Discord-Datamining VS Element

Discord being an Electron/web app also makes it trivially easy to datamine, and someone has a GitHub repo setup to track changes made to the JavaScript files in the client. https://github.com/Discord-Datamining/Discord-Datamining

That screenshot was from this GitHub repo iirc: https://github.com/Discord-Datamining/Discord-Datamining

It seems there will also be an increase in message length for nitro users too https://github.com/Discord-Datamining/Discord-Datamining/commit/667c475ff93e46ccb73f8b929fe6b86df8bdcf13#comments.

Source: https://github.com/Discord-Datamining/Discord-Datamining/commit/a83fc6f4c5b8bf66eb5db2a1fb2b12b9c3b5eeae#comments

10 May 2021 - 9e720d6c1f14e1890b36 (Canary build: 84399) · Discord-Datamining/Discord-Datamining@ced5f5b (github.com)

For those wondering, this is 100% an Apple-directed decision. The strings for a canary version of the client, at one point, blamed App Store rules directly: https://github.com/Discord-Datamining/Discord-Datamining/com...

I can only assume that it is also against Apple's rules to blame Apple for their draconian policies, and therefore they had to amend the text.

Element is an open-source instant messaging client built on the Matrix protocol, offering users features such as end-to-end encryption, file sharing, and voice/video calls. The self-hosted version accommodates up to 200 users at no charge, providing a budget-saving secure and collaborative communication platform. perthguppy describes it as a "slack style team chat."

Sounds like you’re talking about Element Web or Desktop here. On Mobile, we just rewrote the app as Element X and it addresses almost all your concerns (other than per-room nicks, although ironically Element Web does have that today - try the /roomnick command, from memory).

Having got Element X out the door, my attention at least is going to swing back to Element Web. In terms of encryption disasters, we are about to switch Element Web’s crypto to the same rust implementation as Element X, hopefully next week - you can track the progress at https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/21972#issuec.... Hopefully this will make a much-needed massive improvement on encryption, while also speeding it up 5x or so. On Element X, encryption failures are almost unheard of (other than when talking to Element Web).

The main remaining Nebuchadnezzar issue is mitigating server-controlled group membership. The first step has been to kill off the 1st gen E2EE implementations, which were responsible for the implementation vulns found by RHUL - and we should hopefully conclude that next week by moving everything into the matrix-rust-sdk crypto create implmentation: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/21972#issuec... is the tracker.

Then, we can address the harder server-controlled group membership issue in one place. First step will be to improve device verification & trust so that trust is the default, not the exception, to make it easier to spot and warn about unexpected devices in the room. The full solution is then either MSC3917 (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/blob/fay...) - or potentially to switch everything to MLS.

We're working on MLS anyway in parallel to RHUL mitigation work; you can see the progress at https://arewemlsyet.com, and it's looking good.

I'm guessing you're not interested in doing a podcast on "yay we converged our crypto implementations on a single robust Rust implementation so we can fix the remaining bugs in one place", but as soon as the server-controlled group membership thing is solved we'll be in touch. Work has also gone much slower than hoped on this, thanks to the joys of funding open source.

- Various GUI instability bugs: chats that are suddenly empty, text suddenly randomly overlaid on other text

1: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/24392

Why don't you mean Matrix? This is precisely what Element is, built on Matrix: https://element.io