I appreciate their effort but isn't Matrix (the company) based out of the UK and primary hosted instances on AWS in the UK? The UK were the first AFAIK to create such internet laws [0]. I could imagine people running their own instances in places where the age laws are not yet active but that number is shrinking fast. [1]
Their solution is for everyone to pay for Matrix with a credit card to verify age. I assume that means there must be a way to force only paid registered accounts to join ones instance? What percentage of the accounts on Discord are paid for with a credit or debit card? Or boosted? I don't keep up with terminology
> isn't Matrix based out of the UK and primary hosted instances on AWS in the UK?
It doesn't matter what country you run your server in or where your company is based; if you're providing public signup to a chat server then the countries (UK, AU, NZ etc) which require age verification will object if you don't age verify the users from those countries. (This is why Discord is doing it, despite being US HQ'd). In other words, the fact that The Matrix.org Foundation happens to be UK HQ'd doesn't affect the situation particularly.
(Edit: also, as others have pointed out, Matrix is a protocol, not a service or a product. The Matrix Foundation is effectively a standards body which happens to run the matrix.org server instance, but the jurisdiction that the standards body is incorporated in makes little difference - just like IETF being US-based doesn't mean the Internet is actually controlled by the US govt).
> Their solution is for everyone to pay for Matrix with a credit card to verify age.
Verifying users in affected countries based on owning a credit card is one solution we're proposing; suspect there will be other ways to do so too. However: this would only apply on the matrix.org server instance. Meanwhile, there are 23,306 other servers currently federating with matrix.org (out of a total of 156,055) - and those other servers, if they provide public signup, can figure out how to solve the problem in their own way.
Also, the current plan on the matrix.org server is to only verify users who are in affected countries (as opposed to try to verify the whole userbase as Discord is).
> It doesn't matter what country you run your server in or where your company is based; if you're providing public signup to a chat server then the countries (UK, AU, NZ etc) which require age verification will object if you don't age verify the users from those countries. (This is why Discord is doing it, despite being US HQ'd).
Whether it matters depends very much on what sort of organization you are.
Discord is a multinational for-profit corporation planning an IPO. It takes payments from users in those countries, likely partners with companies in those countries, and likely wants to sell stock to investors in those countries. Every one of those countries has the ability to punish Discord if it does not obey their laws, even if it does not have a physical presence there.
The situation is likely quite different for most of the 23,306 Matrix servers that federate widely. The worst thing Australia, for example could do to one of their operators is make it legally hazardous for them to visit Australia.
I appreciate that answer, it makes sense that it is based on the country. What I'm hoping to avoid is having to give my actual identity to all services on the internet. It will just allow terrible monitoring and oversight that isn't helpful for democracy. I don't trust the current us administration to know everything I say, everything I do, I don't really trust any government to have that power (and I want to stop crime and abuse..). I like some privacy. We are heading to that already with the Texas and Florida age requirements on the internet today.
This matrix discussion here is missing the point - many people don't want ubiquitous tracking of everything we do on the internet. You and matrix are seemingly not honestly addressing that point, because matrix doesn't seem different discord (in the requirements).
The difference with Discord is that Matrix is a protocol, not a service. It's made up of thousands of servers run by different people in different countries. Public instances may choose to verify users in affected countries to abide by the law; others may choose to run a private instance instead.
Matrix is a protocol, not a service. It's likely the UK government can enforce laws against content and accounts hosted on the matrix.org servers, but no single government has jurisdiction over the entire network.
That sounds more like a recipe for overreach than a method to escape the law, to be honest. Governments don't typically go "aw, shucks, you've caught us on a technicality" without getting the courts involved.
Clueless lawmakers will see this app called Element full of kids chatting without restrictions and tell it to add a filter. When the app says "we can't", the government says "sucks to be you, figure it out" and either hands out a fine or blocks the app.
There are distinctions between the community vibe Discord is going for (with things like forums and massive chat rooms with thousands of people) and Matrix (which has a few chatrooms but mostly contains small groups of people). No in-app purchases, hype generation, or kyhrt predatory designs, just the bare basics to get a functional chat app (and even less than that if you go for some clients).
I'd say being based in the UK will put matrix.org and Element users at risk, but with Matrix development being funded mostly by the people behind matrix.org that implies an impact to the larger decentralized network.
It would take some clever crafting to outlaw Matrix clients without also outlawing web browsers and conventional email clients. Let's assume they did though. The best they can do is block it from app stores, which won't stop anyone but iOS users.
More likely, it just won't become popular enough for lawmakers to notice because the UX is a little rough, and people have very little patience for such things anymore.
> Governments don't typically go "aw, shucks, you've caught us on a technicality" without getting the courts involved.
That might happen here, but I don’t think that principle holds generally. If that were true, wouldn’t every component of the service provider chain be sued for people e.g. downloading pirated or illegal stuff? The government cracks down on e.g. torrent trackers and ISPs, but they haven’t seriously attacked torrent clients or the app stores/OSes that allow users to run those clients. Why not?
I thought it was both and their hosted service is in the UK. Is it not? I know people can host their own but I have had very little success in getting people to host their own things. Most here at HN will not do anything that requires more than their cell phone. Who knows maybe Discords actions will incentivize more people to self host.
Couldn't you simply set up your own instance and link up with the wider network? I guess you would have to age verify yourself if you live in a country that requires it, but regulating that would be sort of hilarious.
Whether or not authorities with jurisdiction over you would notice your instance (homeserver) or bother you about age verification is an issue you'd have to consider for yourself.
Couldn't you simply set up your own instance and link up with the wider network?
I honestly have no idea. As much as they love money I am not paying my lawyers to research AI this one. I would probably wait for others to get made example of.
It's an interesting legal question, but I would imagine for a federated service, the burden of proof should be on the individual's home server for age verification. That's where the user account is, after all.
Matrix is basically labeled "adults only" everywhere, so restricting certain servers/rooms due to possible innocent eyes is likely out of scope.
