8 ms·

Upcoming coordinated security fix for all Matrix server implementations

172 points by notpushkin 1y ago

baby 1y ago
I feel like what's missing is not decentralization, but an open source offering to have large servers with e2e encryption. The cost of running a server doesn't have to be high.
mystraline 1y ago
Just a heads up, that I mostly quit using Matrix except for a few topic-specific and heavily moderated servers. Why? The main chat server matrix.org has a child porn/CSAM 'problem'. Due to lack of moderation in many of those rooms, along with protocol problems, these sorts of CSAM spammers can do an hours long image campaign of stuff that's illegal to even have. Theres nothing quite like waking up to a post every 10 seconds of felonies in a cybersecurity or Linux chat, and the summary clean and get the hell out of those rooms. Banning also doesn't work, due to distributed nature of rooms. You can be banned from matrix.org room but connect through a different server, and they can still spam users. If you do want to be on Matrix, I would recommend a few changes. 1. Don't stay on matrix.org chatrooms. They are the worst hit and slow to resolve 2. Disable image preloading and downloading. 3. If you have private servers and rooms for friends, its the best.
- AAAAaccountAAAA 1y ago
  They recently adopted this thing, though: https://matrix.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-policy-servers/ https://matrix.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-policy-servers/ I haven't encountered any of that kind of abuse in Matrix after it has been implemented. It partially nullifies the point of the room decentralization, though. Some of the biggest public rooms like "Matrix HQ" are almost unusably slow, though, since they have tens of thousands zombie users. Matrix performance feels now more or less adequate for all realistic use cases, as long as long-term idle users are pruned out every now and then from public rooms.
  - ezst 1y ago
    > It partially nullifies the point of the room decentralization, though. And that's the ONE thing giving Matrix bragging rights over any other chat protocol. Their whole crusade against XMPP in Matrix early days was based on this distinction and overstating the importance and relevance of it. So I guess we are left with an absurdly complex protocol and single-source implementation for… nothing then?
    - Ajedi32 1y ago
      It looks like the policy servers are themselves federated, so it's not really as big a concession as you're making it out to be.
    - edhelas 1y ago
      XMPP is still there and going strong :)
- edent 1y ago
  Any when you complain about it, Matrix accuses you of acting in the interests of the attackers. I've quit it entirely. They have a real victim complex and don't understand that people have legitimate complaints about them.
  - mystraline 1y ago
    I've never engaged the project admins. But if they're like Tor and their responses to deanonymizing OS reporting (basically hostile and attacking), it wouldn't surprise me. My issue with possession of CSAM is that its statutory without mens rea. That means if my client gets an image without my knowledge or approval, I'm still blamed for it. And blame is a bloody felony. Some jurisdictions call for absurd punishments of 10y prison per image. There are a few rooms I'm in. They are heavily moderated and narrow discussion. One is an speech-to-text from OpenMHZ police scanner for my area. But I also discourage usage - I'm highly technical, and I fear average users would get in over their heads and have a very bad time.
    - firefax 1y ago
      >...if they're like Tor and their responses to deanonymizing OS reporting (basically hostile and attacking), it wouldn't surprise me. Can you be more specific about this? I've met several of the devs and they seem open to bug reports, and the Tor blog is always being updated with notes about various fixes that have been implemented...
      - mystraline 1y ago
        Tor silently, last October, quit spoofing OS and now reports over browser headers what OS you are. Previously, every Tor Browser was "windows". The claim I've heard was that there were JavaScript attacks that could uncover what OS you were using. Patching those would be 'too hard'. So now TBB just gives up OS. Seems not very good to voluntarily give up bits of PII. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3wlNemFwbwE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3wlNemFwbwE is where I was made aware of this problem. I verified it on my infrastructure too.
- orbisvicis 1y ago
  Aren't matrix user IDs global? Wouldn't it be possible to ban messages from a given user regardless of server?
  - joseda-hg 1y ago
    Wouldn't registering a new user in a different instance give you a new ID?
- meepmorp 1y ago
  Is the CSAM spam a way to harass the admins/users or some kind of trading via broadcast in public forums?
  - AAAAaccountAAAA 1y ago
    Former, I think. It involved highlighting all users of the room, and sometimes verbal abuse against Matrix and/or the projects which the rooms in question belogned to. Now that sort of abuse is much harder, since they have improved spam filtering.
  - mossTechnician 1y ago
