Matrix.org Will Migrate to MAS
136 comments
·April 2, 2025jckahn
foresto
> I assume that Meta has a backdoor into WhatsApp conversations
They don't need a back door when they control the front door: the app. End-to-end encryption doesn't protect the endpoints.
(In other words, your concern is warranted.)
pentagrama
You're absolutely right. End-to-end encryption protects message content, but WhatsApp still collects metadata, which is incredibly valuable.
Even though they can't read your messages, they know who you talk to, how often, when, and for how long. They also track your device info, IP address (which can reveal your location), network details, and app usage patterns.
And this data isn’t just sitting there—Meta uses it. For example, if you chat with a business on WhatsApp, you might start seeing ads for that business on Instagram or Facebook. They don’t need to read your messages when they can infer so much just from how you use the app.
Disclaimer: Comment translated from Spanish and corrected by Chat GPT.
ItsBob
> Even though they can't read your messages
I've long wondered if this is actually true.
If I have a closed-source app and claim (and can verify!) E2EE, surely I could still read every message from my closed-source app, within the app itself, and you'd never know.
I've never been a mobile app developer but I've been a desktop and web developer since the 90s so I don't know what apps can and cannot see but in a desktop app or web app, if it's on the screen, it's decrypted and I can put code in to read/steal it.
Am I missing something here?
ranger_danger
And the default/largest homeserver, matrix.org, uses cloudflare, so all your data belongs to them as well.
foresto
It is disappointing that they use Cloudflare, especially since most Matrix metadata hasn't yet been moved to the end-to-end encrypted channel.
(Arathorn: is e2ee metadata still on the roadmap?)
But no, not all your data is exposed. The e2ee parts, like message content in encrypted rooms, are opaque to Cloudflare.
Steltek
Self-hosted Matrix with all the bridges is awesome and brings back that Pidgin/Adium life of one chat app for all of my friends. Too bad Apple has an uncanny ability to avoid consequences with iMessage.
nisa
It's wonderful that it seems work well for you but my experience in bridging group chats with XMPP or IRC was terrible. Lost messages, bridge crashes, puppet accounts getting randomly broken/duplicated with discarded messages.
From the bridges I've run, only the Telegram bridge is somewhat stable for me but it also has it's warts.
Might be different if you run a strictly personal server for 1:1 conversations but I'd say from an ux perspective the bridges idea largely failed IMHO.
I don't think it's the fault of element/matrix it's a difficult problem and I guess with limited resources they made a lot of progress and made things possible that weren't before but it's not plug and play, at least it wasn't for me.
In general I've found it's also difficult to communicate in group chats if there are two worlds with a slightly different view (missing reactions, some elements of the messenger are not supported like captions, polls and so on...)
kuon
While I generally agree, the slidge bridge for XMPP has been working quite well for me, especially whatsapp, but it is really new.
jcul
Signal doesn't have a web interface, but being able to use a desktop app is OK for me.
The big downside for me is not being able to use it on two devices. All the other services, privacy concerns or not can now do this. It's one reason why I stopped donating to / advocating for signal.
nothrabannosir
Settings -> linked devices?
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007320551-Li...
jcul
This lets you use the desktop application and a phone at the same time, which I use.
It doesn't allow you to use multiple phones at the same time.
anotherpaul
For me the issue was contact names tbh. Is that solved? It used to be that the contact name was set by the contact and not by me/my address book.
crossroadsguy
You mean you access all these on Matrix/Element via the bridge? Or you actually mean you convinced all of them to ditch their chat apps and migrate to Matrix, or at least install Element as well in addition to the other ones? It’s a feat if it’s the latter without or without ditching. Is this a very privacy conscious demographic?
null
9283409232
Wasn't there a big falling out between the Matrix team and Element or am I misremembering what happened?
Arathorn
Element is the company formed by the team who created Matrix to work on Matrix, almost all of whom are still there; there is no falling out :)
The Matrix Foundation is the non-profit set up by the Matrix team in 2018 to keep Matrix itself independent of Element and other Matrix vendors - to act as a steward of the protocol and a standards body. Originally Element donated almost all of its code on Matrix to the Foundation (e.g. Synapse, the original Matrix server) as permissive Apache-licensed FOSS, assuming that if Matrix was successful, folks would want to fund it.