Yeah that's the thing. No matter what you do, it's bound to be illegal somewhere in the world. Be it North Korea or Iran or Australia. You simply can't follow everyone's laws because they are often contradictory.
I don't care about what Australia wants. If I ran a private Matrix instance (e.g. to chat with my gaming buddies) I wouldn't even agree to divulge who is registered on it.
> Practically speaking, that means that people and organisations running a Matrix server with open registration must verify the ages of users in countries which require it. Last summer we announced a series of changes to the terms and conditions of the Matrix.org homeserver instance, to ensure UK-based users are handled in alignment with the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA).
At least you can self-host matrix and messages are end to end encrypted, unlike IRC.
There are a few IRC clients that support OTR. irssi-otr is one [1] weechat-otr is another [2]. Pidgin though I have not used it in a very long time. Hexchat using an always work in progress plugin. There may be others.
OTR could use some updates to include modern ciphers similar to the recent work of OpenSSH but probably good enough for most people.
E2EE aside having chat split up into gazillions of self hosted instances makes it much harder for chat to be hoovered up all in one place. It takes more effort to target each person and that becomes a government scalability issue. Example effort: [3]
Links 1 and 2 have not had updates in 10 and 8 years respectively, they probably don't even compile anymore. They implement OTRv3 which was published in about 2005 and uses 1536-bits primes. As far as I know, neither the protocol nor the implementations were audited (and especially not audited recently). This is not good encryption at all.
Additionally, OTRv3 does not allow multiple clients per account, which makes it unusable for anyone who wants to chat from two devices.
I use link [1] all the time. It comes pre-compiled for many Linux distributions but not installed by default. And yeah like I said it needs cipher updates like was recently performed in OpenSSH. HN has a handful of cryptographic nerds that could update OTR in their sleep if they so desired maybe even rewrite in Rust but being cryptographic nerds they probably have no need. If the same is true with cryptographers as is with car mechanics and plumbers they probably only use plain text as mechanics have broken down cars in their yards and some plumbers have old leaky pipes due to burn out.
> Practically speaking, that means that people and organisations running a Matrix server with open registration must verify the ages of users in countries which require it.
Practically speaking, I would just ignore this requirement. The UK government has no jurisdiction on this side of the pond.
IRC is also most commonly used for open servers where anyone can join whenever they want to without as much as needing to register for an 'account'! You just pick a nickname out of thin air and off you go.
In that kind of environment, end to end encryption really doesn't add value.
Last time I tried matrix (~2022) they still didn't have voice channels--they had voice calls but not a mechanism where people can join/leave a particular voice chat at will. To me this is a must have feature for anyone who has used discord/mumble/ventrilo.
I agree with you. The good news is that it looks like some of the alternate clients are focusing on it. https://commet.chat/ has voice channels (video rooms but default to camera off), and cinny's element call support PR defaults to camera off in video rooms as well iirc.
What's the canonical way to block users from age-gate jurisdictions to one's website? I wish Cloudflare had a wizard flow for this. I'm not going to age-gate access to my blog (it's a wiki so it has user-generated content) so I'd rather jurisdiction-gate it.
Perhaps we should have network traffic report its geographic location so that we can comply easily. Would prefer something in an IP packet so that I can just filter at the firewall. Doesn't even need to be implemented in a sophisticated way at clients. Can just have the urgent flag repurposed to mean "respond only if not geo-locked and unconcerned with regulatory" and then I can drop these directly, and regulated source locations could ensure that packet flags are correctly set at the widest peering location out of the UK and so on.
This appeal falls flat when you get to the parts about their homeserver requiring some form of age verification:
> From our perspective, the matrix.org homeserver instance has never been a service aimed at children, which our terms of use reflect by making it clear that users need to be at least 18 years old to use the server. However, the various age-verification laws require stricter forms of age verification measures than a self-declaration. Our Safety team and DPO are evaluating options that preserve your privacy while satisfying the age verification requirements in the jurisdictions where we have users.
Which is actually more strict than Discord's upcoming policy which allows accounts to operate for free without any verification, with some limitations around adult-oriented servers and content.
There has been a lot of FUD about the Discord age verification, so a refresher: The upcoming changes do not actually require you to verify anything to use Discord. It just leaves the account in teen mode by default. This means the account can't join age-restricted channels, can't unblur images marked as sensitive, and incoming message requests from unknown users will go to a second inbox with a warning by default.
You can, of course, run your own Matrix server. Having been there before I would suggest reading up on some typical experiences in running one of these servers. Unless you have someone willing to spend a lot of time running the server and playing IT person for people using it, it can be a real headache. They also note that running a server doesn't actually get around any age requirements:
> Practically speaking, that means that people and organisations running a Matrix server with open registration must verify the ages of users in countries which require it.
The list of locations with those laws is growing very large. From the post:
> Last summer we announced a series of changes to the terms and conditions of the Matrix.org homeserver instance, to ensure UK-based users are handled in alignment with the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA). Since then Australia, New Zealand and the EU have introduced similar legislation, with movement in the US and Canada too.
...and while we have no choice but implement it on the matrix.org instance, other folks running their own servers are responsible for their own choices.
As a Discord user myself, I’ve been surprised at how aggressive the recent data collection direction feels, especially given how much of its appeal came from being lightweight and community-centric. This to me seems like a real opportunity for a simpler alternative that preserves core functionality without the additional data surface area.
Totally agree there and they actually talk about that in the post:
> Finally: we’re painfully aware that none of the Matrix clients available today provide a full drop-in replacement for Discord yet. All the ingredients are there, and the initial goal for the project was always to provide a decentralised, secure, open platform where communities and organisations could communicate together. However, the reality is that the team at Element who originally created Matrix have had to focus on providing deployments for the public sector (see here or here) to be able to pay developers working on Matrix. Some of the key features expected by Discord users have yet to be prioritised (game streaming, push-to-talk, voice channels, custom emoji, extensible presence, richer hierarchical moderation, etc).