    Some of it was the latter. Matrix servers could be used in the past to store and serve unauthenticated media to anyone[0], which was described by the team as "not great"[1] and "abuse of Matrix as a content distribution network" [2]. I believe the team was prudent in being reserved about describing the issue (and the abuse it could entail) until after these changes rolled out in 2024[1], especially due to the unique challenges they required (including putting a freeze on unauthenticated media as part of the upgrade process). [0]: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/06/26/sunsetting-unauthenticated-media/ https://matrix.org/blog/2024/06/26/sunsetting-unauthenticate... [1]: https://2024.matrix.org/documents/talk_slides/LAB4%202024-09-21%2010_45%20Travis%20Ralston%20-%20Authenticated%20Media%20&%20How%20to%20ship%20spec%20features.pdf https://2024.matrix.org/documents/talk_slides/LAB4%202024-09... [2]: https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/ https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/ [3]: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/06/20/matrix-v1.11-release/ https://matrix.org/blog/2024/06/20/matrix-v1.11-release/
  - diggan 1y ago
    Also not unheard of less ethical competitors to engage in such campaigns.
- rglullis 1y ago
  You can configure synapse to not cache remote images. Yes, these spammers are obnoxious but most homeservers should be safe if the moderation is prompt.
- Fokamul 1y ago
  Make server with images banned. Only text. Profit?
  - SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
    Possessing the BASE64-encoding of such an image is still a felony. Text only doesn't solve the problem.
    - ptman 1y ago
      Matrix messages/events are limited to 64kB if you disallow attachments
      - zamadatix 1y ago
        62k of base64 of a random stock image from Pexel https://pastebin.com/raw/tU5D1kuT https://pastebin.com/raw/tU5D1kuT, you can try it here https://base64.guru/tools/data-url-to-image https://base64.guru/tools/data-url-to-image Proper SPAM and user/content management is an inevitable need for public chat. E.g. what makes HN chat readable and full of legal content is not comment length limit but all of the other more complex systems enabling efficient moderation.
    - diggan 1y ago
      Also ban anything that looks Base/binary-to-text encoded.
- phyzome 1y ago
  I have a private server (running Dendrite) but it doesn't even work well for that purpose -- so many bugs, many preventing me from reading messages due to encryption state fuckups.
- asimops 1y ago
  There is a blog post that captures this feelings very well in my opinion: Not being federated and E2E as an advantage https://blog.koehntopp.info/2025/06/17/no-federation-no-e2e.html https://blog.koehntopp.info/2025/06/17/no-federation-no-e2e....
- lowwave 1y ago
  To be fair on matrix.org they recommend that you host your own server. Main selling point of matrix.org is there is NO centralized server!!! That is whole point of using matrix instead of Telegram, Signal, Wire. Element for smart phone, please make it very easy to change custom server instead of the default "matrix.org" ( Schildi Chat did a good job in their UI) I would recommend matrix client over Element TBH.
- xinayder 1y ago
  I've been using it for over 2 years now and I agree there's a spam problem on public chatrooms. However, what's making me want to quit is that for more than 3 months now, message notifications have been completely broken on Android (Element X and its forks), and there's no fix for it. I completely miss out on important things and now have to build the habit of opening Element X once or twice every 15 minutes, so that it loads the messages from the server, and shows what people have been messaging me lately. I no longer get message notification details on my phone, instead a generic "you have new messages" pop-up. There are at least 6 issues on GitHub detailing the same issue, but there isn't a fix and it looks like this is not a priority for the development team right now, even though it makes Element X practically unusable.
  - komali2 1y ago
    In my experience, Element X was released long before it was ready, and I still think it's far from ready. I've been using Element on android and it's been wonderful. Can't speak for iOS.
    - realityfactchex 1y ago
      Element X is fine on iOS, but I wish it had regular updates. It feels like it has stagnated. There is still a feature gap for it to catch up with regular Element on iOS.
      - Arathorn 1y ago
        Dev on EXI has been focused on: * event cache, to speed up room load and provide offline support. this was a huge amount of “invisible” work. * media browsing - swiping between images, using the event cache * fixing voip integration * loads of trust & safety features * threads (now in labs) * spaces (in active dev) * search (in active dev) I agree that it feels like dev has slowed since the initial sprint to launch, but there’s another wave of features landing in the coming months.
        realityfactchex 1y ago
- ProofHouse 1y ago
  I am curious if there are any anyways that you would suggest this issue best be handled outside of putting the onus on user, as per your bullet points
- cjbgkagh 1y ago
  One of the reasons we cant have nice things. CSAM spam filtering is a bit of a moat for larger companies able to manage the costs of moderating it. I would like to see AI moderating of CSAM, perhaps an open weights model that is provided by a nation state. With confidential computing such models can be run on local hardware as a pre-filtering step without undermining anonymity.
