paper-research-privacy-matrix.org VS Ferdi

I am trying to find something similar to discord that is actually private. Matrix phones home with a nasty amount of info: https://github.com/libremonde-org/paper-research-privacy-matrix.org/tree/master/part1, Snikket seems like a decent alternative, i just havent audited it for security purposes. Any suggestions? All im trying to maintain is the multiple-channels aspect of Discord, voice/video are optional, but preferred if possible

I present to you a MUC I've created on the XMPP (also informally known as Jabber) network. I've put some thought into which network would be best fit and decided that, while IRC is an excellent way to chat, there is an apparent lack of mobile support and perhaps lacks the ability to choose a server of your choice. Furthermore, I've concluded for many years that Matrix isn't a good choice for multiple concerning reasons, the most impactful being the Matrix Foundation itself receiving large amounts of metadata and being overly centralized over the entirety of the network. Matrix also utilizes CloudFlare (a popular CDN service) which, according to W3Techs, provides services for 19.2% of all websites. I don't believe CloudFlare is a bad actor but they certainly can MITM any websites utilizing their free tier plan. One can easily check if a website is using the free tier SSL certificate by checking here. You can see that in the "subject" area, it shows the SSL domain name as sni.cloudflaressl.com. CloudFlare's free SSL operates by encrypting only the data sent from you to the CDN, leaving the data that is sent from the CDN back to Matrix.org unencrypted. This isn't necessarily problematic for the entirety of the network, however, it shows the Matrix Foundation has an apparent lack of privacy/security practices while advertising their project as a privacy-oriented chat solution. I won't ramble on too much about Matrix's suspected privacy issues, instead, I'll leave you these two write-ups to read for yourself, here and here.

it's an entire paper written by a nonprofit dedicated to user privacy. it's also last updated 6 months ago? you can view all the commits here (https://github.com/libremonde-org/paper-research-privacy-matrix.org/commits/master)

I found this to be an interesting read about Matrix. https://github.com/libremonde-org/paper-research-privacy-matrix.org/blob/master/part2/README.md

Not sure what exactly they were referring to, but here are some of them: https://github.com/libremonde-org/paper-research-privacy-mat...

It's subscription priced now...? Maybe try Ferdi instead...? Same App but without subscriptions. https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi

Suggesting this one must be cheating https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi

This probably was already a problem in Ferdi. There is/was an issue on github https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi/issues/1458

I use Ferdi to multiplex my messaging apps and have them all in one place. It's basically a glorified web browser that only opens iframes to specific pages (eg: discord). In this environment Discord has some interesting behavior where the menu bar at the top left is very slow to respond, and despite large window sizes (and refreshing at these large window sizes) the screen always seems to be in a single column layout, never showing the chat messages + channel list at the same time.

I just noticed the getferdi.com website is up again including a video, link to the code etc.

Then you can use https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi, which is a unrestricted Fork of Franz

Ferdi (Website, GitHub): Free fork of Franz. Announced on June 11, 2022 that "There will be no further updates to Ferdi. 🏄‍♂️" but that tweet is now deleted and the repo is updating again... But they've disabled the issue tracker behind a $9/month paywall.

I see that the repo is back (https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi)