Our great sponsors
-
-
simplex-chat
SimpleX - the first messaging network operating without user identifiers of any kind - 100% private by design! iOS, Android and desktop apps 📱!
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
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.
What do you all think about SimpleX-Chat?