  - diggan 1y ago
    > I would like to see AI moderating of CSAM, perhaps an open weights model that is provided by a nation state. I don't envy the people who would have to trauma their way through creating such dataset. Yet, it would be useful yes. > With confidential computing such models can be run on local hardware as a pre-filtering step without undermining anonymity. I'm not sure it'd make sense to run locally. Many clients aren't powerful enough to run it on the receiving end (+ every client would need to run it, instead of fewer entities), and for obvious reasons it doesn't make sense to run on the senders end.
    - cjbgkagh 1y ago
      I guess I meant locally to the server not the client (edge). But also perhaps a very light model could be run on the edge. I built a porn detection filtering algorithm back in the Random Forest days, it worked well except for the French and their overly flexible definition of 'art'. The 'hot-dog/not-hot-dog' from SV HBO is pretty accurate on what that was like. I've thought about what it would take to make a CSAM filter and if it could be trained entirely within a trusted enclave without external access to the underlying data and I do believe it is possible.
- Arathorn 1y ago
  This has been due to a very persistent spammer attacking the public network. Since adding policy servers (https://matrix.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-policy-servers/ https://matrix.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-policy-servers/) as a way to preemptively block content and other measures (https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/ https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/) things have improved at least in public rooms - assuming the admins enable policy servers. We sincerely apologise to everyone who has got exposed to this, and are continuing to improve the trust & safety apparatus in Matrix (although could really do with funding for the Foundation to help folks work on this as their day job).
  - stevenicr 1y ago
    It's been a while, I vaguely recall something about credits or levels or karma points or something, was this a matrix setting? For my matrix rooms I really want a default karma = 100 to be seen by others in the room, people can adjust this higher or lower Might be interesting to have an option for others to donate 20 karma to new people they know are cool or something. I get it that that destroys the conversation for new people and new people are what many groups really want - but we could be transparent about it. I have two spammers over the years that I spent many many hours blocking ip cidrs and such.. this was actually easier with the old RealChat program (simple right click by moderators) - not sure if that has gotten better in recent year or so. A cool down for new users and making it so we stop multiple 'cool in / warn up' accounts from same subnet would be nice too.
BoredPositron 1y ago
IRC is and was the answer.
- ClueslessTech99 1y ago
  IRC doesn't have chat history and a bunch of other features.
  - AAAAaccountAAAA 1y ago
    IRCv3 has "chathistory" extension. It basically involves combining an IRC network and a bouncer. There are at least two server implementations using it: ergo, which is more or less production ready, but does not have support for multi-server networks, and Libera's sable, which is under (very slow) development. I wonder why such thing wasn't done 15...20 years ago. Now it seems to be too little too late, with Matrix more or less having been taken the place of IRC.
    - darkwater 1y ago
      I guess that because of the "we don't need that here" attitude that ran a lot through the first generation(s) of Internet population. And it's a shame because with a more dynamic IRC development we wouldn't be in the Slack/Discord silos situation. Or maybe we would have been anyway because adding more and more complex features to federated, open-protocol systems with many actors involved with different, maybe even competing interests is not easy at all. But also if I think back at late '90s, IRC had almost the needed critical mass and non-tech users to become something more mainstream...
  - scblock 1y ago
    Our small group uses The Lounge web client for IRC which is a very good PWA, acts as a bouncer, has history search (not unlimited, but pretty long), supports image upload, and basically builds a modern group chat on top of IRC as a backend. We have a few folks who still use traditional IRC clients, but almost everyone just uses the web app. It's not a bad middle ground.
  - 1y ago
willvarfar 1y ago
I guess many of us are like me - have only a fuzzy idea of what Matrix is and what its like. Are there any normal web viewers to show what's in the public chatrooms without needing to join matrix and use the app etc?
- prmoustache 1y ago
  Main app, Element, is a website.
realityfactchex 1y ago
As other commentary here says, there is a real and alarming problem with spam in public rooms on the public server. On the other hand, a private server with just people who trust each other is fairly phenomenal. However, TFA seems to be in general about an upgrade to fix the following: "“state resets”: scenarios where Matrix’s state resolution algorithm can give unexpected results". If room states become more stable, that is great. Thanks to the Matrix team for all their efforts. Much gratitude.