Same here, tried a couple of years ago. I was drawn to it because of the protocol concept. The experience was not bad, everything worked. But I remember the signup/domain/keys/backups/etc UX was a bit confusing. Happy to see there is more attention going to Matrix lately. Time to give it another go perhaps
My security collective is honestly considering going back to IRC.
It's becoming increasingly apparent that if you don't use something truly free and open source and host it yourself, you're just setting yourself up for more of this sort of thing.
You can't trust anyone to properly handle the problem of "how the hell do we keep creeps the f*ck away from kids?" with any amount of common sense.
Even if you self-host matrix there are still multiple ways you could be liable for content you don't even know exists. Especially the last 4 points here:
There are even custom message/media types that people use to upload hidden content you can't see even if you're joined to the same channel using a typical client.
20. "ask someone else’s homeserver to replicate media" -> also fixed by authenticated media
21. "media uploads are unverified by default" - for E2EE this is very much a feature; running file transfers through an antivirus scanner would break E2EE. (Some enterprisey clients like Element Pro do offer scanning at download, but you typically wouldn't want to do it at upload given by the time people download the AV defs might be stale). For non-encrypted media, content can and is scanned on upload - e.g. by https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse-spamcheck-badlist
22. "all it takes is for one of your users to request media from an undesirable room for your homeserver to also serve up copies of it" - yes, this is true. similarly, if you host an IMAP server for your friends, and one of them gets spammed with illegal content, it unfortunately becomes your problem.
In terms of "invisible events in rooms can somehow download abusive content onto servers and clients" - I'm not aware of how that would work. Clients obviously download media when users try to view it; if the event is invisible then the client won't try to render it and won't try to download the media.
Nowadays many clients hide media in public rooms, so you have to manually click on the blurhash to download the file to your server anyway.
I cannot even use Discord if I wanted to... every time I try to sign up I get immediately phone-walled and/or banned, and the appeal is always denied with "our automated system is working properly." I have been trying for close to ten(!) years now off and on, with all different combinations of browsers, OSes, ISPs and physical machines. No VPN or proxy either.
And even if I was able to register, that "automated system" still randomly bans people whenever it feels like it. Search the r/discordapp subreddit or just google "discord random ban", it's a widespread problem with no solution and I have no idea how so many other people seem to have no issues, yet at the same time you can find lots of people just as frustrated as me.
"Automated system discriminating against me with no appeal or recourse" may not be the biggest injustice in the world right now, but I fear/loathe that it seems like it's going to keep getting bigger.
A bug blocking functionality is an annoyance, but a Scarlet Letter branded onto a secret dossier is terrifying.
Does phone-walled mean you have to verify with a phone number? Are you unable to do it because it doesn’t work, or because you don’t want to give it your phone number?
On the two occasions I’ve tried to chat with someone on the public Matrix server, I was completely unable to get it to work. I’ve tried with the new Mac app and with some older thing years ago.
So… choose your poison? I’m sure Matrix/Element works for someone or they would be out of business, but it does not work for me.
I have a similar issue with Matrix as well... even though it's federated, most large rooms use the same bots and blocklists so I end up getting banned from many rooms before I've even attempted to join.
Apparently my monopoly ISP rotates IPs fairly often and I am sharing them with people that have been doing bad things with them, so not only are many Matrix channels blocked but even large regular websites like etsy or locals are completely blocked for me as well. Anything with a CF captcha is also an infinite loop.
As far as I know I wasn’t banned or restricted or anything. The client just never managed to create a room or initiate a chat or whatever they called it.
That K-ID bypass has already been patched, and even if it's bypassed again, Discord is apparently directing some users to Persona instead now. Persona does server-side classification so that one won't be as easy as nulling out the checks on the client.
The 3D model method might work on Persona, but that demo only shows it fooling K-IDs classifier.
Eh, the worldwide rollout hasn't happened yet so for now the only people getting sent to Persona after they promised client-side scanning are those who are fiddling around with Discords internals to trigger the age verification flow early. But yeah if they stick with Persona then they will need to retract the client-side promise before the proper rollout, and that'll be even more fuel on the PR fire.
I've always wished there was a market for mod actions.
Moderation and centralization while typically aren't independent, aren't necessarily dependent. One can imagine viewing content with one set of moderation actions and another person viewing the same content with a different set of moderation actions.
We sort of have this in HN already with viewing flagged content. It's essentially using an empty set for mod actions.
I believe it's technically viable to syndicate of mod actions and possibly solves the mod.labor.prpbl, but whether it's a socially viable way to build a network is another question.
Consider the ActivityPub Fediverse. With notable, short-lived exceptions (when a bad actor shows up with a new technique), the majority of the abuse comes from a handful of instances, whose administrators are generally either negligent or complicit.
So your solution to people using a decentralized, federated protocol to say things you don't like is to stop various servers interacting with each other? At that point why not just use federated services with multiple accounts?
It seems far too risky to sign up on a service for the purpose of intercommunication that is able (or even likely) to burn bridges with another for any reason at any time. In the end people will just accumulate on 2 or 3 big providers and then you have pseudo-federation anyway.
Servers stopping federation with each other is pretty normal IMO. If I had a mastodon server I would also not federate with something like gab.com.
However all the LGBT+ friendly servers federate with each other and that's good enough for me. I like not having to see toxicity, there's too much of it in the world already.
My solution is for instances to stop being negligent. Mastodon still directs everyone to create an account on mastodon.social using dark patterns (see https://joinmastodon.org/), which has lead to the flagship instance being far bigger than its moderation team can handle, leading to a situation where it's a major source of abuse and where defederation is too costly for many to consider.
"People will just accumulate on 2 or 3 big providers" is far from an inevitable circumstance, but there are conditions that make it more likely. That, too, is largely down to negligence or malice (but less so than the abusive communications problem).
