Element really just told us if we don't like their direction of selling services to cops we should use another app. This is seriously the direction they settled on.

Content warning: yelling (not at you OP) Click to open/close

@theruran @alcinnz Do you have any knowledge as to where the bulk of funding is coming from for those who are supporting the XMPP ecosystem? @tigase whats your funding model look like?

Whelp, guess what just got uninstalled!

Something else about Element I've never seen much comment on but always really bothered me is this - why is it ok that the mobile app for a supposedly privacy-centric messenger is collecting all this telemetry?

https://apps.apple.com/app/vector/id1083446067

@theruran @alcinnz @tigase XMPP servers are cheap and easy to set up. The core software has been around for decades. Several proprietary chat services started as XMPP, then defederated, most famously Facebook Messenger and Google Chat. That's probably where most of the initial funding came from.

I don't know what "Element" is. I am enjoying that this is the first quote-post I've seen on Mastodon.

As far as I can tell, the XMPP project themselves do not have much more of an internet presence than what I'm managing on the side.

So I believe right now their funding is very meagre, relying on the sort of opensource contributions which have brought others so far!

TBH I am very torn on this.

1. Even a non-profit has fund itself somehow. Public funding and government contracts make sense.

2. The alternative for non-US military and/or police would likely be to use one of the big messengers (e.g. WhatsApp) or buy from a company that does "security by obscurity".

In my opinion: Police/military will use some kind of messenger anyway. I would prefer if they used one with less backdoors and more security.

Of course it could happen that police and Matrix get all warm and cuddly with each other. This is definitely a thing that makes Matrix less trustworthy.

It's hard to find a tech company whose C-Suite won't jump into bed with anyone with cash. I'm looking forward to when we've moved on to whatever is after this phase of capitalism.

no back door required if you are shipping the data out the front door on purpose.

... motherfucker

Okay, gonna phase element out of my ESL volunteer work I guess

If talking about being in line with fedi culture, I'd say delta.chat (@delta@chaos.social) deserves an honorable mention for implementing secure messaging over the existing email network.

like @jalcine said... a horrible hill to die on.

@foolishowl @theruran @alcinnz @tigase in terms of ongoing provider costs, the server side is so lightweight as to barely register.

I provide XMPP messaging for Chinwag users automatically alongside their Fedi service and it's barely a blip in the stats compared to something like Mastodon.

Just read the article. If I understood correctly, they seem to mean that they're selling services to help maintain servers, like live chat and such, and NOT that they're selling individual messages to governments.

A very poor choice of words there. I couldn't pick a worse set even if I tried.

@theruran @alcinnz @tigase

Sorry to pop everyone's bubble but XMPP is also widely used in police and military applications. People need to be a bit more realistic about the dual-use nature of internet and computing tools.

It's a bad look to be advertising your cooperation with cops and fully mis-reading your audience here. Also, I do not condone it. However, to the audience: what did you expect? Secure communications is first and foremost a defense industry need.

If use and engagement with police and defense is your standard for whether or not to use a particular set of tools, then do I have some bad news regarding all of open source for you!

Police/Military/Government is the only major source of funding for encryption tools and encrypted messengers

Be it Element, Conversations or GPG. No one else is willing to pay enough

Refusing to sell would harm the free software project, but would do nothing against the police using matrix. It's free software after all and they can use it without any support contract. And some governments do exactly that

This is a situation where you can't win either way. Fuck capitalism 🤬

so which is it in the end? I see contradicting retoots. Do @element sell chat logs, or chatting devices to governments / police ...? It's indeed quite not the same.

oh my god that's the actual quote wtf

@theruran @alcinnz software licence (https://tigase.net/pricing-xmpp) and technical support (https://tigase.net/pricing-technical)

Tigase is almost completely FOSS/AGPL (save for advanced clustering) and can be deployed and used as such.

its a good reminder to work out better community funded and accountable models.

"Open source" isn't a funding model.