172 points by notpushkin 1y ago

baby 1y ago

I feel like what's missing is not decentralization, but an open source offering to have large servers with e2e encryption. The cost of running a server doesn't have to be high.

mystraline 1y ago

Just a heads up, that I mostly quit using Matrix except for a few topic-specific and heavily moderated servers. Why? The main chat server matrix.org has a child porn/CSAM 'problem'. Due to lack of moderation in many of those rooms, along with protocol problems, these sorts of CSAM spammers can do an hours long image campaign of stuff that's illegal to even have. Theres nothing quite like waking up to a post every 10 seconds of felonies in a cybersecurity or Linux chat, and the summary clean and get the hell out of those rooms. Banning also doesn't work, due to distributed nature of rooms. You can be banned from matrix.org room but connect through a different server, and they can still spam users. If you do want to be on Matrix, I would recommend a few changes. 1. Don't stay on matrix.org chatrooms. They are the worst hit and slow to resolve 2. Disable image preloading and downloading. 3. If you have private servers and rooms for friends, its the best.

AAAAaccountAAAA 1y ago
They recently adopted this thing, though: https://matrix.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-policy-servers/ https://matrix.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-policy-servers/ I haven't encountered any of that kind of abuse in Matrix after it has been implemented. It partially nullifies the point of the room decentralization, though. Some of the biggest public rooms like "Matrix HQ" are almost unusably slow, though, since they have tens of thousands zombie users. Matrix performance feels now more or less adequate for all realistic use cases, as long as long-term idle users are pruned out every now and then from public rooms.
- ezst 1y ago
  > It partially nullifies the point of the room decentralization, though. And that's the ONE thing giving Matrix bragging rights over any other chat protocol. Their whole crusade against XMPP in Matrix early days was based on this distinction and overstating the importance and relevance of it. So I guess we are left with an absurdly complex protocol and single-source implementation for… nothing then?
  - Ajedi32 1y ago
    It looks like the policy servers are themselves federated, so it's not really as big a concession as you're making it out to be.
  - edhelas 1y ago
    XMPP is still there and going strong :)
edent 1y ago
Any when you complain about it, Matrix accuses you of acting in the interests of the attackers. I've quit it entirely. They have a real victim complex and don't understand that people have legitimate complaints about them.
- mystraline 1y ago
  I've never engaged the project admins. But if they're like Tor and their responses to deanonymizing OS reporting (basically hostile and attacking), it wouldn't surprise me. My issue with possession of CSAM is that its statutory without mens rea. That means if my client gets an image without my knowledge or approval, I'm still blamed for it. And blame is a bloody felony. Some jurisdictions call for absurd punishments of 10y prison per image. There are a few rooms I'm in. They are heavily moderated and narrow discussion. One is an speech-to-text from OpenMHZ police scanner for my area. But I also discourage usage - I'm highly technical, and I fear average users would get in over their heads and have a very bad time.
  - firefax 1y ago
    >...if they're like Tor and their responses to deanonymizing OS reporting (basically hostile and attacking), it wouldn't surprise me. Can you be more specific about this? I've met several of the devs and they seem open to bug reports, and the Tor blog is always being updated with notes about various fixes that have been implemented...
    - mystraline 1y ago
      Tor silently, last October, quit spoofing OS and now reports over browser headers what OS you are. Previously, every Tor Browser was "windows". The claim I've heard was that there were JavaScript attacks that could uncover what OS you were using. Patching those would be 'too hard'. So now TBB just gives up OS. Seems not very good to voluntarily give up bits of PII. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3wlNemFwbwE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3wlNemFwbwE is where I was made aware of this problem. I verified it on my infrastructure too.
orbisvicis 1y ago
Aren't matrix user IDs global? Wouldn't it be possible to ban messages from a given user regardless of server?
- joseda-hg 1y ago
  Wouldn't registering a new user in a different instance give you a new ID?
meepmorp 1y ago
Is the CSAM spam a way to harass the admins/users or some kind of trading via broadcast in public forums?
- AAAAaccountAAAA 1y ago
  Former, I think. It involved highlighting all users of the room, and sometimes verbal abuse against Matrix and/or the projects which the rooms in question belogned to. Now that sort of abuse is much harder, since they have improved spam filtering.
- mossTechnician 1y ago
  Some of it was the latter. Matrix servers could be used in the past to store and serve unauthenticated media to anyone[0], which was described by the team as "not great"[1] and "abuse of Matrix as a content distribution network" [2]. I believe the team was prudent in being reserved about describing the issue (and the abuse it could entail) until after these changes rolled out in 2024[1], especially due to the unique challenges they required (including putting a freeze on unauthenticated media as part of the upgrade process). [0]: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/06/26/sunsetting-unauthenticated-media/ https://matrix.org/blog/2024/06/26/sunsetting-unauthenticate... [1]: https://2024.matrix.org/documents/talk_slides/LAB4%202024-09-21%2010_45%20Travis%20Ralston%20-%20Authenticated%20Media%20&%20How%20to%20ship%20spec%20features.pdf https://2024.matrix.org/documents/talk_slides/LAB4%202024-09... [2]: https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/ https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/ [3]: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/06/20/matrix-v1.11-release/ https://matrix.org/blog/2024/06/20/matrix-v1.11-release/
- diggan 1y ago
  Also not unheard of less ethical competitors to engage in such campaigns.
rglullis 1y ago
You can configure synapse to not cache remote images. Yes, these spammers are obnoxious but most homeservers should be safe if the moderation is prompt.
Fokamul 1y ago
Make server with images banned. Only text. Profit?
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
  Possessing the BASE64-encoding of such an image is still a felony. Text only doesn't solve the problem.
  - ptman 1y ago
