> It partially nullifies the point of the room decentralization, though.

And that's the ONE thing giving Matrix bragging rights over any other chat protocol. Their whole crusade against XMPP in Matrix early days was based on this distinction and overstating the importance and relevance of it. So I guess we are left with an absurdly complex protocol and single-source implementation for… nothing then?

I've never engaged the project admins. But if they're like Tor and their responses to deanonymizing OS reporting (basically hostile and attacking), it wouldn't surprise me.

My issue with possession of CSAM is that its statutory without mens rea. That means if my client gets an image without my knowledge or approval, I'm still blamed for it. And blame is a bloody felony. Some jurisdictions call for absurd punishments of 10y prison per image.

There are a few rooms I'm in. They are heavily moderated and narrow discussion. One is an speech-to-text from OpenMHZ police scanner for my area. But I also discourage usage - I'm highly technical, and I fear average users would get in over their heads and have a very bad time.

They definitely have a victim complex. Few years back, when I complained of the then-insanely poor performance and scalability of the Synapse server, they told me to spend a few thousands of bucks on a high-performance personal server, and to educate myself to set up and maintain a Synapse instance, which was then and is still much harder to do than running most other server software.

Hell, I was told I was a some sort of bad person for being unhappy with room joins taking hours or even days.

After exhausting all other options, they have improved their software a lot (it's still not perfect, but definitely usable), but their poor attitude has soured their reputation, and made it really difficult to be enthusiastic about Matrix.

> a real victim complex

that, a thousand times. Combined with a severe lack of objectivity. If you can't see the flaws and can't be critical of your own product, what room/hope is there for improvement? Matrix is a never ending story of over-promises under-delivered, taking feedback in bad faith, and, yeah, playing the victim.

I'm amazed that Matrix did manage to capture so much attention for so long while at it. There were there at the right time but with the wrong tech/product/abstraction/competences, sucked all the air out of the "federated personal instant messaging that you can host yourself"-room, and I am still sour that they possibly contributed to the current sad sate of affairs and worst case of consolidation there has ever been in this space (there was a time when WhatsApp wasn't so ubiquitous, facebook messenger, skype, … sucked, GTalk had some amount of interop, and we had a shot at not having our instant messaging in walled gardens).

Wouldn't registering a new user in a different instance give you a new ID?

Former, I think. It involved highlighting all users of the room, and sometimes verbal abuse against Matrix and/or the projects which the rooms in question belogned to. Now that sort of abuse is much harder, since they have improved spam filtering.

Some of it was the latter. Matrix servers could be used in the past to store and serve unauthenticated media to anyone[0], which was described by the team as "not great"[1] and "abuse of Matrix as a content distribution network" [2].

I believe the team was prudent in being reserved about describing the issue (and the abuse it could entail) until after these changes rolled out in 2024[1], especially due to the unique challenges they required (including putting a freeze on unauthenticated media as part of the upgrade process).

[0]: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/06/26/sunsetting-unauthenticate...

[1]: https://2024.matrix.org/documents/talk_slides/LAB4%202024-09...

[2]: https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/

[3]: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/06/20/matrix-v1.11-release/

Also not unheard of less ethical competitors to engage in such campaigns.

Possessing the BASE64-encoding of such an image is still a felony. Text only doesn't solve the problem.

In my experience, Element X was released long before it was ready, and I still think it's far from ready. I've been using Element on android and it's been wonderful. Can't speak for iOS.

You might want to look into Unified Push. Although you need to use a Unified Push server that supports the differing Matrix endpoints because for some reason the Matrix devs decided to do their own thing. I wouldn't call using Unfied push with Matrix reliable, just like nothing with Matrix is ever truly reliable, but it works much better than native notifications for me.

> I would like to see AI moderating of CSAM, perhaps an open weights model that is provided by a nation state.

I don't envy the people who would have to trauma their way through creating such dataset. Yet, it would be useful yes.

> With confidential computing such models can be run on local hardware as a pre-filtering step without undermining anonymity.

I'm not sure it'd make sense to run locally. Many clients aren't powerful enough to run it on the receiving end (+ every client would need to run it, instead of fewer entities), and for obvious reasons it doesn't make sense to run on the senders end.

IRCv3 has "chathistory" extension. It basically involves combining an IRC network and a bouncer. There are at least two server implementations using it: ergo, which is more or less production ready, but does not have support for multi-server networks, and Libera's sable, which is under (very slow) development.

I wonder why such thing wasn't done 15...20 years ago. Now it seems to be too little too late, with Matrix more or less having been taken the place of IRC.

Our small group uses The Lounge web client for IRC which is a very good PWA, acts as a bouncer, has history search (not unlimited, but pretty long), supports image upload, and basically builds a modern group chat on top of IRC as a backend. We have a few folks who still use traditional IRC clients, but almost everyone just uses the web app. It's not a bad middle ground.

> IRC doesn't have chat history

Personally I see that as a feature. Chat is ephemeral, discussions/texts that aren't should be saved elsewhere anyways, otherwise it gets lost with all the other ephemeral stuff.

Chat history is a place were knowledge dies. That said my bouncer keeps the history for me.

> what's so great about IRC?

It's got a simple protocol that's easy to implement.

There's no company who "owns" IRC, as there is with Matrix, and no "reference implementation". Extensions and enhancements are done by consensus of the people writing the clients and servers, there's no central agency that maintains extendion proposals like Python's PEP or Java's JEP. As a result, to be as interoperable as possible, most implementations stick to supporting the existing status quo. If you want to add something new to a client or a server, you run the risk of having that feature only work for a small fraction of users. If it's popular enough, other impementors may choose to make their clients and servers support it.

IRCv3 is an attempt to make collaboration a little more formal, but it's a slow process.