5 ms·
You would avoid it. The criminals it's ostensibly meant to target will avoid it. Who won't avoid it is the hundreds of millions of Europeans who use WhatsApp a
by Zak 2y ago
You would avoid it. The criminals it's ostensibly meant to target will avoid it.
Who won't avoid it is the hundreds of millions of Europeans who use WhatsApp as their primary means of telecommunication, many of whom don't even know what "end to end encryption" means, but effortlessly gain resistance to mass surveillance.
- kstrauser 2y agoThat’s all true. It’s also why we should have smaller networks that are resistant to a given jurisdiction’s laws. WhatsApp has offices and business presences all over the world and now they’re stuck complying with everyone’s laws. That’s a bad situation for us to be in.
- Zak 2y agoI won't argue with that, and I would certainly like for Matrix to get good enough to use as a primary messaging system. Right now, I think if I tried to convince non-technical people to use it, they would find the experience unsatisfactory.
- kstrauser 2y agoVery true. I like it. I wouldn’t want to explain to my extended family how to contact me through it. I really really wish Mastodon had E2E messaging. Non-techies are using it today. I’d much rather get my sibling set up on that.
- _lvbh 2y agoThat’s the opposite of my experience. I’ve gotten most of my (very non-technical) family to use matrix through my home server. It’s a simple sign up and tell me your username type of thing and that’s it. One major advantage is that it works perfectly fine even in China which means there is one platform that everyone can use (WeChat is invite only, WhatsApp is blocked).
- Zak 2y agoI find the barrier isn't usually lack of technical skill, but lack of interest and patience. The average American can reach everyone they know by SMS and it's hard to convince them to use Signal or WhatsApp, which take under a minute to set up, are fast and reliable, and have almost no learning curve for people already used to SMS. You describe a situation where people can't reach everyone all of their family members in the popular ways, and Matrix offers a way to keep in touch you can guide them through and admin for them. I've had speed and reliability issues with Matrix myself, so I wouldn't try to talk people into using it.
- Arathorn 2y agohistorically matrix has had perf problems for sure; we are in the final stages of fixing that tho. to quote someone earlier today in one of the community rooms: > just downloaded element x from f-droid and wowza it just.. loads instantly? can't believe i now live in the age of element being faster than discord
- _lvbh 2y agoI think federation is currently the biggest tax on performance. Joining even medium sized groups with only a hundred users takes a few minutes and eats up a ton of resources on the server. It got so bad that I had to turn federation off completely. That said, I only have ~1GB of RAM.