Hello fellow c/privacy members.
I’m not new to privacy related things but I had a hard time persuading my family members and friends to switch to Matrix/Element. It is a reponse to UK’s Online Security Bill and Investigative Powers Act that may soon in effect.
While it is just a preperation and planning in case those actually became law, I already face resistance from them. When I ask them would they switch, their first reaction is “Why one more app?” then follows with “That’s cumbersome.” or “I don’t want to learn a new app.” and suggest something more popular like Line, Telegram or Discord. Sometimes they would “Install WhatsApp because X is on there and he/she won’t install one more app just for you.”
What can I do to persuade them to use a new platform? Thanks in advance.
EDIT: I think I should elebroate more of what Online Security Bill and Investigative Powers Act does[1]. As far as I understand, OSB will break E2EE by require scanning data on client device, like CSAM but much more generic. IPA requires companies to submit security funcition to the government for approval before releasing, and disable such feature upon request. Apple[2], Single[3] and WhatsApp made the announancment of exiting the UK market totally or partically if two were signed into law.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/thenextweb.com/news/uk-investigatory-powers-act-default-surveillance-devices-privacy
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2023/07/21/apple-threatens-to-pull-facetime-and-imessage-from-the-uk
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20230809125823/https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-65301510#2023-08-09T12:57:48+00:00
I can’t confirm this. For me it runs smooth and without bugs. Calls with Element are sometimes better than calls with my mobile carrier.
But I don’t have the technical knowledge to understand why a backend in python is a bad thing. Maybe your experience with Matrix is biased because of this knowledge?
I had a terrible, completely unusable experience with Matrix before I found out what it was made with. It took several minutes to load, 5-10 minutes to join a room, and about a couple minutes per message (which would just not send half the time). It was slower than email.
This huge difference in experience isn’t a great sign. But I hope it gets better over time.
when did you experience this?
loading the web client also takes a lot of time (1-2 minutes) for me, but everything else is ok. even that is because of an API design problem, and they are already working to replace that bad decision
I think it was about a year or two ago.
I believe it was this year that they made some great improvements in performance, so you might get a different experience if you try it again.
Well, it looks we might have convinced someone that it’s not that bad :)
I tried it again and the difference was astounding! Instead of waiting multiple minutes to send one message, I only had to wait a whole minute!
I like the idea of a federated chat platform, but I’ll have to stick to discord for now, it would seem.