If users don’t trust their app provider, they can always go switch apps, which gives them freedom. Users in federated systems tend to coalesce around the best/biggest server that the bulk of people use - which means that server typically gets to see a disproportionate amount of communication metadata (who’s talking to who, and when), and has disproportionate power over the network, which could bully others away from running their own deployments. (Moxie didn’t want the 36C3 talk recorded, and I haven’t watched it, so this is responding to the original blog post).įrom my perspective, the main points proposed in ‘The ecosystem is moving’ boil down to:ĭecentralised systems are harder to design and build than centralised ones, as coordination is harder if you don’t have a single authority to trust.ĭecentralised systems are harder and slower to evolve than centralised ones, as you can’t force participants to rapidly roll out (or even agree on) new features. However, the subject has come up again thanks to Moxie’s talk on the same subject at 36C3 last week, and we keep getting asked to write a formal response on the Matrix side. The conclusion was that we agreed to disagree and Moxie said he’d be happy to be proved wrong, and wished us good luck. Moxie politely declined, and then a few months later wrote “ The ecosystem is moving” to elaborate his thoughts on why he feels he “no longer believes that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.”Īt the time we didn’t respond via a blog post instead we ended up talking it through a few times in person to see how misaligned we really were.
After all, one of Matrix’s goals is to be an interoperability layer between other communication silos, and one of the reasons for us using Signal’s Double Ratchet Algorithm for Matrix’s encryption was to increase our chances of one day connecting with other apps using the same algorithm (Signal, WhatsApp, Google Allo, Skype, etc). A few years ago, back when Matrix was originally implementing end-to-end encryption, we asked Moxie (the project lead for Signal) whether he’d ever consider connecting Signal (then TextSecure) to Matrix.
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