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The addressbook, contact matching and public email are pretty low value from my perspective. I'd much rather personally validate and match my contacts on my ow

The addressbook, contact matching and public email are pretty low value from my perspective. I'd much rather personally validate and match my contacts on my own and I really think this should be the default with huge WARNING to people that want to share their email globally and addressbook with the server etc. "Users don't care" is largely because developers submarine the issues with "UX flow" reasoning. Excusing this toxic data exfiltration with "UX" really doesn't hold water. Edit - Specifically looking at https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/10167 https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/10167 This looks like industry standard bury the issue in unreadable TOS boilerplate. How about "Hey YOU PROBABLY DON'T NEED to share your email globally unless you expect to meet your long lost cousin via the matrix.org social graph" This is a place where ADDING friction makes the world better.

Arathorn 7y ago
(Matrix lead here) The core problem is: empirically most users want an app which works like Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram etc and tells you which other users are contactable. If you’re some random installing a comms app, you want to know if any of your contacts are on it already. It’s nothing to do with whether your long lost cousin is on it. However, there are then folks hyperfocused on privacy who declare this ‘toxic data exfiltration’ and vociferously object. We’re trying to get the balance right, and it’s worth noting that the bug you linked is still up in the air. We don’t have the final UX yet, but the idea is to even more explicitly warn the user that their contacts are being uploaded to a identity lookup service if they want to discover people on the network. An alternative/complementary approach is https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/10093 https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/10093. (edited due to accidentally hitting submit...)
- DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
  I really want to cheer for matrix/riot and this blog post moves me in that direction, but then seeing your comment as lead-dev throws me back into reality. The post is all about _tightening_ privacy! So why is the suggestion to solve addressbook feature more elegantly than a a TOS not addressed and instead GP is dismissed as being hyperfocused on privacy. The reason I cheer about Matrix is exactly because of its P2P nature, which neither of the other privacy focused solutions like Wire/Signal address (though these give better privacy right now). Isn't it exactly the privacy conscious crowd that matrix is pitching to? Those of us who don't trust a signal or wire server because that server code is proprietary? Matrix has been promising better privacy (and e2e encryption) for some time but maybe this isn't actually where matrix is heading? I sure would like to know because there is no point for many of us to continue cheering for what otherwise looks really promising. And it's not like a better technical solution for the address book doesn't exist!!
  - _Codemonkeyism 7y ago
    Like everyone else they want to become the next WhatsApp - with only "the privacy conscious crowd" they don't think they'll get there. They market to your mom.
    - Arathorn 7y ago
      We really don't want to become the next WhatsApp fwiw. The idea is more to be the new email, or the realtime version of the web. We should be able to support the use cases both for privacy enthusiasts as well as mums, dads, grandparents or whoever.
      - etiam 7y ago
        Do you imagine the new email is going to be anything like the old email, in allowing easy composition of substantial, letter-length messages which can be organized in their own right? I would love to be able to point non-technical users to an email alternative with sane integrity properties, and I've tried to some extent to push correspondence to Riot, but as it is right now, many of those users seem to suffer from Riot's flat design and not adapting well to the room metaphor. And one trigger-happy composition line posted to infinity scroll chat is pretty far from the experience of even a rudmentary email client. I'll admit I haven't done a thorough search of the clients but if you're aware of good implementations of a letter metaphor for Matrix I'd be very grateful to learn what I've been missing.
        Arathorn 7y ago
        We don't have a good letter metaphor in Matrix yet, but it should be coming fairly soon - we have someone sponsoring development on threading, and so you should get that bit at least in the coming months. However, the other aspect of mail style semantics is the incredible flexibility which email gives in terms of adding/removing people from threads on a message by message basis. This doesn't map very tidily into a Matrix room currently, and is a bit of an open question right now :)
- _Codemonkeyism 7y ago
  I'm using Signal and I never want or wanted "like Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram etc and tells you which other users are contactable."
  - Arathorn 7y ago
    okay, which is why we're making it very clearly opt-in, so that folks who don't want this don't end up accidentally using it.
