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this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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If the Matrix protocol actually implemented E2E encryption properly I would love to use something like this.
Please explain. They don't have that?
If it's the problem that I've seen people complain about in the past, it's effectively the same as HTTPS 'not supporting' end to end encryption because it runs over IP and IP packets contain the IP address of where they need to go, so someone can see that two IP addresses are communicating, which is unavoidable as otherwise there's nothing to say where the data needs to go, so no way for it to get there. Someone did a blog post a couple of years ago claiming Matrix was unsecure as encrypted messages had their destination homeserver in plaintext, but that doesn't carry any information that isn't implied by the fact that the message is being sent to that homeserver's IP.
But what if the name of my home server is my private key? Mah jong, alchemists!
https://wire.com/en/blog/matrix-not-safe-eu-data-privacy
Wire wrote that article in summer last year to prevent the German IT-Planning Council from adopting Matrix as the communications layer for its consolidated interfederal government-to-citizen messaging infrastructure in the public administration.
So be aware that, to my knowledge, this article is not a good-faith tech blog post but part of public affairs campaign / lobbying attempt.
Would be neat to have meta data encrypted in Matrix, but it's not a deal breaker for most use cases imo.
Agreed, but metadata not being encrypted remains a fact. Sure, metadata of a single message might not mean much, but when combined with metadata of many messages from many users you can find out a lot about a person and their habits. Especially when cross-referencing with other data sources (social media of other users, phone location, etc.).
https://youtube.com/watch?v=tL8_caB35Pg
Absolutely, it's definitely one of the major areas work on the Matrix standard is needed.
There is an MSC (= a spec change proposal) from September 2025 where the folks at Element proposed a solution for how to do this going forward: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/3414?ref=element.io
This blog article explains it more clearly: https://element.io/blog/hiding-room-metadata-from-servers/
Thank you very much for these links. I really like the ideas Matrix + Element, and I think they have the best shot of making something very usable. Hopefully this gets implemented one day and I can actually make the switch!
Looks like it's behind an experimental flag, only applies to new rooms, and isn't available on the public app.element.io instance right now (the Labs screenshot they showed doesn't show the option on element.io+matrix.org when I checked just now):
https://github.com/element-hq/element-web/pull/31513
For it to work, looks like it needs another in-progress feature to allow new members to decrypt previous messages (Matrix can't do that yet????):
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/4268
(That one isn't even in the spec yet, it'll take a lonnnnnng time before we see any real movement on it, possibly a year or two. A year or two before you can see encrypted messages from before you joined a room. Insanity.)
A contributor calls this encrypted metadata feature a "partial prototype:"
https://github.com/element-hq/element-meta/issues/1214#issuecomment-3714132569
Pretty crazy they've been discussing this for nearly 10 years and it's just now "a partial prototype," but that's Matrix for you.