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Comment by krageon | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know what this product is based on? Is it just a ready-made image with all the bridges preconfigured (and prerequisites such as a small android vm for a viable whatsapp bridge), or has there been some evolution on the existing package? Is there documentation on what was done to achieve this?

Purely on the content of the article: Given that the messages are not stored encrypted locally and that this service is connected to the US, I do not see how it can be viable for the privacy-conscious.

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> Purely on the content of the article: Given that the messages are not stored encrypted locally and that this service is connected to the US, I do not see how it can be viable for the privacy-conscious.

Matrix chats (direct and group) are E2E by default. There is no bridge that will let you keep E2E encryption between Signal/WhatsApp and another service - it has to be broken somewhere. I believe Element is a UK company.

The blog post on This Week In Matrix states it uses modified versions of the open source (and self hostable) Mautrix bridges which are primarily built by tulir [2] of Beeper [3]: https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix#element...

> However, in addition to being a fast, snappy Matrix account, it also comes with unlimited personal bridging to Whatsapp, Signal and Telegram thanks to mautrix-whatsapp/signal/telegram!

[2]:https://github.com/tulir [3]: https://www.beeper.com/

> There is no bridge that will let you keep E2E encryption between Signal/WhatsApp and another service - it has to be broken somewhere

Yes, but it doesn't have to be stored plain on a completely untrusted (because again, the company touches the US - that is an ideologically privacy-hostile space) server. This makes data collection much easier, including data collection of data in the past (as opposed to only communication from a certain point in time, as with an ongoing tap of the machine itself).

> The blog post on This Week In Matrix

Thank you :)

From there Terms of Service: Where you read 'Element' or 'we' or 'us' below, it refers to Element, a trading name of New Vector Ltd., its French subsidiary: New Vector SARL, its U.S. subsidiary: Element Software Inc, and their agents. https://element.io/terms-of-service

So UK, French and US.

I've been running the Signal bridge for a couple of months and it seems pretty unstable. Sometimes it stops delivering messages and I have to restart either signald or the bridge. At other times, it broke completely and started working again only after a couple of days, when I updated signald.

I haven't tried the WhatsApp bridge yet because it needs to go through my phone or an Android VM. WhatsApp recently announced support for using WhatsApp Web without the need to have your phone online, but I don't think it's available for everyone yet.

I've just signed up (after reading this message). My hope is that as a paid service effort will be made to make it reliable (through development, configuration, whatever). Having some users paying for it should hopefully make issues much more visible (through complaints to support if nothing else!).

That's a bummer. I was excited about running a home instance to bridge my (many) chat platforms. To me the point of such a thing is you can set it up and mostly leave it alone, so if it needs frequent fiddling it is mostly not fit for purpose.

Well, try it. It's a paid service so you might get some support, or maybe I'm plain unlucky.

I cannot use this service in good conscience because it touches the US, the fact that they were willing to launch a paid service made me wonder about the viability of the components.

I've had the opposite experience. I've run a signal bridge for ~6 months with 0 interaction at all from me. This is the mautrix signal bridge, pantalaimon, and Synapse.

Yes this has been my experience too. The WhatsApp bridge I used had been pretty unstable. I thought it might be a configuration issue from my side.

> Does anyone know what this product is based on?

It's very likely based on https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

It is not, according to this comment[0] "although Element One doesn’t use slavi’s ansible playbooks but instead the Element Matrix Services hosted infra"

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29000978

This is cool, thank you! Very well documented and (from the looks of things) feature-complete.

IIRC element/EMS do their own automation not based on that ansible project. But the bridges are the same open source ones.

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