- IshKebab 7y ago
  Well said. The privacy nazis are a very vocal minority here but I'm glad you are focusing on making something that people might actually want to use. We already have PGP if you want inconvenient NSA-proof communication with nobody. What we really need is good open alternative to Slack and WhatsApp, that have good security but not at the cost of making them annoying to use.
  - DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
    I don't think your comment helps. An alternative to Slack exists: Zulip and Mattermost and both aren't annoying to use. You can use Signal instead of WhatsApp or if you don't trust that you can also use Ricochet. Being passionate about something doesn't make them a Nazi.
    - eropple 7y ago
      Dunno about Zulip, but IMO Mattermost is pretty clunky and uncomfortable.
      - it33 7y ago
        Mattermost CEO here, thanks for your feedback, is there anything specific you feel we could improve? We recently raised $50 million in funding from YC to accelerate the project.
- WhatIsDukkha 7y ago
  Not sure I'm in the "hyperfocused on privacy" camp but I guess if people need to be typecast ok... I use matrix to talk to a few friends and family largely trying to replace gtalk. The irc or whatsapp usecase isn't really whats up for me. Sharing the email globally suddenly puts its out there for 7billion other people... you KNOW this is going to get scraped and repurposed, so why do it? Separate the flows. 1 - "Hey I'm a social butterfly and WANT to add my twitter etc I UNDERSTAND this is blasting my personal data to the world" 2 - "Hey I'd just like to get off gtalk and talk to my close friends and family/creepydarkprivacyspais" The flows for addressbook alone... like how thought out is any of that? Oh sweet my coworkers from 17 years ago are going to matrix with me...(no thanks?). You've done a lot of good INNOVATIVE work with matrix so far but this part seems half-baked and frankly like you are phoning it in.
  - Arathorn 7y ago
    Okay, so i guess it's not really a question of privacy hyperfocus but just different users having very disjoint use cases. I'm not sure i'd characterise this as phoning it in: the point of the blog post and all the accompanying bugs is to spell out that we're trying to solve for once and for all the problem of how best to enable contact discovery for folks who want it (as opt-in rather than opt-out!)... while also keeping the private-messaging crew happy. Totally agreed that it's been half-baked historically though, which is why we're fixing it now that 1.0 is out the door and we have some bandwidth to address it. > Separate the flows. The idea here is absolutely to separate the flows. We don't have a final UI proposal yet (as is clear from the bugs) because we're still working it through. The closest is probably https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/10091 https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/10091 right now.
    - cmroanirgo 7y ago
      My big problem is the auto uploading of all contacts. Maybe providing a ui to select the ones you're most likely to want to contact would be beneficial? Some ppl would want to select All, and some None, but if given the choice between the two, I'd select None. However, with a list I could select the 10 or so important to me rather than actually None.
- jeltz 7y ago
  > you want to know if any of your contacts are on it already. For me that is an anti-feature and something which I have so far never wanted to do. I hate when apps ask me to add users based on my other contact lists. I want to curate my contact list and only add the people I communicate with over this platform. I do not want to add a bunch of old contact's which I have forgot who they are when moving to a new messenger and I do not want to add people's accounts which they may have only used once years ago. And this is entirely ignoring the privacy aspect of it which I do not care that much about.
  - Arathorn 7y ago
    Yup, while many people do like this feature (the billions of people who use WhatsApp and breathe a sigh of relief that they can find their friends & family on the app without having to manually create a whole new contact list), obviously there are others who do not (irrespectively of privacy concerns). The point of the blog post is to show we're trying to cater for both, rather than assuming that everyone falls into the WhatsApp bracket.
    - techntoke 7y ago
      If you are trying to cater to people that will use your app like the other services, then why would they just not choose Discord or Telegram in the first place?
      - cyphar 7y ago
        The goal is to make it easier for those people to use Matrix too. Otherwise you won't ever expand past a fraction of the tech community and won't overcome the network effect of larger messaging systems. This is the same reason why (for instance) E2E isn't the default right now -- there were massive usability issues that most normal users would have trouble with (until very recently you could lose all your historical session keys unless you were very careful and backed them up religiously). Speaking anecdotally, several people I've switched to Matrix really wanted to switch away because they lost all of our old chat messages when they logged out of their account. I hope you agree that people without very strong privacy concerns should be able to use Matrix as well.
