Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

I love Matrix and I am planning on running a home server of my own and integrate it with all the different chat services I use.

Last time I checked there was the Matrix reference implementation and Riot. Today, there's a bunch of gorgeous Matrix clients that I can see people actually use. Alternative clients like Fractal and Nheko can make or break the ecosystem and I'm glad to see continuous improvement in that area.

It's especially nice to see the cross-signing proposal approved, as trying out just a few Matrix clients over time has added 9 separate keys I need to approve to my account already. Stuff like this will make it easy to switch phones/desktops/apps and will be wonderful for public uptake.

I want to integate all chat services as well. Could you share how you plan to do it? Libpurple/pidgin perhaps?

Pidgin integration would be amazing. It's my favorite client and one of the most usable currently, but nothing uses it. Everything nowadays is custom web or electron apps. I wish someone made a signald plugin for Pidgin...

Quinn Norton had some pretty damning things to say about libpurple and its lack of security in 2014: https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1

It's possible libpurple's security has improved since then, but I wouldn't count on it.

Thanks for the link. I actually checked the CVEs so far and read their 'security' page. I have only skimmed the article, however, if it's just reverse engineering the protocols, and you are still using somebody else's server, what's the biggest risk? Maybe a vuln in the client that won't be fixed as fast as the official client?

https://matrix.org/blog/2017/03/11/how-do-i-bridge-thee-let-... is a good overviewer. Only one bridge (matrix-bifrost) uses libpurple as a fallback; everthing else speaks the target protocol natively.

There's a whole bunch of bridges available for Matrix. I plan on trying the whatsapp and telegram bridges, and maybe discord as well.

There's a list here: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/bridges

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