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How Matrix is becoming the communication standard for Public Sector (www.youtube.com)
submitted 11 hours ago by to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
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Matrix was built to become the open communication of the web and serve everyone. But, as the Internet and email did, its network effect started with governments. Today, and as proven by the audience in the room, most European governments and several others are either using it or looking at implementing it for their communications. This talk will tell the story of how we got there and why.

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[–] 32 points 11 hours ago* (9 children)

Speaking from experience, matrix is still kinda rough around the edges if you have a 100+ person group with non-technical users.

More broadly, pretty much all of the secure messengers currently have an ~O(N^2) problem with state sync in groups. The only one that isn't deeply frustrating is Signal and that's largely because it has very few features and can't be self hosted.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 hour ago

    Why would ppl use group chat for 100+ ppl, just why? Should not something like Lemmy plus Notification suit the role better? I saw ppl use group chat as gallery sharing but when I saw it is WhatsApp, wechat, line... Well, those big corp deserve it.

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  • [–] 8 points 10 hours ago* (6 children)

    It sucks because it feels SOOOO close. I had my own server setup but setting up a client was so very hard. And it was hard to explain to friends/family how to set it up.

    My CPU on my tiny server was being used like crazy for matrix.

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  • [–] 1 point 27 minutes ago

    I switched from synapse to continuwuity about 9 months ago and it has been a MUCH better experience. Also switched from Element to Sable recently and it is a much more comfortable and reliable client. Not much more complicated to set up than Discord IMHO.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 hour ago

    And it was hard to explain to friends/family how to set it up.

    That's why I gave up on self hosting it. I can sit here and mess around with recovery keys and verification and whatever else, but if the people that would use it with me can't just sign up and chat, then I've got no one to talk to. They don't care much about privacy, which I'm finding is most people.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 hour ago

    Yea Synapse is very resource hungry. Element built a much more performative enterprise server implementation, but though it's open source it comes with a proprietary license, which kind of defeats the point when it comes to digital sovereignty in the public sector. From what I heard they unfortunately concluded that this is the only way to prevent organizations from freeriding, but it still sucks for the ecosystem. I'm working on one of the larger European Matrix public sector projects and we've been trying to mobilize funds for upstream contributions for some time, but it's not easy to convince the policy and finance people to approve sustainable contributions to an open source ecosystem; they want to see procurements where it's 100% clear what you get for your money. Also, public sector communication use cases frequently have high user count, low message volume and a high number of federated instances; so the current Synapse implementation has mostly been workable as you can feasibly scale horizontally. So there is currently not really that much financial incentive and pressure from the public sector to improve the efficiency of Synapse.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 hours ago

    I've said that before, but the O(N²) issue with E2E encryption only exists in an ideological sense. If your group chat is large enough that the overhead is unbearable, you don't have a private and secure group chat to begin with, just because a group chat of this magnitude is very much public by definition.

    With that said, you can keep server logs encrypted while avoiding the payload/key rotation explosion by using static keys (available since forever with PGP in XMPP) or wait the decade (but most probably, the eternity) that it will take for MLS to be bolted on top of Matrix (and the new protocol design that this entails due to the absence of guarantee about messages ordering)

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