- meruru 7y ago
  >most users want an app which works like Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram etc Most users are already using Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram etc. I don't think it makes sense to sacrifice privacy to make Riot work similarly to them when the whole reason to use Riot is so that you don't have to make such sacrifices. How does Discord works? It's pretty popular and I don't think they do that. Somehow it doesn't seem to be a problem for them.
  - Arathorn 7y ago
    But we're not sacrificing privacy. The idea is to give the user a checkbox to check that lets them opt in to making themselves discoverable on the network if they want, and similarly clarifies the wording if they want to see which of their contacts are also on the network. Discord is just one specific use case of an app, while Matrix is trying to support all possible ones (e.g. WhatsApp style behaviour).
    - meruru 7y ago
      I'm fine with that as long as it's clearly explained. The issue was that the program would nudge the user to upload personal information without making it clear what was happening and that it was unnecessary for Riot to function. However there's a broader point that it doesn't make sense to imitate the competition when the thing you're copying is precisely the reason why one would want to leave the competition to your solution.
    - maxidorius 7y ago
      Allowing a user to make themselves discoverable is fine. The real question is why was "vector.im" used and not "matrix.org", or the user simply prompted? And why is that data queryable without any kind of authentication? Also, the Identity servers are part of a closed cluster where data is replicated. We are aware of vector.im and matrix.org but you did not answer the following question of the research document: is there other servers in that closed cluster? If yes, which?
      - Arathorn 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Fnoord 7y ago
  > (edited due to accidentally hitting submit...) You can add a value to delay in your HN profile. E.g. delay 10 gives you 10 minutes till your comment appears. See the FAQ, "In my profile, what is delay?" [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- lostinthematrix 7y ago
  I run several home servers for clubs and communities and plan to expand them. So far the installations are as good as isolated from the rest of the Matrix network. They are just an alternative to slack or whatsapp groups, but not whatsapp as a whole (share your status with your supervisor, discovered by YOUR phone number). Since the communication to the identity server of matrix.org/new vector was not transparently communicated so far or could simply be switched off, I decided to run identity servers as well (mxisd) and enter them in the Riot instances. These are completely isolated and are only used for password resets. It would have been much easier if identity server support could be disabled directly in the home server for simple and secure installations. Let's see whether the matrix team solves the hard problem of running a privacy respective, yet global key-value store ;)

Arathorn 7y ago

(Matrix lead here) The core problem is: empirically most users want an app which works like Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram etc and tells you which other users are contactable. If you’re some random installing a comms app, you want to know if any of your contacts are on it already. It’s nothing to do with whether your long lost cousin is on it. However, there are then folks hyperfocused on privacy who declare this ‘toxic data exfiltration’ and vociferously object. We’re trying to get the balance right, and it’s worth noting that the bug you linked is still up in the air. We don’t have the final UX yet, but the idea is to even more explicitly warn the user that their contacts are being uploaded to a identity lookup service if they want to discover people on the network. An alternative/complementary approach is https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/10093 https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/10093. (edited due to accidentally hitting submit...)

DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
I really want to cheer for matrix/riot and this blog post moves me in that direction, but then seeing your comment as lead-dev throws me back into reality. The post is all about _tightening_ privacy! So why is the suggestion to solve addressbook feature more elegantly than a a TOS not addressed and instead GP is dismissed as being hyperfocused on privacy. The reason I cheer about Matrix is exactly because of its P2P nature, which neither of the other privacy focused solutions like Wire/Signal address (though these give better privacy right now). Isn't it exactly the privacy conscious crowd that matrix is pitching to? Those of us who don't trust a signal or wire server because that server code is proprietary? Matrix has been promising better privacy (and e2e encryption) for some time but maybe this isn't actually where matrix is heading? I sure would like to know because there is no point for many of us to continue cheering for what otherwise looks really promising. And it's not like a better technical solution for the address book doesn't exist!!
- _Codemonkeyism 7y ago
  Like everyone else they want to become the next WhatsApp - with only "the privacy conscious crowd" they don't think they'll get there. They market to your mom.
