I haven't been following Matrix development too closely, but last I heard, both the protocol and the reference implementation had serious flaws, including gaping security holes. As in, issues that couldn't be overcome without a clean-slate redesign. Did they somehow manage to salvage something useable?
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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Got any more info on what you heard? There were problems in their Olm library (certain vulnerabilities with encryption that could be exploited) and they encouraged projects (servers + clients) to switch to a more secure library. Anything else you are thinking of?
Do you have the issue trackers?
That’s good news. Hopefully it will gain traction among individuals as well as a viable Discord alternative
I used to roll on the main matrix server, but I've been toying with the idea of rolling out a server for just myself here at home for a while now, since I can federate with other servers. Just disable making new accounts after I set up my own account and roll out.
If you want to host your own matrix server, I can't recommend this project enough https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
Super easy to run and configure. And makes managing it a breeze
I have actually looked at this one before but the main reason I hadn't done it is no experience with Ansible. Would you say Ansible is easy enough to pick up just for rolling this out? I have a lot of networking experience, building docker compose files from scratch for projects, and am used to editing json and yml files. I have only set up a reverse proxy with caddy once and have never tried nginx although it seems more fully featured. Any thoughts would be appreciated. I also knoe of some good Ansible security hardening playbooks but once again just haven't used Ansible so never rolled them out
If you're more comfortable doing it another way, I totally understand preferring that route.
That said, the documentation on this project is really good. I didnt understand ansible before picking it up. At this point, I'm not at a level where I could write a playbook from scratch, but I can certainly read through it and understand what's going on and make changes to my config accordingly.
This playbook takes care of all the reverse proxies for you, so theres no need to do anything like that yourself.
If you have more questions, feel free to ask, and I'll try to answer them as best I can
I'd actually love a reason to try Ansible and get used to it. So if it's well documented, maybe a good starter project.
I don’t understand the matrix hype. It has never worked for me. Every server is just perma loading / syncing. It’s so slow.
Matrix sucks pretty bad at federation. But if you run a single closed server internally it works just fine.
Oh, is that why everyone hates matrix so much? I've been rocking it for years for me and my wife to communicate. It's been pretty solid. Calls/video calls are hit and miss, but the chat has been great. I've never federated it. Account creation is locked down, local auth, etc.
I like Matrix, but it definitely lacks refinement and isn't particularly user-friendly.
I think of it a bit as being the Linux of messaging platforms.
I wanted to like matrix.
They have been heading in government-corporate direction for a while now. Good for them, yet from a perspective of a small server hoster, everything is more complicated now for no good reason.
(Official ESS requires Kubernetes and a dozen subdomains, third-party auth service is required to even register a plain username+password account, calls are all over the place between Element, Element X and web client)
Scratching this one of the list then
Do you know what other federated messaging tool governments use? Email! Better scratch that too, just in case.
I've heard government uses Linux too. I guess it's BSD for me! 🙃