64
switch from Whatsapp to Element (matrix)?
(element.io)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
64 points (95.7% liked)
BuyFromEU
6551 readers
99 users here now
Welcome to BuyFromEU - A community dedicated to supporting European-made goods and services!
Feel free to post, comment and vote, be excellent to each other and follow the rules.
We also invite you to subscribe to:
Logo generated with mistral le chat Banner by Christian Lue on unsplash.com
founded 11 months ago
MODERATORS
I know what you mean. The requirement is that friends and family will use it, too.
How long ago was your experience with matrix?
Self-hosted and bridged: half a year.
I quit that experiment and registered an account at a generic instance. Needless to say: it is only me and some public rooms.
None of my peers engages me there. They really don’t want to waste time with registration, backup keys, and concepts.
One issue is: As rooms are decentralised, if someone posts illegal content and your server downloads it, that could lead to legal trouble, especially as you'd then also host it.
The encryption often fails, leading to the meme "Message cannot be decrypted".
That should only be an issue for media though shouldn't it, since all plain text can be set up to be e2e.
Is that still the case, I have been using matrix for about a year now and I haven't ever had an issue sending and receiving except for a day which the vector.org servers were down. I hear that hosting a synapse server is a pain in the ass, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
It does not matter whether you encrypt illegal content, things do not magically turn legal once they are encrypted.
Plaintext cannot be set up to be E2EE, that is a contradiction in itself. Rooms can be either unencrypted or encrypted. If they are, messages are encrypted.
Indeed, it is. That's why I have replaced mine with Tuwunel, much less effort and way less resource-intensive.
I wasn't suggesting it was, I was just pointing out that it wouldn't be easily provable that you were in possession of such content.
I feel this is a bit pedantic as I would assume that you understood that I meant text messages, unless you are saying that all forms of messages, including media like images and videos, are encrypted in e2ee rooms, in which case that is information I did not have.
Yeah, but I'd rather not have anything illegal than just making it less obvious. I'd rather stick to the rules.
Yes, media would be encrypted as well. Metadata is not, though. Matrix leads to quite a lot of that, unfortunately, due to the way it works.
There are usually many servers that know name and members of a chat, even though the contents are encrypted.
EDIT: I've been deep into hosting Matrix and XMPP for a long time, I sometimes forget which things aren't obvious from a user's point of view.