I know I am just a normie who doesn't really know internal workings of them... But in my experience, XMPP is just easier to host, the servers are lighter, they don't store everything they touch forever like Matrix does, and OMEMO doesn't break like Matrix's encryption. Synapse would be probably impossible to run on my VPS, while Conduit and Dendrite are not as full-featured.

[email protected]

I am really concerned about the dominance of the central instance on Matrix. It has visibility into pretty much every groupchat - if not in content because of encryption, then in all the metadata. I'd rather use another public homeserver.

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You can also set up MollySockets for notifications via unified push!

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Is using an Matrix account from matrix.org private and secure enough to talk with my family members and people in general?