Alright, so I'm now running an instance of Matrix chat for our family. They agreed to give it a try instead of WhatsApp! Let's see how this experiment goes. It might fail, but then at least we've tried. Our server runs synapse + relayd on OpenBSD. I use weechat-matrix for now, the others use Element. I'm not entirely convinced myself, yet. Matrix feels like a behemoth with tons of bells and whistles. I wish we could just use IRC, but yeah. I just hope synapse survives the upcoming OpenBSD upgrade. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * End-to-end encryption in Matrix is clunky. This is always a difficult issue. Even more so if users are confronted with "keys" and "backup keys" and all those words. This is all fine for tech nerds, but normal users can't handle that. It's too complicated. PGP failed for the same reason (yes, yes, PGP is worse than Matrix, no need to argue). In our case, it would be fine to just disable it completely, since I own the server and transport layer encryption takes care of the rest. But that's not possible. There are several discussions, like this one: Let's wait and see ... Hopefully, e2ee UX issues don't cause our little experiment to fail.