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Comment by Veratyr | Hacker News Reader

I'm just waiting for Matrix to get E2E going... For now, XMPP works well enough.

E2E is already activated in Riot web and will come to mobile in a month or so (at least according to what Matthew said in the Matrix room on Matrix).

To be honest, I don't even think E2E is as important in a distributed system. If you're worried about who can see your messages, you can just set up your own server and force server-to-server and client-to-server encryption.

You shouldn't have to set up your own server to have secure communication. It should be the default for all users.

Right now, yes, agreed that to "set up your own server" is not for the casual user...but eventually setting up a server should be as a straight-forward affair - not unlike installing an app from an app store/marketplace.

Also, remember that there was a time when casual users would go through the set up of local/desktop clients in order to simply read/write email - e.g. outlook express, thunderbird, apple's mail app, etc. Whether we call it setting up a server, or installing/setting up an app., eventually it won't make much difference.

Actually, E2E does end up being really important in Matrix because room history gets synchronised across all the participating users in a room. So assuming you have /any/ non-local users in the room, they'll end up storing a copy of the conversation in plaintext-equivalent on their servers unless you have E2E, which rapidly becomes non-desirable for any private rooms given you don't want to have to trust everyone's sysadmins. And given 'run your own server' is half the joy of Matrix, we don't want to tell people to turn off federation if they want security!

This is why we've made a real effort with Olm & Megolm (http://matrix.org/git/olm/about/) in Matrix to ensure that E2E is there in the baseline, and will be turned on by default for all private rooms. (disclaimer: I work on Matrix)

Yep, same! I'll run my own homeserver for me and my friends when E2E kicks off.

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