this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2025
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Privacy
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Matrix literally syncs the entire data/metadata history to all other servers where someone pops in; chat is meant to have an ephemeral aspect to it. The whole network is de facto centralized on Matrix.org or the servers they host for others which means one org has access to almost everything—like the issue with Signal.
What’s scary to me is how expensive it is to run this eventual consistency model, which should not be a protocol requirement for this style of communication. It sucks so much RAM, so much storage, so wasteful—which causes medium-sized servers to shutdown on maintenance costs alone which causes more users to leave for the Matrix.org. These are not the characteristics of a revolutionary protocol—revolutionary is users & collectives to reasonably be self-hosting this stuff for their privacy & autonomy.
tbf there is not really a good solution to the 'ephemeral aspect' problem
the only way to truly not sync metadata to or btwn servers at all is to use a p2p model, in which you cant send anything if one of the parties is offline
simplex might be a bit better in this regard, but still relies on servers for syncing. at least it doesnt extensively replicate metadata like matrix does though
so it depends on your threat model whether this is a compromise or not
Sure there is: Don't store everything in a database.
what alternative do you propose for saving messages when the recipient is offline?
This is not either or. You can store things only until the recipient comes online and then delete it (but Matrix specifically doesn't do this and conceptually can't due to its design).
sure that is how pop3 does it
but metadata is still replicated to the server, so this does not solve the metadata replication issue
even if you dont explicitly store metadata or encrypt it in some way, the server still necessarily knows stuff like timestamps of when the messages are sent for example.
sure, you can delete it later, but you also have to trust the server to actually do that, and there is no way to guarantee this in any protocol