Yup, exactly my point. Element Spaces and Telegram Folders feel like half-measures as these tools pivot to a more org-based chat.
At least Element (Matrix) is trying to build that on reasonable well-designed E2EE. Telegram gave up on that long ago but still blusters.
Conversation
Matrix E2EE protocol is quite good but a few things like reactions are quite strangely not part of what's encrypted. Also, no attempt at protecting metadata. It's still far better than anything available for IRC, XMPP or Email which it's quite ready to replace completely already.
2
Well, for comparison, Telegram doesn’t have any support for E2EE group chat whatsoever.
The native apps use their wacky custom “MTProto” transport encryption algorithm for all client/server encryption, versus some standard protocol like TLS, QUIC, or Noise.
1
Yeah, the Matrix encryption protocol itself actually appears to be very good including the group chat support.
Element also defaults to E2EE for all private rooms now, which can actually be a bit annoying if you intend to make them public since you can't yet turn it off.
2
1
Ideally, I think clients should probably tie whether it's E2EE to public vs. private with it getting turned off by default when making it public.
It's quite annoying for a huge public room because it's totally useless and it adds a lot of overhead, but you can't turn it off yet.
2
I mean, there was always a switch, it's just turning it on resulted in a horrible and confusing UX for a long, long time.
It's getting better now.
1
The UI of E2EE enabled by default for private and disabled by default for public is great. The main UX issue is just that you can never turn off E2EE. Rooms growing and going from being private to public is quite normal, and then having E2EE becomes very annoying due to overhead.
2
The overhead is insignificant for a 20 person room but when you get up to thousands of people, it's really not something you want and it's totally useless.
Needing to do these painful room upgrades is one of my main issues with it right now. Needs to be automatic migration.
1
I try to get people to contact me via Matrix rather than Signal or email now. I particularly don't ever want to deal with people sending me PGP encrypted emails anymore.
From my perspective at least, Matrix already completely replaces email, not just IRC and XMPP. Works fine.
1
One of the limitations in that regard is the default 50M server limit on sharing files, but it's not like email has ever had reliable / widely supported sharing of large files. I think they've done a really good job replacing almost any earlier federated protocol already.
1
We use Matrix for nearly everything having to do with GrapheneOS development. Fully moved away from a mix of mostly IRC with a bit of email and Signal.
Telegram/IRC just have a basic per-room bridge to Matrix (matterbridge) and our subreddit is only used for announcements now.