> which has lead to the flagship instance being far bigger than its moderation team can handle, leading to a situation where it's a major source of abuse
Is that still true? As the admin of a small instance, I find the abuse coming from mastodon.social has been really low for a few years. There is the occasional spammer, but they often deal with it as quickly as I do.
Throwing in Nostr as a truly decentralized alternative. Instead of relying on federated servers, the messages themselves are signed and relayed for anyone to receive.
it's up to the maintainer of a particular server to moderate what goes on in said server. Now, if the Matrix.org Foundation wants to moderate their servers one way or the other, that's one thing, but to expect the protocol/spec to lay down a content policy is, with all due respect, dumb as hell.
you're free to have your own opinion based on your experiences here, but i wouldn't blame anyone for feeling that way. for the record, i don't think dang or anybody is a transphobe, but i have to imagine the culture here is pretty off-putting to trans people
i don't think it's that "wild". sure, i'm not so cynical as to feel hn's become a nazi bar or anything, but i am willing to recognize that some of the incidents i've witnessed could be reason enough for a trans person to want to avoid this site.
> It's neutral to this topic, it's about tech.
this thread began by xe bringing up failures in moderation affecting trans people
That isn't how it works. The presence of neutral allies doesn't somehow counterbalance and cancel out the transphobia. If a platform allows transphobic users - as Hacker News does because transphobia isn't against the guidelines - and transphobia is common in threads where trans issues or people are a subject (and it is) then it's a hostile platform to trans people.
Asking trans people to ignore this is like asking Jews to be comfortable in a bar where only ten percent of the patrons are Nazis. Arguing that "well not everyone is a Nazi" doesn't help, an attitude of "we're neutral about Nazis, we serve drinks to anyone" still makes it a Nazi bar, just implicitly rather than explicitly.
I'd agree with this logic if we were discussing all kinds of different topics here, and one's stance on gender would be immediately visible to anyone. But I can't remember the last time the matters of gender were discussed here at all, and pretty sure anything openly transphobic would be flagged or deleted pretty soon.
>I'd agree with this logic if we were discussing all kinds of different topics here, and one's stance on gender would be immediately visible to anyone.
We do discuss all kinds of different topics here. Despite what many people here want to believe, Hacker News isn't exclusively for tech and tech-related subjects.
>and pretty sure anything openly transphobic would be flagged or deleted pretty soon.
But not banned, that's the problem. The guidelines are extremely pedantic but nowhere is bigotry, racism, antisemitism or transphobia mentioned as being against those guidelines. You might say that shouldn't be necessary, but it's weird that so much effort is put into tone policing specific edge cases but the closest the guidelines come to defending marginalized groups is "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." Transphobia is treated as a mere faux pas on the same par as being too snarky, or tediously repetitive. The real transgression being not the bigotry but "trampling curiosity." Any trans person who posts here knows that bigots who hate them and want to do them harm aren't going to suffer meaningful consequences (especially if they just spin up a green account) and that the culture here isn't that concerned about their safety.
Read the green account just below me. That sort of thing happens all the time. Yes, the comment is [dead] but why should a trans person be comfortable here, or consider themselves welcome, knowing that this is the kind of thing they'll encounter?
I'm not in a position to tell marginalized people how they should feel, but a moderation policy that wouldn't even allow offensive messages by new accounts appear for a short time would make this place into another social media - walled off and tracking their users. I understand the point though.
I just don't get why anyone is still arguing against age verification tbh. Large social spaces are required by law to do it, whether its discord or matrix or anywhere that allows strangers to interact.
I appreciate their effort but isn't Matrix (the company) based out of the UK and primary hosted instances on AWS in the UK? The UK were the first AFAIK to create such internet laws [0]. I could imagine people running their own instances in places where the age laws are not yet active but that number is shrinking fast. [1]
Their solution is for everyone to pay for Matrix with a credit card to verify age. I assume that means there must be a way to force only paid registered accounts to join ones instance? What percentage of the accounts on Discord are paid for with a credit or debit card? Or boosted? I don't keep up with terminology
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_age_verification_in_the...
[1] - https://avpassociation.com/4271-2/
I wrote the OP, so to try to clarify:
> isn't Matrix based out of the UK and primary hosted instances on AWS in the UK?
It doesn't matter what country you run your server in or where your company is based; if you're providing public signup to a chat server then the countries (UK, AU, NZ etc) which require age verification will object if you don't age verify the users from those countries. (This is why Discord is doing it, despite being US HQ'd). In other words, the fact that The Matrix.org Foundation happens to be UK HQ'd doesn't affect the situation particularly.
(Edit: also, as others have pointed out, Matrix is a protocol, not a service or a product. The Matrix Foundation is effectively a standards body which happens to run the matrix.org server instance, but the jurisdiction that the standards body is incorporated in makes little difference - just like IETF being US-based doesn't mean the Internet is actually controlled by the US govt).
> Their solution is for everyone to pay for Matrix with a credit card to verify age.
Verifying users in affected countries based on owning a credit card is one solution we're proposing; suspect there will be other ways to do so too. However: this would only apply on the matrix.org server instance. Meanwhile, there are 23,306 other servers currently federating with matrix.org (out of a total of 156,055) - and those other servers, if they provide public signup, can figure out how to solve the problem in their own way.
Also, the current plan on the matrix.org server is to only verify users who are in affected countries (as opposed to try to verify the whole userbase as Discord is).
> It doesn't matter what country you run your server in or where your company is based; if you're providing public signup to a chat server then the countries (UK, AU, NZ etc) which require age verification will object if you don't age verify the users from those countries. (This is why Discord is doing it, despite being US HQ'd).
Whether it matters depends very much on what sort of organization you are.
Discord is a multinational for-profit corporation planning an IPO. It takes payments from users in those countries, likely partners with companies in those countries, and likely wants to sell stock to investors in those countries. Every one of those countries has the ability to punish Discord if it does not obey their laws, even if it does not have a physical presence there.