  - Arathorn 7y ago
    We really don't want to become the next WhatsApp fwiw. The idea is more to be the new email, or the realtime version of the web. We should be able to support the use cases both for privacy enthusiasts as well as mums, dads, grandparents or whoever.
    - etiam 7y ago
      Do you imagine the new email is going to be anything like the old email, in allowing easy composition of substantial, letter-length messages which can be organized in their own right? I would love to be able to point non-technical users to an email alternative with sane integrity properties, and I've tried to some extent to push correspondence to Riot, but as it is right now, many of those users seem to suffer from Riot's flat design and not adapting well to the room metaphor. And one trigger-happy composition line posted to infinity scroll chat is pretty far from the experience of even a rudmentary email client. I'll admit I haven't done a thorough search of the clients but if you're aware of good implementations of a letter metaphor for Matrix I'd be very grateful to learn what I've been missing.
      - Arathorn 7y ago
        We don't have a good letter metaphor in Matrix yet, but it should be coming fairly soon - we have someone sponsoring development on threading, and so you should get that bit at least in the coming months. However, the other aspect of mail style semantics is the incredible flexibility which email gives in terms of adding/removing people from threads on a message by message basis. This doesn't map very tidily into a Matrix room currently, and is a bit of an open question right now :)
_Codemonkeyism 7y ago
I'm using Signal and I never want or wanted "like Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram etc and tells you which other users are contactable."
- Arathorn 7y ago
  okay, which is why we're making it very clearly opt-in, so that folks who don't want this don't end up accidentally using it.
IshKebab 7y ago
Well said. The privacy nazis are a very vocal minority here but I'm glad you are focusing on making something that people might actually want to use. We already have PGP if you want inconvenient NSA-proof communication with nobody. What we really need is good open alternative to Slack and WhatsApp, that have good security but not at the cost of making them annoying to use.
- DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
  I don't think your comment helps. An alternative to Slack exists: Zulip and Mattermost and both aren't annoying to use. You can use Signal instead of WhatsApp or if you don't trust that you can also use Ricochet. Being passionate about something doesn't make them a Nazi.
  - eropple 7y ago
    Dunno about Zulip, but IMO Mattermost is pretty clunky and uncomfortable.
    - it33 7y ago
      Mattermost CEO here, thanks for your feedback, is there anything specific you feel we could improve? We recently raised $50 million in funding from YC to accelerate the project.
WhatIsDukkha 7y ago
Not sure I'm in the "hyperfocused on privacy" camp but I guess if people need to be typecast ok... I use matrix to talk to a few friends and family largely trying to replace gtalk. The irc or whatsapp usecase isn't really whats up for me. Sharing the email globally suddenly puts its out there for 7billion other people... you KNOW this is going to get scraped and repurposed, so why do it? Separate the flows. 1 - "Hey I'm a social butterfly and WANT to add my twitter etc I UNDERSTAND this is blasting my personal data to the world" 2 - "Hey I'd just like to get off gtalk and talk to my close friends and family/creepydarkprivacyspais" The flows for addressbook alone... like how thought out is any of that? Oh sweet my coworkers from 17 years ago are going to matrix with me...(no thanks?). You've done a lot of good INNOVATIVE work with matrix so far but this part seems half-baked and frankly like you are phoning it in.
- Arathorn 7y ago
  Okay, so i guess it's not really a question of privacy hyperfocus but just different users having very disjoint use cases. I'm not sure i'd characterise this as phoning it in: the point of the blog post and all the accompanying bugs is to spell out that we're trying to solve for once and for all the problem of how best to enable contact discovery for folks who want it (as opt-in rather than opt-out!)... while also keeping the private-messaging crew happy. Totally agreed that it's been half-baked historically though, which is why we're fixing it now that 1.0 is out the door and we have some bandwidth to address it. > Separate the flows. The idea here is absolutely to separate the flows. We don't have a final UI proposal yet (as is clear from the bugs) because we're still working it through. The closest is probably https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/10091 https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/10091 right now.
