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404 Media reports that a bunch of cybercriminals are ditching Telegram in the wake of CEO Pavel Durov's arrest: https://www.404media.co/in-wake-of-durov-arrest-some-cybercriminals-ditch-telegram/
I've seen the same! The crew behind a one-time password stealing operation called Estate (I profiled earlier this year: https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/13/cyber-criminals-stealing-one-time-passcodes-sim-swap-raiding-bank-accounts/) wiped its channel and ditched Telegram, citing the messaging app's recent moderation changes that allows anyone to report private groups.
"Telegram can't be trusted anymore," wrote the OTP bot crime crew.
Ignoring the context.
Don’t pirate over Telegram, it’s no longer safe in terms of privacy and legal safety.
XMPP with the OMEMO extension is close, no? While Matrix isn’t distributed, it is decentralised like Lemmy and Mastodon, and E2EE by default. That could be the closest thing to what you mean?
I’d argue XMPP is less ideal than Matrix because groups are located on a single server, which makes them easier to take down than Matrix’ replicated state.
Running any P2P/decentralized protocol over I2P seems to be the best for privacy and censorship-resistance. I2P already works great for torrents, except for it’s speed and lack of users/seeders.
@zabadho@ani.social
The problem always comes down to usability and barrier to entry. Telegram is popular because it’s great to use, and doesn’t moderate much. More private services rarely (never?) reach the level of usability most people expect, often simply because of it’s architecture.
I just signed up for Matrix because you mentioned it.
I installed the Element front end, because that seems to be the most popular.
It looks like IRC, which is fine if that’s all you need.
It also appears that anything beyond text has to be hotlinked, which is understandable, given that the amount of data transmitted for redundancy between home servers is exponential with the number of home servers.
Really very similar to Lemmy, where the identity of each group is tied to a particular server, e.g. lemmy has !anime@ani.social but Matrix has #anime:matrix.org
So what happens if matrix.org goes away or decides the server admin wants to be hostile to #anime?
Really very similar to Lemmy, where the identity of each group is tied to a particular server, e.g. lemmy has !anime@ani.social but Matrix has #anime:matrix.org
So what happens if matrix.org goes away or decides the server admin wants to be hostile to #anime?
A matrix room can have multiple identities/adresses set by the room admin. E.g. the admin of !anime:matrix.org could add another adress for the same room on !anime:myanime.instance. Because the room is replicated on all other participating servers, this would let the room continue to exist on the network (besides all matrix.org users not being able to access it).
Matrix does have a single “room id” per room, which looks like it gives the original creating home server more rights, which it does not. E.g. !ehXvUhWNASUkSLvAGP:matrix.org
Any server admin does not have any more rights over a room than another server admin. They can ban the room for their local users, but this does not stop federation as a whole.
It also appears that anything beyond text has to be hotlinked […]
Matrix allows for media to be hotlinked, but it can also be replicated across servers.
I.e. if I send an image in a room and look at the source (available on many web clients), the image url looks like the following "url":"mxc://matrix.org/qGgUKuZuHcRsWAhSfqKnmtiX". The actual image (and preview) then gets fetched by your server from my server [4], and then gets send to your client.
It’s important to note that a server isn’t required to download all media. If a user does not read a room, it might not download the media from another server, until the user actually wants to view it (or rather that part of the room history). Or a server admin might clean up the media store to free up space.
What kind of system that depends on centralized servers can ever be secure from government snooping?
That kind of architecture is completely hopeless in that regard.
Is a encrypted, distributed, P2P architecture realistic though?
XMPP with the OMEMO extension is close, no? While Matrix isn’t distributed, it is decentralised like Lemmy and Mastodon, and E2EE by default. That could be the closest thing to what you mean?
I’d argue XMPP is less ideal than Matrix because groups are located on a single server, which makes them easier to take down than Matrix’ replicated state.
Running any P2P/decentralized protocol over I2P seems to be the best for privacy and censorship-resistance. I2P already works great for torrents, except for it’s speed and lack of users/seeders.
@zabadho@ani.social
The problem always comes down to usability and barrier to entry. Telegram is popular because it’s great to use, and doesn’t moderate much. More private services rarely (never?) reach the level of usability most people expect, often simply because of it’s architecture.
I just signed up for Matrix because you mentioned it.
I installed the Element front end, because that seems to be the most popular.
It looks like IRC, which is fine if that’s all you need.
It also appears that anything beyond text has to be hotlinked, which is understandable, given that the amount of data transmitted for redundancy between home servers is exponential with the number of home servers.
Really very similar to Lemmy, where the identity of each group is tied to a particular server, e.g. lemmy has !anime@ani.social but Matrix has #anime:matrix.org
So what happens if matrix.org goes away or decides the server admin wants to be hostile to #anime?
A matrix room can have multiple identities/adresses set by the room admin. E.g. the admin of !anime:matrix.org could add another adress for the same room on !anime:myanime.instance. Because the room is replicated on all other participating servers, this would let the room continue to exist on the network (besides all matrix.org users not being able to access it).
Matrix does have a single “room id” per room, which looks like it gives the original creating home server more rights, which it does not. E.g. !ehXvUhWNASUkSLvAGP:matrix.org
Any server admin does not have any more rights over a room than another server admin. They can ban the room for their local users, but this does not stop federation as a whole.
[1] https://github.com/element-hq/element-meta/issues/419
[2] https://app.element.io/#/room/#synapse:matrix.org/$htJmba92wLTP9AoFg4eEWi9IXpgwvXr6G9Sa-kBsNNs
[3] https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/latest/admin_api/rooms.html#delete-room-api
Matrix allows for media to be hotlinked, but it can also be replicated across servers.
I.e. if I send an image in a room and look at the source (available on many web clients), the image url looks like the following
"url": "mxc://matrix.org/qGgUKuZuHcRsWAhSfqKnmtiX". The actual image (and preview) then gets fetched by your server from my server [4], and then gets send to your client.It’s important to note that a server isn’t required to download all media. If a user does not read a room, it might not download the media from another server, until the user actually wants to view it (or rather that part of the room history). Or a server admin might clean up the media store to free up space.
[4] https://matrix.org/docs/spec-guides/authed-media-servers/
@JackbyDev@programming.dev