still using reddit, works great
Chat platforms
Never used Matrix before. How to use it? What client to use? Does it require phone number or email to use it?
PMUSR
This is the main one. However it requires an email address. You could simply use a throwaway email, but if you absolutely don't want to use email, you can look at these suggestions from leafnose instead.
Is there a link to the mastodon thread on why discord was chosen over xmpp as a matrix replacement?
Last I checked, xmpp scales pretty well with users relative to matrix.
One con I can see is with xmpp you can't delete messages, but outside of that, xmpp has a pretty robust moderation system.
nemo yeah there was no helpful links shared, so after manually hunting it down, all I could find was a Matrix article linked in Mastodon citing mutual similarities. No explicit XMPP commentaries that I saw
XMPP is still a great potential IMO
nemo One con I can see is with xmpp you can't delete messages
I was not a member of the moderation team when it was decided. I was not involved in any discussions about it, so keep this in mind. I have also never used XMPP so I know virtually nothing about it.
However, if deleting messages isn't supported, that would be an instant deal breaker if you ask me. It's just not acceptable to leave certain things up for the whole community to see.
There are many people who've moved to Discord and many have said that they moved to Discord because it's a better experience overall.
Many people have issues with Discord because they don't want to provide their phone number. I personally signed up while connected to a VPN, I used a SimpleLogin email alias, and I haven't been asked for a phone number. Servers can set their "verification level" to "highest" (documentation), which would require that members provide their phone number, but our server doesn't have it set up that way.
Regardless, all of this isn't all that important considering all messages are still bridged across Discord, Matrix, Telegram, and IRC. Feel free to pick your favorite and participate from there.
ErnestThornhill Whitelisted XMPP server federstion might be a reasonable consideration in that scenario. Starting from zero and controlling vetting additions onward for example.
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other8026 I prefer to think principally on this. I'd rather deal with the outcomes and consequences of creating free open privacy respecting spaces using liberating options. Rather than .. more or less .. misaligning and conflating philosophy and core intentions.
GOS is the betterment affecting and forging positive change. Nobel. Innovating and empowering sovereignty, privacy, security etc. If there was suddenly then a decision made to go use one of Google or Microsoft's platforms for collaboration, that conflicts every fibre of my being.
Example is GOS about Discourse. Might be cute, functional and familiar. But I wouldn't have made that choice personally foundationally. It's owned by one entity, all logged (yes can soft delete), censorship is practiced, and they can ultimately decide if you are welcome tomorrow or not.
Long story short, I just prefer the totally sovereign and independent alternatives in the pursuit of creating an ecosystem that changes stronghold norms.
Mentality being as such. I acknowledge the considerations of the different methodologies.
riddlemethis As the community manager for the project, along with having been a community moderator for a very long time now, let me give you my perspective:
When I first started engaging with the GrapheneOS community a number of years ago, I created a Matrix account just to be able to speak in the GrapheneOS rooms. This is not an uncommon occurrence in our community, and I would say that if we were to take a poll, the percentage of people who made a Matrix account just for GrapheneOS and don't use it for anything else would be surprising.
I can understand the "principled" position, but there are many other factors to consider if you want to create a solid community. Matrix has horrid moderation tools, critical state-breaking issues that have led to room bricks, etc. This has greatly impacted our community through having to re-create the rooms after a brick many times, along with long-time helpful community members deciding to leave due to being exposed to graphic materials by people attacking the project because all we could do is remove it as soon as possible; the lack of moderation tools didn't give us any serious proactive options.
Matrix was chosen because that's where the community already was after IRC stopped being the main platform for the project. It's still offered as an option to this day, as is IRC, Telegram, and more recently, Discord.
Discord in a few months has grown immensely. It's a space where members can be shielded from the attacks, and also lowers friction as a great number of people already have pre-existing and long-established Discord accounts, which is not going to realistically be the case for Matrix or XMPP.
Adding more options on top of Matrix wouldn't make sense if the options that were added did not address the problems that we were dealing with on Matrix in the first place. Matrix remains an option, but by also offering Discord, we're offering people the chance to use something familiar, lowering the bar to entry, along with something that allows us to uphold the standards of protecting our community that we want.
GrapheneOS is useful to people when they get to use it. Let's not make the community surrounding it obscure. Extending a welcome to people on a platform that's not only better in terms of being resistant to attacks but also familiar is a good thing, not a bad thing.
As things stand, we would prefer to not have to host something else, and even if we had the capacity to host something else, it would have to be something that would solve issues instead of just creating different problems without a clear benefit.
