seshat VS zulip-mobile

> Can you already say something about encrypted search support in Element X?

It's planned, and should be way easier to do than on old Element given we can hook the clientside search indexer (https://github.com/matrix-org/seshat), which happens to be in Rust, directly into matrix-rust-sdk and thence both EIX and EAX. Whereas previously we'd have had to do custom integs with Seshat on EI and EA like the current one on Element Desktop, which just becomes a maintenance nightmare. Hopefully should be ready in the next months.

> Also since you mentioned it, is multiaccount support something that we can realistically expect to see in Element X someday (maybe even in a v1.0?). If I remember correctly for the previous iterations of the clients the status was mostly "maybe one day" or "the architecture does not really support it".

Definitely. We actually had it pre-Element in Matrix Console, and then it got lost in Element. The hope is to get it into Element X relatively early.

https://github.com/matrix-org/seshat - we’ve had it for years on desktop; just need to hook it up on mobile. it’s currently blocked behind unifying sdks, so we don’t have to do it twice in iOS & Android.

Excellent noise cancellation (and background noise elimination, microphone scratch noise elimination etc). Ideally you need something like https://krisp.ai/ or https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/06/background-n... in the mix - but doing this in an E2EE-friendly and privacy preserving manner is Hard. However, just like we solved E2EE full text search by doing it clientside and making the indexes gossipable between your clients (https://github.com/matrix-org/seshat), we'll have a go at doing something similar for this problem too.

The competitive gap with Discord in terms of media quality is probably something like:

* Need a low-latency SFU. This should be very doable; not only are there a lot of good FOSS SFUs to build on top of these days, the history of the Matrix team is actually that we built VoIP stacks fulltime before we shifted focus to Matrix, and we've built MCUs and media servers of all flavours in the past. MSC3401 should also give us a competitive edge given latency will be automagically minimised by using the physically closest decentralised SFU, and letting anyone bring their SFU to the party.

* Needs a SFU with good rate control (and/or FEC). This is probably the single most important thing to get right in terms of quality. Signal wrote up a good overview of why: https://signal.org/blog/how-to-build-encrypted-group-calls/

* Excellent noise cancellation (and background noise elimination, microphone scratch noise elimination etc). Ideally you need something like https://krisp.ai/ or https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/06/background-n... in the mix - but doing this in an E2EE-friendly and privacy preserving manner is Hard. However, just like we solved E2EE full text search by doing it clientside and making the indexes gossipable between your clients (https://github.com/matrix-org/seshat), we'll have a go at doing something similar for this problem too.

* Excellent automatic gain control. The importance of normalising/compressing everyone's audio so they're equivalent loudness is really important.

We're also in the process of adding in spatial audio (unsure if Discord has that) which should help a tonne with distinguishing the different audio feeds.

We can probably also be more bullish about supporting new audio codecs like Lyra.

Messages are stored in encrypted form on the Beeper server and the Beeper client has a local search index (the same one used by Element desktop: https://github.com/matrix-org/seshat)

And a basic feature for the iOS client hasn’t been implemented in 6 years https://github.com/zulip/zulip-mobile/issues/438

But they haven’t managed to fix a rather basic feature in their iOS client in nearly 6 years now: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-mobile/issues/438

Zulip (version 27.191): The Zulip mobile app, chat for distributed teams

Federation would make me almost instantly recommend it for a handful of cases, but in the meantime they have a lot of catching up to do in the privacy department.

Behold, the two five year old tickets requesting that they stop passing notification text to Apple/Google cloud messaging:

https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6954

https://github.com/zulip/zulip-mobile/issues/1190

For those who don't know: if you have an app and want to send a notification to a user, you use Apple or Google push notification services. In both cases, the notification is plaintext but transmitted via encrypted channel to Apple or Google, then transmitted via encrypted channel to the user's phone. But in each case, the push messaging provider gets to see the messaging text.

So companies that give a shit about your privacy send a token instead, that says "hey, wake up, something happened, fetch a notification." Apple likely doesn't do anything with the notification text, but it's a given Google datamines the hell out of it.

They also still don't have any form of e2ee. Here's another five year old ticket requesting end to end encrypted chat, where a bunch of people say "here's a long list of apps that support e2ee" and Zulip devs go "gosh golly how do they handle keys? Math is hard."

https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6096

Indeed. It's been mentioned in the relevant issue: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-mobile/issues/3838

Zulip (version 169): The world’s most productive group chat

We've had similar problems with keeping Zulip in the Apple app store. It's incredibly unpleasant to deal with this aspect of publishing an open source application.

For context, Zulip is a 100% open-source team chat project (in the same space as Slack/IRC/etc.). You can self-host Zulip, which we've put a lot of effort into making easy, or host it on Zulip Cloud (with both free and paid plans). There's no individual subscription option for the product at all -- just like with Slack -- so the app store policies to enforce their monopoly by requiring all individual purchases be taxed by Google/Apple shouldn't even apply to us.

But we've still had multiple rounds of rejections caused by aggressive enforcement of these policies:

* A couple years ago, Apple reviewers repeatedly rejected updates to the app because the privacy policy / terms of service pages linked from the app contained the zulip.com website footer, which in turn link to the pricing page for Zulip's paid offerings. This means our Privacy Policy could be a way to get people to buy something without paying the Apple tax! We "resolved" this, on the advice of their appeals expert, by passing a special parameter when loading these pages from the ToS/Privacy links in the mobile apps that hides the header/footer sections of the page :(.

* In May, Apple reviewers repeatedly rejected the Zulip mobile app for linking to its own source on GitHub. At first we thought the problem was that we had recently set up GitHub Sponsors [1]. Further correspondence determined that the problem was even more ridiculous: Any GitHub page has a tiny link in the https://github.com/zulip/zulip-mobile footer for GitHub's own pricing! We were able to convince them to approve it in the end, but we were close to giving up and removing the GitHub links. I'm still upset about the whole experience because it was a huge waste of energy.

It's not clear to me whether these rejections are what Apple's policies intended or just the policies being incorrectly applied. But it doesn't really matter: these appeal processes are opaque and scary and mostly consist of them repeating what you need to change with minimal explanation. If not for the entrenched monopoly, we'd be looking to switch to another vendor that wasn't so sloppy about something that's very important to us. I think the harm caused by sloppiness on the part of monopolies doesn't get enough attention.

[1] This would have been wrong too, though I do know some companies use a Patreon as the way to sell their product, and I can imagine that being a workaround that Apple would be on the lookout for. But it's easy to check that we're definitely not playing that game.