  - cmroanirgo 7y ago
    My big problem is the auto uploading of all contacts. Maybe providing a ui to select the ones you're most likely to want to contact would be beneficial? Some ppl would want to select All, and some None, but if given the choice between the two, I'd select None. However, with a list I could select the 10 or so important to me rather than actually None.
jeltz 7y ago
> you want to know if any of your contacts are on it already. For me that is an anti-feature and something which I have so far never wanted to do. I hate when apps ask me to add users based on my other contact lists. I want to curate my contact list and only add the people I communicate with over this platform. I do not want to add a bunch of old contact's which I have forgot who they are when moving to a new messenger and I do not want to add people's accounts which they may have only used once years ago. And this is entirely ignoring the privacy aspect of it which I do not care that much about.
- Arathorn 7y ago
  Yup, while many people do like this feature (the billions of people who use WhatsApp and breathe a sigh of relief that they can find their friends & family on the app without having to manually create a whole new contact list), obviously there are others who do not (irrespectively of privacy concerns). The point of the blog post is to show we're trying to cater for both, rather than assuming that everyone falls into the WhatsApp bracket.
  - techntoke 7y ago
    If you are trying to cater to people that will use your app like the other services, then why would they just not choose Discord or Telegram in the first place?
    - cyphar 7y ago
      The goal is to make it easier for those people to use Matrix too. Otherwise you won't ever expand past a fraction of the tech community and won't overcome the network effect of larger messaging systems. This is the same reason why (for instance) E2E isn't the default right now -- there were massive usability issues that most normal users would have trouble with (until very recently you could lose all your historical session keys unless you were very careful and backed them up religiously). Speaking anecdotally, several people I've switched to Matrix really wanted to switch away because they lost all of our old chat messages when they logged out of their account. I hope you agree that people without very strong privacy concerns should be able to use Matrix as well.
meruru 7y ago
>most users want an app which works like Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram etc Most users are already using Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram etc. I don't think it makes sense to sacrifice privacy to make Riot work similarly to them when the whole reason to use Riot is so that you don't have to make such sacrifices. How does Discord works? It's pretty popular and I don't think they do that. Somehow it doesn't seem to be a problem for them.
- Arathorn 7y ago
  But we're not sacrificing privacy. The idea is to give the user a checkbox to check that lets them opt in to making themselves discoverable on the network if they want, and similarly clarifies the wording if they want to see which of their contacts are also on the network. Discord is just one specific use case of an app, while Matrix is trying to support all possible ones (e.g. WhatsApp style behaviour).
  - meruru 7y ago
    I'm fine with that as long as it's clearly explained. The issue was that the program would nudge the user to upload personal information without making it clear what was happening and that it was unnecessary for Riot to function. However there's a broader point that it doesn't make sense to imitate the competition when the thing you're copying is precisely the reason why one would want to leave the competition to your solution.
  - maxidorius 7y ago
    Allowing a user to make themselves discoverable is fine. The real question is why was "vector.im" used and not "matrix.org", or the user simply prompted? And why is that data queryable without any kind of authentication? Also, the Identity servers are part of a closed cluster where data is replicated. We are aware of vector.im and matrix.org but you did not answer the following question of the research document: is there other servers in that closed cluster? If yes, which?
    - Arathorn 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Fnoord 7y ago
> (edited due to accidentally hitting submit...) You can add a value to delay in your HN profile. E.g. delay 10 gives you 10 minutes till your comment appears. See the FAQ, "In my profile, what is delay?" [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
lostinthematrix 7y ago
I run several home servers for clubs and communities and plan to expand them. So far the installations are as good as isolated from the rest of the Matrix network. They are just an alternative to slack or whatsapp groups, but not whatsapp as a whole (share your status with your supervisor, discovered by YOUR phone number). Since the communication to the identity server of matrix.org/new vector was not transparently communicated so far or could simply be switched off, I decided to run identity servers as well (mxisd) and enter them in the Riot instances. These are completely isolated and are only used for password resets. It would have been much easier if identity server support could be disabled directly in the home server for simple and secure installations. Let's see whether the matrix team solves the hard problem of running a privacy respective, yet global key-value store ;)