That's both horribly worded (I understand what they meant, though) and hilarious. Matrix's UX is so bad (probably because I tries to mix IIRC back compat with E2E encryption) I can't imagine an org actually paying for it. But now that I think of it none of the other enterprise chat apps (Slack, Teams, Webex, etc.) have E2E

@rra @theruran @tigase I find it unfair to judge devs by who are using our software, we might need to accept uses we disagree with to do the most good. (I don't disagree with private software, as long as those who use your software gets the Four Freedoms).

I think it is totally fair to judge us by who we're engaging with!

Personally (privileged) I can't get all that worked up about 1312, but I see the counterarguments missing the mark.

@theruran @alcinnz @tigase Most XMPP software is developed by individuals like @daniel without millions of VC funding. And they still manage to release modern features (Conversations and @dino released native A/V calls before #Element did) all while complying to current internet standards (instead of inventing yet another incompatible messaging protcol) and building on native UI libraries (instead of Electron bloatware). #XMPP truly was the right answer to instant messaging all along.

I prefer #xmpp but I don't get why this causes so much flap on the fediverse. Matrix is selling their messaging as a business model and also sell it to the police, so what?
@element

Are any servers "de-federating" matrix.org because of this?

Do you have something against public services using FLOSS software? AND financing a EU company for developping it ? What about the French Gendarmerie using Linux for Years? Would you criticize a company that would maintain and develop linux distribution for them?
Usually the alternative is to use a service from the GAFAM, so I think what Element does is more than OK.

@crashglasshouses @foolishowl @downey Not really? With XMPP and Matrix your messages are stored and forwarded on your server, and on the other side's server, but since Tox, by design (at least at the time) had no concept of servers/proxies, there wasn't anyone to store "in flight" messages for you.

@ar @foolishowl @downey welp. that's the same problem XMPP has, and to some degree, Matrix as well. blargedy blarg.

@crashglasshouses @foolishowl @downey Last time I tried Tox, moving the same account between devices wasn't a thing, and message didn't get delivered if sender and recipient weren't simultaneously online at the same time. I get why it behaved like that, but it just pushed it beyond the edge of usability for me.

@crashglasshouses @ar @foolishowl @downey thats a client issue thats quite easy to fix with just showing a profile picture in the corner of the client app. some apps support this already

@ar @foolishowl @downey i was talking about moving accounts between devices. Matrix isn't as bad, but XMPP makes it difficult to tell which session you're using if you have multiple.

@crashglasshouses @ar @downey Gajim for instance. It's one of the reasons I prefer it to Dino.IM

@rra @theruran @alcinnz @tigase IMO there is a huge difference in having the police use your software and the police being part of the funding of the main software provider for a protocol. The former is obviously something you have no control over. While the latter can cause reliance on the police and give them influence/power over the direction the protocol can move towards.

#xmpp #jabber #matrix

@stevenroose @rra @theruran @tigase If you go out of your way it's possible to control whether the police/military use your software, but often that'd prevent a lot of good from being done too!

@Gabriele Svelto @wakest Having people use your free software and selling support to them aren’t the same thing at all. You have limited control over the former in an open-source environment, while you have total control over the latter no matter what.

@Gabriele Svelto @wakest By all means, please keep moving the goal post, see how far it gets you. You haven't even tried understanding, let alone sympathizing with the people who feel bad about using a piece of software because the main company behind its development sell its support to law enforcement agencies, so how about you fuck right off?

a company sells support, not a piece of software. The Matrix protocol is free and has several independent implementations, why would you stop using that because one company sells support to someone you don't like? All sort of terrible companies sell support services for Linux and even worse ones contributed to its development. Would you stop using the software because of that?

@hypolite the OP conflated Matrix and Element, not me. I can similarly conflate any piece of the FOSS stack with either IBM or Google, two companies that did far worse than Element will ever do. If your goal is radical political change of government agencies - and law enforcement in particular - then not using a particular piece of FOSS software will *NOT* achieve that goal. Neither will insulting strangers. Political change requires political action.

@gabrielesvelto @hypolite Please do not continue to tag me in your bad faith arguments.

@Gabriele Svelto Well you made a false generalization in your very first reply so why do you expect to be treated with politeness when you then double down?