The situation is likely quite different for most of the 23,306 Matrix servers that federate widely. The worst thing Australia, for example could do to one of their operators is make it legally hazardous for them to visit Australia.
For hosts in the US, wouldn't this apply? https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118565/witnesses/...
tldr, means for American firms to sue due to burdonsome regulations, also some contitution stuff.
I appreciate that answer, it makes sense that it is based on the country. What I'm hoping to avoid is having to give my actual identity to all services on the internet. It will just allow terrible monitoring and oversight that isn't helpful for democracy. I don't trust the current us administration to know everything I say, everything I do, I don't really trust any government to have that power (and I want to stop crime and abuse..). I like some privacy. We are heading to that already with the Texas and Florida age requirements on the internet today.
This matrix discussion here is missing the point - many people don't want ubiquitous tracking of everything we do on the internet. You and matrix are seemingly not honestly addressing that point, because matrix doesn't seem different discord (in the requirements).
We're taking it for granted that people do not want to be tracked on the internet, and certainly don't want everyone to have to verify themselves on every site they use. I personally spent ages of time campaigning against the legislation (and lost) - e.g. https://matrix.org/blog/2021/05/19/how-the-uk-s-online-safet... and https://element.io/blog/the-online-safety-bill-an-attack-on-... etc.
The difference with Discord is that Matrix is a protocol, not a service. It's made up of thousands of servers run by different people in different countries. Public instances may choose to verify users in affected countries to abide by the law; others may choose to run a private instance instead.
Matrix is a protocol, not a service. It's likely the UK government can enforce laws against content and accounts hosted on the matrix.org servers, but no single government has jurisdiction over the entire network.
That sounds more like a recipe for overreach than a method to escape the law, to be honest. Governments don't typically go "aw, shucks, you've caught us on a technicality" without getting the courts involved.
Clueless lawmakers will see this app called Element full of kids chatting without restrictions and tell it to add a filter. When the app says "we can't", the government says "sucks to be you, figure it out" and either hands out a fine or blocks the app.
There are distinctions between the community vibe Discord is going for (with things like forums and massive chat rooms with thousands of people) and Matrix (which has a few chatrooms but mostly contains small groups of people). No in-app purchases, hype generation, or kyhrt predatory designs, just the bare basics to get a functional chat app (and even less than that if you go for some clients).
I'd say being based in the UK will put matrix.org and Element users at risk, but with Matrix development being funded mostly by the people behind matrix.org that implies an impact to the larger decentralized network.
It would take some clever crafting to outlaw Matrix clients without also outlawing web browsers and conventional email clients. Let's assume they did though. The best they can do is block it from app stores, which won't stop anyone but iOS users.
More likely, it just won't become popular enough for lawmakers to notice because the UX is a little rough, and people have very little patience for such things anymore.
> Governments don't typically go "aw, shucks, you've caught us on a technicality" without getting the courts involved.
That might happen here, but I don’t think that principle holds generally. If that were true, wouldn’t every component of the service provider chain be sued for people e.g. downloading pirated or illegal stuff? The government cracks down on e.g. torrent trackers and ISPs, but they haven’t seriously attacked torrent clients or the app stores/OSes that allow users to run those clients. Why not?
Matrix is a protocol, not a service
I thought it was both and their hosted service is in the UK. Is it not? I know people can host their own but I have had very little success in getting people to host their own things. Most here at HN will not do anything that requires more than their cell phone. Who knows maybe Discords actions will incentivize more people to self host.
There's more than just the big flagship server and hosting your own. There are lots of small public servers you can sign up for, similar to email.
> had very little success in getting people to host their own things. Most here at HN will not do anything that requires more than their cell phone.
You're just talking to the wrong ones :-)
You're just talking to the wrong ones :-)
I do hope you are right. Governments have more than enough low hanging fruit to go snatch up and then pat themselves on the back.
Like all global finance goes through NYC, they will find a throat to choke if motivated.
Couldn't you simply set up your own instance and link up with the wider network? I guess you would have to age verify yourself if you live in a country that requires it, but regulating that would be sort of hilarious.
Yes, you could.
Whether or not authorities with jurisdiction over you would notice your instance (homeserver) or bother you about age verification is an issue you'd have to consider for yourself.
Couldn't you simply set up your own instance and link up with the wider network?
I honestly have no idea. As much as they love money I am not paying my lawyers to research AI this one. I would probably wait for others to get made example of.
The problem is that "simply" is a lie.
It's an interesting legal question, but I would imagine for a federated service, the burden of proof should be on the individual's home server for age verification. That's where the user account is, after all.
Matrix is basically labeled "adults only" everywhere, so restricting certain servers/rooms due to possible innocent eyes is likely out of scope.
The Australian law doesn't care where servers are run. I don't know about others.
People without a physical or legal presence in Australia likely don't care what the Australian law cares about.
Yeah that's the thing. No matter what you do, it's bound to be illegal somewhere in the world. Be it North Korea or Iran or Australia. You simply can't follow everyone's laws because they are often contradictory.
ISIS cuts off hands for watching porn. They will have to cut through my porn induced callused skin using hydraulics.
I don't care about what Australia wants. If I ran a private Matrix instance (e.g. to chat with my gaming buddies) I wouldn't even agree to divulge who is registered on it.
For everyone not reading the post:
> Practically speaking, that means that people and organisations running a Matrix server with open registration must verify the ages of users in countries which require it. Last summer we announced a series of changes to the terms and conditions of the Matrix.org homeserver instance, to ensure UK-based users are handled in alignment with the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA).
At least you can self-host matrix and messages are end to end encrypted, unlike IRC.
unlike IRC
There are a few IRC clients that support OTR. irssi-otr is one [1] weechat-otr is another [2]. Pidgin though I have not used it in a very long time. Hexchat using an always work in progress plugin. There may be others.
