matrix: expand upon why so many accounts and brief history of dead homeservers

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Aminda Suomalainen 2023-04-30 10:05:57 +03:00
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@ -40,6 +40,7 @@ I also have a [txt with a list of all my accounts](/txt/matrix.txt) which [has S
- [That doesn't help me](#that-doesnt-help-me)
- [Personal questions](#personal-questions)
- [Why so many accounts?](#why-so-many-accounts)
- [Brief history of my experiences with dead homeservers](#brief-history-of-my-experiences-with-dead-homeservers)
- [Why do you use Matrix URI scheme instead of matrix.to?](#why-do-you-use-matrix-uri-scheme-instead-of-matrixto)
- [Why does one of your accounts have capital letter in the username?](#why-does-one-of-your-accounts-have-capital-letter-in-the-username)
- [Which client do you recommend?](#which-client-do-you-recommend)
@ -336,7 +337,49 @@ sending raw events in JSON to them.
#### Why so many accounts?
In my opinion it's preferable to have multiple accounts on different homeservers for ensuring decentralisation instead of having a single authority in power and being able to issue commands from multiple servers in case of federation meltdown which multiple rooms experienced during the period of room version 9 before homeserver software started to nag on unintentionally open registration refusing to start. Additionally state resets are a good reason to keep old accounts around.
My reasons for that are mane and I am often proved correct in them.
- By having multiple accounts on different homeservers, there is no single
entity that can decide whether I participate on Matrix or not. This is also
a benefit of decentralisation in general.
- In case of federation meltdown, I have multiple entrypoints to send events
and thus hopefully one of them goes through faster. There have been
multiple incidents where this could have been useful for room
administrators.
- Matrix homeservers used to allow open registration with no kind of
protection and no warnings they are being ran with that configuration
until some time before room version 10 was released. This
allowed multiple rooms to be spammed trivially and it took days for all
homeservers to sync ACL bans in the worst cases. It also resulted to a lot
of state resetting so the affected rooms never got cleaned up as the spam
users kept coming back and clients had issues handling so inflated rooms.
- State resets keep happening and thus I cannot trust other accounts than the
one which created a room in question stay as power level 100.
- Homeservers come and go, sometimes with little to no warning. As I have many
functioning accounts generally with power levels set, homeserver migrations
take me less effort than going through every room and ensuring just now
created account has power.
##### Brief history of my experiences with dead homeservers
Believe my concern on homeservers coming and going or not, no one is safe.
1. 2018-09-07: [Disroot.org announced Matrix closure](https://disroot.org/en/blog/matrix-closure).
1. 2019-04-12: [Matrix.org was compromised](https://matrix.org/blog/2019/04/11/we-have-discovered-and-addressed-a-security-breach-updated-2019-04-12)
resulting the homeserver being down for a while, some integrations even
longer and the XMPP bridge returned months later.
1. From Disroot I moved to Feneas thinking that homeserver being a paid
membership benefit would help it to stay up and be reliable. However in
late 2021 and early 2022 we decided to disband the association due to
COVID-19 pandemic, lack of volunteers, lack of money (which wasn't helped
by [Finnish money gathering law issues](https://github.com/liberapay/liberapay.org/issues/30)
etc.
1. Around 2023-04-24 the-apothecary.club went down and writing this on
2023-04-30 I am yet to hear anything about the downtime. Was it by intent,
will it return, anything? However I haven't been participating their
community in a long time and I was only using the account for testing
purposes so the information not reaching me is understandable, especially
considering their homeserver main room is not federated.
#### Why do you use Matrix URI scheme instead of matrix.to?