    Matrix messages/events are limited to 64kB if you disallow attachments
    - zamadatix 1y ago
      62k of base64 of a random stock image from Pexel https://pastebin.com/raw/tU5D1kuT https://pastebin.com/raw/tU5D1kuT, you can try it here https://base64.guru/tools/data-url-to-image https://base64.guru/tools/data-url-to-image Proper SPAM and user/content management is an inevitable need for public chat. E.g. what makes HN chat readable and full of legal content is not comment length limit but all of the other more complex systems enabling efficient moderation.
  - diggan 1y ago
    Also ban anything that looks Base/binary-to-text encoded.
phyzome 1y ago
I have a private server (running Dendrite) but it doesn't even work well for that purpose -- so many bugs, many preventing me from reading messages due to encryption state fuckups.
asimops 1y ago
There is a blog post that captures this feelings very well in my opinion: Not being federated and E2E as an advantage https://blog.koehntopp.info/2025/06/17/no-federation-no-e2e.html https://blog.koehntopp.info/2025/06/17/no-federation-no-e2e....
lowwave 1y ago
To be fair on matrix.org they recommend that you host your own server. Main selling point of matrix.org is there is NO centralized server!!! That is whole point of using matrix instead of Telegram, Signal, Wire. Element for smart phone, please make it very easy to change custom server instead of the default "matrix.org" ( Schildi Chat did a good job in their UI) I would recommend matrix client over Element TBH.
xinayder 1y ago
I've been using it for over 2 years now and I agree there's a spam problem on public chatrooms. However, what's making me want to quit is that for more than 3 months now, message notifications have been completely broken on Android (Element X and its forks), and there's no fix for it. I completely miss out on important things and now have to build the habit of opening Element X once or twice every 15 minutes, so that it loads the messages from the server, and shows what people have been messaging me lately. I no longer get message notification details on my phone, instead a generic "you have new messages" pop-up. There are at least 6 issues on GitHub detailing the same issue, but there isn't a fix and it looks like this is not a priority for the development team right now, even though it makes Element X practically unusable.
- komali2 1y ago
  In my experience, Element X was released long before it was ready, and I still think it's far from ready. I've been using Element on android and it's been wonderful. Can't speak for iOS.
  - realityfactchex 1y ago
    Element X is fine on iOS, but I wish it had regular updates. It feels like it has stagnated. There is still a feature gap for it to catch up with regular Element on iOS.
    - Arathorn 1y ago
      Dev on EXI has been focused on: * event cache, to speed up room load and provide offline support. this was a huge amount of “invisible” work. * media browsing - swiping between images, using the event cache * fixing voip integration * loads of trust & safety features * threads (now in labs) * spaces (in active dev) * search (in active dev) I agree that it feels like dev has slowed since the initial sprint to launch, but there’s another wave of features landing in the coming months.
      - realityfactchex 1y ago
ProofHouse 1y ago
I am curious if there are any anyways that you would suggest this issue best be handled outside of putting the onus on user, as per your bullet points
cjbgkagh 1y ago
One of the reasons we cant have nice things. CSAM spam filtering is a bit of a moat for larger companies able to manage the costs of moderating it. I would like to see AI moderating of CSAM, perhaps an open weights model that is provided by a nation state. With confidential computing such models can be run on local hardware as a pre-filtering step without undermining anonymity.
- diggan 1y ago
  > I would like to see AI moderating of CSAM, perhaps an open weights model that is provided by a nation state. I don't envy the people who would have to trauma their way through creating such dataset. Yet, it would be useful yes. > With confidential computing such models can be run on local hardware as a pre-filtering step without undermining anonymity. I'm not sure it'd make sense to run locally. Many clients aren't powerful enough to run it on the receiving end (+ every client would need to run it, instead of fewer entities), and for obvious reasons it doesn't make sense to run on the senders end.
  - cjbgkagh 1y ago
    I guess I meant locally to the server not the client (edge). But also perhaps a very light model could be run on the edge. I built a porn detection filtering algorithm back in the Random Forest days, it worked well except for the French and their overly flexible definition of 'art'. The 'hot-dog/not-hot-dog' from SV HBO is pretty accurate on what that was like. I've thought about what it would take to make a CSAM filter and if it could be trained entirely within a trusted enclave without external access to the underlying data and I do believe it is possible.
Arathorn 1y ago
This has been due to a very persistent spammer attacking the public network. Since adding policy servers (https://matrix.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-policy-servers/ https://matrix.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-policy-servers/) as a way to preemptively block content and other measures (https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/ https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/) things have improved at least in public rooms - assuming the admins enable policy servers. We sincerely apologise to everyone who has got exposed to this, and are continuing to improve the trust & safety apparatus in Matrix (although could really do with funding for the Foundation to help folks work on this as their day job).
- stevenicr 1y ago
  It's been a while, I vaguely recall something about credits or levels or karma points or something, was this a matrix setting? For my matrix rooms I really want a default karma = 100 to be seen by others in the room, people can adjust this higher or lower Might be interesting to have an option for others to donate 20 karma to new people they know are cool or something. I get it that that destroys the conversation for new people and new people are what many groups really want - but we could be transparent about it. I have two spammers over the years that I spent many many hours blocking ip cidrs and such.. this was actually easier with the old RealChat program (simple right click by moderators) - not sure if that has gotten better in recent year or so. A cool down for new users and making it so we stop multiple 'cool in / warn up' accounts from same subnet would be nice too.