OTR could use some updates to include modern ciphers similar to the recent work of OpenSSH but probably good enough for most people.
E2EE aside having chat split up into gazillions of self hosted instances makes it much harder for chat to be hoovered up all in one place. It takes more effort to target each person and that becomes a government scalability issue. Example effort: [3]
[1] - https://github.com/cryptodotis/irssi-otr
[2] - https://github.com/mmb/weechat-otr
[3] - https://archive.ph/4wi5t
Links 1 and 2 have not had updates in 10 and 8 years respectively, they probably don't even compile anymore. They implement OTRv3 which was published in about 2005 and uses 1536-bits primes. As far as I know, neither the protocol nor the implementations were audited (and especially not audited recently). This is not good encryption at all.
Additionally, OTRv3 does not allow multiple clients per account, which makes it unusable for anyone who wants to chat from two devices.
I use link [1] all the time. It comes pre-compiled for many Linux distributions but not installed by default. And yeah like I said it needs cipher updates like was recently performed in OpenSSH. HN has a handful of cryptographic nerds that could update OTR in their sleep if they so desired maybe even rewrite in Rust but being cryptographic nerds they probably have no need. If the same is true with cryptographers as is with car mechanics and plumbers they probably only use plain text as mechanics have broken down cars in their yards and some plumbers have old leaky pipes due to burn out.
> Practically speaking, that means that people and organisations running a Matrix server with open registration must verify the ages of users in countries which require it.
Practically speaking, I would just ignore this requirement. The UK government has no jurisdiction on this side of the pond.
That's fine if you never intend to visit the UK
IRC is also most commonly used for open servers where anyone can join whenever they want to without as much as needing to register for an 'account'! You just pick a nickname out of thin air and off you go.
In that kind of environment, end to end encryption really doesn't add value.
The IRC admins can read all your messages, be it to a channel or to another user.
Even without registering my nick, I would expect a modern protocol to keep my pm communication private by default.
How will you verify who you're talking to?
Recent and related. Others?
Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982421 - Feb 2026 (435 comments)
Discord faces backlash over age checks after data breach exposed 70k IDs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46951999 - Feb 2026 (21 comments)
Discord Alternatives, Ranked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46949564 - Feb 2026 (465 comments)
Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945663 - Feb 2026 (2018 comments)`
I really wish they would just accept digital id’s from apple wallets for age verification without providing any identifying information somehow.
It would be nice if we could use these digital wallets as a framework for all these things, annonymously.
This can be done and it's called a zero knowledge proof (ZKP) in cryptography. And it's starting to be used in crypto wallets to verify humanity.
Last time I tried matrix (~2022) they still didn't have voice channels--they had voice calls but not a mechanism where people can join/leave a particular voice chat at will. To me this is a must have feature for anyone who has used discord/mumble/ventrilo.
I agree with you. The good news is that it looks like some of the alternate clients are focusing on it. https://commet.chat/ has voice channels (video rooms but default to camera off), and cinny's element call support PR defaults to camera off in video rooms as well iirc.
What's the canonical way to block users from age-gate jurisdictions to one's website? I wish Cloudflare had a wizard flow for this. I'm not going to age-gate access to my blog (it's a wiki so it has user-generated content) so I'd rather jurisdiction-gate it.
Perhaps we should have network traffic report its geographic location so that we can comply easily. Would prefer something in an IP packet so that I can just filter at the firewall. Doesn't even need to be implemented in a sophisticated way at clients. Can just have the urgent flag repurposed to mean "respond only if not geo-locked and unconcerned with regulatory" and then I can drop these directly, and regulated source locations could ensure that packet flags are correctly set at the widest peering location out of the UK and so on.
I look at discussions on Hacker News for Discord replacements frequently with despair.
If it doesn't have enough of the utility, performance, and positive UX, it will never gain enough market share to matter.
E2EE encryption doesn't matter if you don't have someone else to communicate over it with!
This appeal falls flat when you get to the parts about their homeserver requiring some form of age verification:
> From our perspective, the matrix.org homeserver instance has never been a service aimed at children, which our terms of use reflect by making it clear that users need to be at least 18 years old to use the server. However, the various age-verification laws require stricter forms of age verification measures than a self-declaration. Our Safety team and DPO are evaluating options that preserve your privacy while satisfying the age verification requirements in the jurisdictions where we have users.
Which is actually more strict than Discord's upcoming policy which allows accounts to operate for free without any verification, with some limitations around adult-oriented servers and content.
There has been a lot of FUD about the Discord age verification, so a refresher: The upcoming changes do not actually require you to verify anything to use Discord. It just leaves the account in teen mode by default. This means the account can't join age-restricted channels, can't unblur images marked as sensitive, and incoming message requests from unknown users will go to a second inbox with a warning by default.
You can, of course, run your own Matrix server. Having been there before I would suggest reading up on some typical experiences in running one of these servers. Unless you have someone willing to spend a lot of time running the server and playing IT person for people using it, it can be a real headache. They also note that running a server doesn't actually get around any age requirements:
> Practically speaking, that means that people and organisations running a Matrix server with open registration must verify the ages of users in countries which require it.
Except discord’s verification applies globally, while matrix is only aiming to implement it for users who live somewhere where it is required by law.
The list of locations with those laws is growing very large. From the post:
> Last summer we announced a series of changes to the terms and conditions of the Matrix.org homeserver instance, to ensure UK-based users are handled in alignment with the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA). Since then Australia, New Zealand and the EU have introduced similar legislation, with movement in the US and Canada too.
...and while we have no choice but implement it on the matrix.org instance, other folks running their own servers are responsible for their own choices.
As a Discord user myself, I’ve been surprised at how aggressive the recent data collection direction feels, especially given how much of its appeal came from being lightweight and community-centric. This to me seems like a real opportunity for a simpler alternative that preserves core functionality without the additional data surface area.
I wanted to love matrix and its clients but its just not quite there yet honestly.