I hope the above provides some context behind the thought process.
other8026 Sad to hear, but understandable. To be fair though, matrix doesn't support deleting messages either, as last I checked it all depends on an honor system between servers (which is to be expected when federation happens).
I'm not up to date with matrix client features, but if there are matrix clients that store messages locally, then matrix has the same message retention problem as xmpp (and irc).
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riddlemethis You might not even have to go that far, you can have an xmpp muc be silent without voice out of the box and manually whitelist people that request voice. To cut down on the spam, have a certain time period before granting voice. You can also drop certain messages that match a specific keyword before they reach the muc (xmpp is pretty robust!).
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Another thing to note too is the more platforms you support, the more resources it takes to manage everything (not sure by how much, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was exponential). So I understand the fact that the grapheneos community simply can't create a bridge to every protocol under the sun.
I'm just sad that xmpp didn't make the cut while discord did :melting_face:
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I'm very glad though that irc is still an option, even though I'm not as comfortable knowing that my messages are being relayed to discord (which doesn't affect me as much because I mainly lurk).
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Thank you for suggestion.
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nemo If someone decides not to honor redactions, they're going to have a whole bunch of Child Sex Abuse Material, gore and other disgusting content in their chat logs. There will also be the endless harassment, fabricated stories and other content posted during raids. In practice, every multi-user server that's allowed to use our rooms honors redactions. The content is still kept by the servers for a certain amount of time after being redacted but only room mods on servers enabling fetching redactions (which we do for the grapheneos.org Matrix server) and the server admins can view it.
Another thing to note too is the more platforms you support, the more resources it takes to manage everything (not sure by how much, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was exponential). So I understand the fact that the grapheneos community simply can't create a bridge to every protocol under the sun.
Each platform adds a lot of moderation overhead, especially platforms without full support for the bridge such as IRC and Telegram. IRC lacks message deletion, so if IRC starts being raided we're going to disable sending messages through it quite quickly.
I'm very glad though that irc is still an option, even though I'm not as comfortable knowing that my messages are being relayed to discord (which doesn't affect me as much because I mainly lurk).
Our rooms are completely public and get public archived at https://view.matrix.org/ which is search indexed. Anyone who wants the content of our rooms can easily obtain them. Bridging to Discord doesn't reduce privacy for people using the room on other platforms. Discord can access the content regardless, as can everyone else. There are no doubt AI models being trained on public chat rooms.
GrapheneOS If someone decides not to honor redactions, they're going to have a whole bunch of Child Sex Abuse Material, gore and other disgusting content in their chat logs.
Can I ask a very serious question? Is there any risk of being exposed to CSAM when on the GrapheneOS chats? Do you have experience of that being posted? How often? How soon before a mod removes it? Because if there is a risk, I think I will just stay on the forum instead.
ryrona
Matrix is vulnerable to raids because it has horribly poor moderation tools with lack of the ability to pre-filter content. The bridge that transfers messages across the chat platforms are configured so that media from Matrix* isn't visible on the Discord side. So if raiders post media on Matrix you won't see it if you're using Discord.
*Not sure if this is the case for the other chat platforms as well (Telegram, IRC).
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ryrona I don't want to go into many details because I don't want to feed the trolls.
I'll just say this: members of the moderation team do our best to protect the community from malicious people. We act as quickly as we can. Some platforms are better than others when it comes to moderation.
Discord is by far the best chat platform when it comes to automatic filtering of inappropriate material. Matrix is the worst. If you want to participate in the community via our chat rooms, Discord is by far the best experience in almost every way.
Discord and Telegram do not receive media from Matrix. Telegram is prevented from being able to share media. People on Discord can, due to Discord's better automated moderation tool not allowing abuse, along with allowing quick response and proper tooling for when it does occur.
TL;DR @ryrona you won't experience anything like that on Discord or Telegram.
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fid02 other8026 matchboxbananasynergy Uhm, Discord sounds nice, but they never allowed me to create an account, not without giving my real phone number at least. Since it sounds like CSAM actually do gets posted every now and then on the Matrix side, I guess I will just stay here on the forum where it is safer.
fid02 Yeah, I tried from both Tor and VPN. Problem is I burn my e-mail address every attempt, and customer support wasn't helpful either. And like 30% of everyone I know who have been using Discord has suddenly one day got banned for no apparent reason. I think Discord's automated moderation system is generally hostile to some of us. Everyone I know is saying to move to Matrix and not bother with Discord. But it seems Matrix is not so suited for large open chat rooms. With that said, I will keep trying to sign up every second year or so, hoping they let me in one day.