From 6b746babec2390103ed82adc45673bc7adc91738 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Aminda Suomalainen Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2023 10:05:57 +0300 Subject: [PATCH] matrix: expand upon why so many accounts and brief history of dead homeservers --- pages/matrix.markdown | 45 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++- 1 file changed, 44 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/pages/matrix.markdown b/pages/matrix.markdown index 8150f64..e0a1683 100644 --- a/pages/matrix.markdown +++ b/pages/matrix.markdown @@ -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?