I'm hopeful the experience will improve in the future.
Totally agree there and they actually talk about that in the post:
> Finally: we’re painfully aware that none of the Matrix clients available today provide a full drop-in replacement for Discord yet. All the ingredients are there, and the initial goal for the project was always to provide a decentralised, secure, open platform where communities and organisations could communicate together. However, the reality is that the team at Element who originally created Matrix have had to focus on providing deployments for the public sector (see here or here) to be able to pay developers working on Matrix. Some of the key features expected by Discord users have yet to be prioritised (game streaming, push-to-talk, voice channels, custom emoji, extensible presence, richer hierarchical moderation, etc).
Same here, tried a couple of years ago. I was drawn to it because of the protocol concept. The experience was not bad, everything worked. But I remember the signup/domain/keys/backups/etc UX was a bit confusing. Happy to see there is more attention going to Matrix lately. Time to give it another go perhaps
Has anyone managed to run Matrix over I2P or other similar overlay network technologies?
My security collective is honestly considering going back to IRC.
It's becoming increasingly apparent that if you don't use something truly free and open source and host it yourself, you're just setting yourself up for more of this sort of thing.
You can't trust anyone to properly handle the problem of "how the hell do we keep creeps the f*ck away from kids?" with any amount of common sense.
Even if you self-host matrix there are still multiple ways you could be liable for content you don't even know exists. Especially the last 4 points here:
https://telegra.ph/why-not-matrix-08-07
There are even custom message/media types that people use to upload hidden content you can't see even if you're joined to the same channel using a typical client.
Does matrix self-hosting allow you to disable federation & uploads?
Has this actually happened, or is it hypothetical?
That post is 2023 vintage and is both outdated and questionable in parts.
19. "media downloads are unauthenticated by default" -> fixed in Jun 2024: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/06/26/sunsetting-unauthenticate...
20. "ask someone else’s homeserver to replicate media" -> also fixed by authenticated media
21. "media uploads are unverified by default" - for E2EE this is very much a feature; running file transfers through an antivirus scanner would break E2EE. (Some enterprisey clients like Element Pro do offer scanning at download, but you typically wouldn't want to do it at upload given by the time people download the AV defs might be stale). For non-encrypted media, content can and is scanned on upload - e.g. by https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse-spamcheck-badlist
22. "all it takes is for one of your users to request media from an undesirable room for your homeserver to also serve up copies of it" - yes, this is true. similarly, if you host an IMAP server for your friends, and one of them gets spammed with illegal content, it unfortunately becomes your problem.
In terms of "invisible events in rooms can somehow download abusive content onto servers and clients" - I'm not aware of how that would work. Clients obviously download media when users try to view it; if the event is invisible then the client won't try to render it and won't try to download the media.
Nowadays many clients hide media in public rooms, so you have to manually click on the blurhash to download the file to your server anyway.
I cannot even use Discord if I wanted to... every time I try to sign up I get immediately phone-walled and/or banned, and the appeal is always denied with "our automated system is working properly." I have been trying for close to ten(!) years now off and on, with all different combinations of browsers, OSes, ISPs and physical machines. No VPN or proxy either.
And even if I was able to register, that "automated system" still randomly bans people whenever it feels like it. Search the r/discordapp subreddit or just google "discord random ban", it's a widespread problem with no solution and I have no idea how so many other people seem to have no issues, yet at the same time you can find lots of people just as frustrated as me.
"Automated system discriminating against me with no appeal or recourse" may not be the biggest injustice in the world right now, but I fear/loathe that it seems like it's going to keep getting bigger.
A bug blocking functionality is an annoyance, but a Scarlet Letter branded onto a secret dossier is terrifying.
Does phone-walled mean you have to verify with a phone number? Are you unable to do it because it doesn’t work, or because you don’t want to give it your phone number?
Most likely they don't want to. It's ridiculous that you would need to give your phone number for some chat program.
Since you need to provide a phone number to sign up for Discord is the reason I never will.
There should be no reason for a phone number and nor do I want to waste my time trying to buy pass it with internet provided single use numbers.
Unless it is a service I must use, then I will provide a phone number. If it is a service I get to choose to use then I will never provide a number.
On the two occasions I’ve tried to chat with someone on the public Matrix server, I was completely unable to get it to work. I’ve tried with the new Mac app and with some older thing years ago.
So… choose your poison? I’m sure Matrix/Element works for someone or they would be out of business, but it does not work for me.
I have a similar issue with Matrix as well... even though it's federated, most large rooms use the same bots and blocklists so I end up getting banned from many rooms before I've even attempted to join.
Apparently my monopoly ISP rotates IPs fairly often and I am sharing them with people that have been doing bad things with them, so not only are many Matrix channels blocked but even large regular websites like etsy or locals are completely blocked for me as well. Anything with a CF captcha is also an infinite loop.
As far as I know I wasn’t banned or restricted or anything. The client just never managed to create a room or initiate a chat or whatever they called it.
If you live in a GDPR country, you could try that — they're required to explain automated profiling.
I'll be closing and uninstalling Discord the first time I get a face scan pop up.
FWIW It's done on the client side and there are multiple ways to bypass it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982421
https://tech.yahoo.com/social-media/articles/now-bypass-disc...
That K-ID bypass has already been patched, and even if it's bypassed again, Discord is apparently directing some users to Persona instead now. Persona does server-side classification so that one won't be as easy as nulling out the checks on the client.
The 3D model method might work on Persona, but that demo only shows it fooling K-IDs classifier.
Oh, so they promised your face was only processed on the client and then deleted, but none of that is true? They're courting some huge GDPR fines.
Eh, the worldwide rollout hasn't happened yet so for now the only people getting sent to Persona after they promised client-side scanning are those who are fiddling around with Discords internals to trigger the age verification flow early. But yeah if they stick with Persona then they will need to retract the client-side promise before the proper rollout, and that'll be even more fuel on the PR fire.
