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Comment by Arathorn | Hacker News Reader

But we're not sacrificing privacy. The idea is to give the user a checkbox to check that lets them opt in to making themselves discoverable on the network if they want, and similarly clarifies the wording if they want to see which of their contacts are also on the network.

Discord is just one specific use case of an app, while Matrix is trying to support all possible ones (e.g. WhatsApp style behaviour).

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I'm fine with that as long as it's clearly explained. The issue was that the program would nudge the user to upload personal information without making it clear what was happening and that it was unnecessary for Riot to function.

However there's a broader point that it doesn't make sense to imitate the competition when the thing you're copying is precisely the reason why one would want to leave the competition to your solution.

Allowing a user to make themselves discoverable is fine. The real question is why was "vector.im" used and not "matrix.org", or the user simply prompted? And why is that data queryable without any kind of authentication?

Also, the Identity servers are part of a closed cluster where data is replicated. We are aware of vector.im and matrix.org but you did not answer the following question of the research document: is there other servers in that closed cluster? If yes, which?

vector.im is the default for Riot because branding for validation emails is done by the identity server, and Riot users expect to see Riot branded mails, whereas the matrix.org IS sends generic Matrix branded mails. The user will now get prompted explicitly to confirm their IS as part of the GDPR flow.

IS lookups are shortly going to require auth, as per the OP (even if just to check whether the API user has agreed to the server’s T&Cs)

There are no other servers in the cluster.

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