BoredPositron 1y ago

IRC is and was the answer.

ClueslessTech99 1y ago
IRC doesn't have chat history and a bunch of other features.
- AAAAaccountAAAA 1y ago
  IRCv3 has "chathistory" extension. It basically involves combining an IRC network and a bouncer. There are at least two server implementations using it: ergo, which is more or less production ready, but does not have support for multi-server networks, and Libera's sable, which is under (very slow) development. I wonder why such thing wasn't done 15...20 years ago. Now it seems to be too little too late, with Matrix more or less having been taken the place of IRC.
  - darkwater 1y ago
    I guess that because of the "we don't need that here" attitude that ran a lot through the first generation(s) of Internet population. And it's a shame because with a more dynamic IRC development we wouldn't be in the Slack/Discord silos situation. Or maybe we would have been anyway because adding more and more complex features to federated, open-protocol systems with many actors involved with different, maybe even competing interests is not easy at all. But also if I think back at late '90s, IRC had almost the needed critical mass and non-tech users to become something more mainstream...
- scblock 1y ago
  Our small group uses The Lounge web client for IRC which is a very good PWA, acts as a bouncer, has history search (not unlimited, but pretty long), supports image upload, and basically builds a modern group chat on top of IRC as a backend. We have a few folks who still use traditional IRC clients, but almost everyone just uses the web app. It's not a bad middle ground.
- 1y ago

willvarfar 1y ago

I guess many of us are like me - have only a fuzzy idea of what Matrix is and what its like. Are there any normal web viewers to show what's in the public chatrooms without needing to join matrix and use the app etc?

prmoustache 1y ago
Main app, Element, is a website.

realityfactchex 1y ago

As other commentary here says, there is a real and alarming problem with spam in public rooms on the public server. On the other hand, a private server with just people who trust each other is fairly phenomenal. However, TFA seems to be in general about an upgrade to fix the following: "“state resets”: scenarios where Matrix’s state resolution algorithm can give unexpected results". If room states become more stable, that is great. Thanks to the Matrix team for all their efforts. Much gratitude.