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).

              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.

                    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.

                            ryrona Are you connecting behind a VPN? Try changing servers until it finds one that doesn't trigger spam checks. Might also trigger fewer checks to sign up through the Discord app and not the website (unsure).

                                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.

                                  FYI, regarding Discord...a spy site is scraping Discord and selling user messages. “Spy Pet” is apparently scraping more than 10,000 Discord servers. For just ~$5, people can start searching for Discord handles, which will bring up their messages posted in a Discord server (not PMs though), assuming the bots have access and are actively scraping. Bots of this service are apparently in some of the popular servers, too. Discord is “investigating” but hasn’t taken any action. In other words, you’ve got more to worry about than just Discord knowing your activity.

                                  https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/16/discord_network_sale/

                                    ryrona It's solely a Matrix problem because we disabled bridging the content to other platforms. IRC is too primitive to have inline media, Discord has good automatic filtering for anything not coming from the bridge since we have filtering nudity, etc. enabled and Telegram is alright. Matrix has major issues with CSAM, gore, etc. along with raids in general. As a federated platform with extremely little work put into anti-abuse and moderation tools, Matrix is extremely vulnerable to this. Avoid Matrix and you'll avoid it. It's the reason we aren't going to add uploading images to the forum, but we're going to add support for linking to images elsewhere via a privacy preserving media proxy (this is currently not active due to imgur blocking OVH).

                                      ErnestThornhill This is not relevant to our chat rooms, and neither is Discord using the data. Our chat rooms are completely public, publicly archived and bridged across multiple platforms... It's the same as posting here on the forum. Everyone can see it including crawlers. Do you think that crawlers are not using all this content on the forum? They do, and they also use the chat room content via https://view.matrix.org/ even if they only crawl the web.

                                        ryrona Our server doesn't require phone number verification so it will only be required if you use an IP with a bad reputation due to it being used for spam, raids, etc.

                                          Of course I'm aware of the crawlers. Since Discord is an option as a chat platform for community members, I was sharing the article to let others know about/make them aware of it. That's all. I apologize if you thought otherwise.

                                          3 months later

                                          Dumdum No, Matrix isn't directly involved in the bridge. The bridge can work without it.

                                            a month later
                                            11 days later

                                            Tbh SimpleX is even worse regarding moderation. All these very private messengers are just bad for moderating big rooms.

                                            As these rooms are public, treat them as public. It sucks that you need to split tunnel Discord, I experienced the same and even after adding a real phone number I couldnt join a chat, just because of a VPN.

                                            But in the end, use SimpleX or XMPP where you are in control, but these are not suited for public rooms.

                                            Tbh I would also only use Matrix for public rooms, it isnt really privacy friendly either.