Ontimp

what kind of baked-in telemetry are we talking about?

I like Zen on Linux

Yea Synapse is very resource hungry. Element built a much more performative enterprise server implementation, but though it’s open source it comes with a proprietary license, which kind of defeats the point when it comes to digital sovereignty in the public sector. From what I heard they unfortunately concluded that this is the only way to prevent organizations from freeriding, but it still sucks for the ecosystem. I’m working on one of the larger European Matrix public sector projects and we’ve been trying to mobilize funds for upstream contributions for some time, but it’s not easy to convince the policy and finance people to approve sustainable contributions to an open source ecosystem; they want to see procurements where it’s 100% clear what you get for your money. Also, public sector communication use cases frequently have high user count, low message volume and a high number of federated instances; so the current Synapse implementation has mostly been workable as you can feasibly scale horizontally. So there is currently not really that much financial incentive and pressure from the public sector to improve the efficiency of Synapse.

Here you go: https://media.ccc.de/v/matrix-conf-2025-74985-how-matrix-is-becoming-the-communication-standard-for-public-sector I get the adversity to YouTube, but the media.ccc link was literally one click away… I find that there is a fine line between having principles and being pedantic.

Also: Host your own Matrix or XMPP server for your family and friends. Basically nothing anyone could do to prevent you from doing that.

That seems like a client-side UI issue though. I’m sure you could get that request into the dev roadmap of your preferred client.

Unfortunately it seems most major Lemmy clients (https://join-lemmy.org/apps) are small or individual projects, some of which are closed source or use their public repos just for transparency. Seems like a relatively easy feature to build though if the APIs still spit out all the required data after deletion.

Depends. A basically old wood fire? No. But here is other nasty stuff that does not ‘burn’ as we think of it but still produces enormous heat in exothermic reactions that do not need oxygen to sustain themselves.

If you plan to securely store such material look at appropriate chemical supply storage, not safes.

Yea but if you worry about CPU bugs there is no such thing as trust, no matter who owns the infrastructure. Any software can have critical bugs and any system that can be accessed remotely can be compromised. Personally I’d trust the people at Signal that they have made a reasonable architecture section to balance availability and privacy

I wouldn’t want to input my personal data on the self-hosted website of some random person.

Also, frequently there are official petition websites for national and European bodies, predominantly parliaments, that will actually force parliaments to discuss the issue instead of just screaming into the void.

No reason to let the perfect be the enemy of the good though. As you said, pretty much anything is better than WhatsApp

Depends. Signal is the strongest competitor within that niche, but overall both will only grow if they capture marker share from WhatsApp; which is perfectly feasible as they are in principle perfectly viable substitute products and it’s mostly the monopolistic pressures of WhatsApp’s preexisting user base. In my personal experiences, Signal, Threema, Matrix, etc. see use within relatively closed bubbles (i.e. I moved my family over to signal, or a work project team uses Element for Matrix, etc.). But more and more people you run into in Germany already have a second messenger that is not owned by Meta in their phone and I would hence expect that WhatsApp’s market share will drop over the next few years. Signal imo has the lead here as it works with phone numbers too, so you don’t need to know someone else’s handle

Foe many of the federated self hosted ones you can just use the public instances; it’s about as freaky as using Lemmy lol

Yes but those things are being worked on including meta data encryption.

Also, strictly speaking you can migrate accounts, it’s just a little cumbersome and needs either some manual effort or separate tooling. I agree though that it should be considerably easier.

Any number of Matrix-based messengers fulfill most of those criteria; meta data reduction could be better but we’re getting there.

Also Signal is very decent alternative if you want a WhatsApp-like UX from a trustworthy source.

This reporting seems quite one-sided.

Which claims are you referring to?