It's pretty accurate. I was a bit shocked when I saw that room names were not encrypted. I thought that was such a basic privacy requirement, and it's not hard to implement when you already have message encryption.
Matrix seems to have a lot of these structural flaws. Even the encryption praised in the Reddit post has had problems for years where messages don't decrypt. These issues are patched slowly over time, but you shouldn't need to show me a graph demonstrating how you have slowly decreased the decryption issues. There shouldn't be any to begin with! If there are, the protocol is fundamentally broken.
They are slowly improving everything, with the emphasis on "slowly". It will take years until everything is properly implemented. To answer the question of whether the future of the protocol is promising, I would say yes. This is in no small part because there are currently no real alternatives in this area. If you want an open system, this is the best option.
The decryption problems I've experienced have a been fixed a while ago. There was a push to fix these last year or the year before that, and at this point I'm pretty sure only some outdated or obscure clients with old encryption liberties still suffer from these problems.
The huge amount of unencrypted metadata is pretty hard to avoid with Matrix, though. It's the inevitable result of stuffing encryption into an unencrypted protocol later, rather than designing the protocol to be encrypted from the start.
I've had similar issues with other protocols too, though. XMPP wouldn't decrypt my messages (because apparently I used the wrong encryption for one of the clients), and Signal got into some funky state where I needed to re-setup and delete all of my old messages before I could use it again. Maintained XMPP clients (both of them) seem to have fixed their encryption support and Signal now has backups so none of these problems should happen again, but this stuff is never easy.
Yes, messaging protocols, especially federated ones, are never easy. I just wish we could have skipped the three or four years when Matrix was basically unusable for the average user because end-to-end encryption was switched on by default. Perhaps a clean redesign would have been better. Now they have to change the wheels on a moving car.
> These issues are patched slowly over time, but you shouldn't need to show me a graph demonstrating how you have slowly decreased the decryption issues. There shouldn't be any to begin with! If there are, the protocol is fundamentally broken.
This is wrong, because afaik these errors happen due to corner cases and I really don't like the attitude here.
It's not just a corner case. The issue was so prevalent for years that if it was limited to just a few corner cases, the entire protocol must consist of nothing but corner cases.
It frequently occurred on the "happy path": on a single server that they control, between identical official clients, in the simplest of situations. There really is no excuse.
I'm not saying that building a federated chat network with working encryption is easy. On the contrary, it is very hard. I'm sure the designers had the best intentions, but they simply lacked the competence to overcome such a challenge and ensure the protocol was mostly functional right from the outset.
> The issue was so prevalent for years that if it was limited to just a few corner cases, the entire protocol must consist of nothing but corner cases.
for me it wasn't really; occasionally it would hit me, but mostly it worked, and I have been using it for encrypted communication since 2020.
> It frequently occurred on the "happy path": on a single server that they control, between identical official clients, in the simplest of situations. There really is no excuse.
There still can be technical corner cases in the interaction of clients
> I'm sure the designers had the best intentions, but they simply lacked the competence to overcome such a challenge and ensure the protocol was mostly functional right from the outset.
well, even if this was true, they still were brave enough to try and eventually pull it off eventually. Perhaps complain to the competent people who haven't even tried.
> for me it wasn't really; occasionally it would hit me, but mostly it worked, and I have been using it for encrypted communication since 2020.
I think the statistic said that around 10% of users receive at least one "unable to decrypt" message on any given day. That's a lot. Perhaps not for devs who are accustomed to technical frustrations, but for non-technical people, that's far too frequent. Other messaging systems worked much better.
> There still can be technical corner cases in the interaction of clients
You linked to a German political talk show. If you wanted to show me the talk in which the guy listed reasons such as "network requests can fail and our retry logic is so buggy that it often breaks" and "the application regularly corrupts its internal state, so we have to recover from that, which is not always easily possible", let's just say I wasn't that impressed.
> well, even if this was true, they still were brave enough to try and eventually pull it off eventually. Perhaps complain to the competent people who haven't even tried.
It isn't a problem that the Matrix team are not federated networking experts. At the time, they had already received millions in investment. That's not FAANG money, but it's still enough to contract the right people to help design everything properly.
I'm not mad at them. Matrix was a bold effort that clearly succeeded in its aims. I'm just disappointed that it was so unreliable for such a long time, and still is to some extent.
Matrix seems to have a lot of these structural flaws. Even the encryption praised in the Reddit post has had problems for years where messages don't decrypt. These issues are patched slowly over time, but you shouldn't need to show me a graph demonstrating how you have slowly decreased the decryption issues. There shouldn't be any to begin with! If there are, the protocol is fundamentally broken.
They are slowly improving everything, with the emphasis on "slowly". It will take years until everything is properly implemented. To answer the question of whether the future of the protocol is promising, I would say yes. This is in no small part because there are currently no real alternatives in this area. If you want an open system, this is the best option.