Things are changing quickly. Some users are being allowed only 3rd party age verification.
https://piunikaweb.com/2026/02/12/discord-uk-age-verificatio...
There's just something about that headline that doesn't land well.
I'll be willing to believe that matrix is a home when they can get their shit together and stop transphobic hate waves for good.
Why (and more importantly how) are you proposing a decentralized protocol censors something?
I've always wished there was a market for mod actions.
Moderation and centralization while typically aren't independent, aren't necessarily dependent. One can imagine viewing content with one set of moderation actions and another person viewing the same content with a different set of moderation actions.
We sort of have this in HN already with viewing flagged content. It's essentially using an empty set for mod actions.
I believe it's technically viable to syndicate of mod actions and possibly solves the mod.labor.prpbl, but whether it's a socially viable way to build a network is another question.
Consider the ActivityPub Fediverse. With notable, short-lived exceptions (when a bad actor shows up with a new technique), the majority of the abuse comes from a handful of instances, whose administrators are generally either negligent or complicit.
So your solution to people using a decentralized, federated protocol to say things you don't like is to stop various servers interacting with each other? At that point why not just use federated services with multiple accounts?
It seems far too risky to sign up on a service for the purpose of intercommunication that is able (or even likely) to burn bridges with another for any reason at any time. In the end people will just accumulate on 2 or 3 big providers and then you have pseudo-federation anyway.
Servers stopping federation with each other is pretty normal IMO. If I had a mastodon server I would also not federate with something like gab.com.
However all the LGBT+ friendly servers federate with each other and that's good enough for me. I like not having to see toxicity, there's too much of it in the world already.
My solution is for instances to stop being negligent. Mastodon still directs everyone to create an account on mastodon.social using dark patterns (see https://joinmastodon.org/), which has lead to the flagship instance being far bigger than its moderation team can handle, leading to a situation where it's a major source of abuse and where defederation is too costly for many to consider.
"People will just accumulate on 2 or 3 big providers" is far from an inevitable circumstance, but there are conditions that make it more likely. That, too, is largely down to negligence or malice (but less so than the abusive communications problem).
> which has lead to the flagship instance being far bigger than its moderation team can handle, leading to a situation where it's a major source of abuse
Is that still true? As the admin of a small instance, I find the abuse coming from mastodon.social has been really low for a few years. There is the occasional spammer, but they often deal with it as quickly as I do.
Throwing in Nostr as a truly decentralized alternative. Instead of relying on federated servers, the messages themselves are signed and relayed for anyone to receive.
it's up to the maintainer of a particular server to moderate what goes on in said server. Now, if the Matrix.org Foundation wants to moderate their servers one way or the other, that's one thing, but to expect the protocol/spec to lay down a content policy is, with all due respect, dumb as hell.
you are literally on hackernews
Is the implication that HN is transphobic?
you're free to have your own opinion based on your experiences here, but i wouldn't blame anyone for feeling that way. for the record, i don't think dang or anybody is a transphobe, but i have to imagine the culture here is pretty off-putting to trans people
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36231993
This is a wild take. HN has transphobic users like it has trans and ally users. It's neutral to this topic, it's about tech.
i don't think it's that "wild". sure, i'm not so cynical as to feel hn's become a nazi bar or anything, but i am willing to recognize that some of the incidents i've witnessed could be reason enough for a trans person to want to avoid this site.
> It's neutral to this topic, it's about tech.
this thread began by xe bringing up failures in moderation affecting trans people
That isn't how it works. The presence of neutral allies doesn't somehow counterbalance and cancel out the transphobia. If a platform allows transphobic users - as Hacker News does because transphobia isn't against the guidelines - and transphobia is common in threads where trans issues or people are a subject (and it is) then it's a hostile platform to trans people.
Asking trans people to ignore this is like asking Jews to be comfortable in a bar where only ten percent of the patrons are Nazis. Arguing that "well not everyone is a Nazi" doesn't help, an attitude of "we're neutral about Nazis, we serve drinks to anyone" still makes it a Nazi bar, just implicitly rather than explicitly.
I'd agree with this logic if we were discussing all kinds of different topics here, and one's stance on gender would be immediately visible to anyone. But I can't remember the last time the matters of gender were discussed here at all, and pretty sure anything openly transphobic would be flagged or deleted pretty soon.
>I'd agree with this logic if we were discussing all kinds of different topics here, and one's stance on gender would be immediately visible to anyone.
We do discuss all kinds of different topics here. Despite what many people here want to believe, Hacker News isn't exclusively for tech and tech-related subjects.
>and pretty sure anything openly transphobic would be flagged or deleted pretty soon.
But not banned, that's the problem. The guidelines are extremely pedantic but nowhere is bigotry, racism, antisemitism or transphobia mentioned as being against those guidelines. You might say that shouldn't be necessary, but it's weird that so much effort is put into tone policing specific edge cases but the closest the guidelines come to defending marginalized groups is "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." Transphobia is treated as a mere faux pas on the same par as being too snarky, or tediously repetitive. The real transgression being not the bigotry but "trampling curiosity." Any trans person who posts here knows that bigots who hate them and want to do them harm aren't going to suffer meaningful consequences (especially if they just spin up a green account) and that the culture here isn't that concerned about their safety.
Read the green account just below me. That sort of thing happens all the time. Yes, the comment is [dead] but why should a trans person be comfortable here, or consider themselves welcome, knowing that this is the kind of thing they'll encounter?
I'm not in a position to tell marginalized people how they should feel, but a moderation policy that wouldn't even allow offensive messages by new accounts appear for a short time would make this place into another social media - walled off and tracking their users. I understand the point though.
Elaborate?
I just don't get why anyone is still arguing against age verification tbh. Large social spaces are required by law to do it, whether its discord or matrix or anywhere that allows strangers to interact.
I'm against needing to give my personal ID to use a simple service. Especially when it's already been leaked once.
No thanks, there are other services I can use.