In practice, by 2023, Matrix was very successful... but it transpired that the vast majority of folks commercially building on the Foundation's Apache licensed code failed to route any funding back to the Foundation (as the hosting body) or to Element (as the primary code contributor), despite many polite requests. As a result, there wasn't enough $ to pay folks at Element to keep working on the core Matrix projects as their day job. So, to keep the lights on, Element stopped donating their work to the Foundation, and changed license to non-permissive AGPLv3 in order to sell AGPL-exceptions to the folks commercialising it. This has helped the situation somewhat (although Element isn't at breakeven yet). Meanwhile, it's left the Foundation focused on governance, the Matrix standards process, trust & safety and hosting core libraries like E2EE and matrix-rust-sdk.
There's no beef between the Foundation and Element over this. In a utopia the projects would certainly have stayed as Apache licensed code in the Foundation - but then again, other standards bodies like W3C or XSF don't publish code these days: it's a phase that a given protocol grows out of once third party organisations get busy building implementations.
Disclaimer: i'm conflicted on this, being project lead/co-founder for Matrix, and then CEO/CTO at Element.
ants_everywhere
I say this all the time, but the point of the permissive licenses is you're making a donation to private industry.
There are reasons to do this, for example if you believe that private industry adopting some technology is good and you want to make that happen.
But people keep seeming surprised by the fact that these donations aren't reciprocated (or at least people don't seem to plan for them to never be reciprocated). It sounds to me like the AGPL license was more consistent with their goals.
freedomben
FWIW I think AGPL is the right license choice for you. The more experience I gain the more I lean toward AGPL for products, MIT for libraries.
9283409232
I understand now. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
ranger_danger
There are ways to get web interfaces for Signal.
But I think the bigger issue is that any platform that controls the javascript sent to you from a web page, can also backdoor/MITM/inject malicious code at any time without you knowing.
jokoon
I set firefox to clear cookies, also using cookies to "strict"
This somehow causes a huge pain to connect to mozilla's matrix instance, and I never understood why. This is a bit ironic since firefox has that feature to clear cookies.
I had to reset password, and do other weird things, I can't remember what exactly.
I hope this MAS thing fixes it.
apples_oranges
So unusable for people like me who only surf in private mode
jeroenhd
Putting tracking protection to strict essentially makes Firefox violate certain web standards. Developers aren't going to test against that, and if they are they're probably not going to be able to do much about the problems strict tracking protection causes.
If MAS fixes this, it'll be by accident and it'll probably break in the future. Firefox warns against this kind of breakage if you enable strict tracking protection in the settings. You can't have strict tracking protection + websites doing cross-domain authentication working.
anon7000
I mean, yeah, tracking prevention features basically completely break cross-domain authentication. There are a surprising number of valid use cases that need cross-domain auth (or make the user experience a lot easier). While there are workarounds these days, sometimes it does require deep changes in how auth works
jokoon
> There are a surprising number of valid use cases that need cross-domain auth
I am not a web developer, but I would disagree with that.
Either web standards respect privacy or they don't, but I would not sacrifice privacy for anything.
Firefox was right to prevent tracking, it highlights how webstandards are just not good. I something doesn't work properly in a firefox private window, to me it should not exist.
dwattttt
Authentication requires the opposite of privacy. If you don't want to be identified, you can't restrict anything to your identity.
kibwen
The status quo appears to involve handing over your account password to your chosen client. That's worse than this.
nurettin
How do you prevent them from collecting "Interaction Data"?
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#bookmark-how-...
apetresc
I vaguely remember an old MSC or TWIM or something that described (the possibility of) a new authentication mechanism whereby I could set up either a dummy homeserver or something in .well_known that would allow me to use my own domain but without needing to use my own homeserver for the actual traffic. Sort of like an auth-only homeserver, if you will.
Is that part of MAS? Was that initiative ever fully-baked? Or am I just misremembering?
Arathorn
That's .well-known based delegation, which was proposed in MSC1708 in Nov 2017: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/blob/old... and merged into the spec in Jan 2019 (prior to Matrix 1.0 in June 2019): https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/commit/0347e873efc...
So yes, fully-baked and part of Matrix since 1.0!
Next Gen Auth via OIDC is instead a key part of the (upcoming) Matrix 2.0 spec release - see https://areweoidcyet.com and https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/386...
MartijnBraam
Afaik that's not related to this, that was already possible as a domain alias. I think that feature is called a delegation if I remember correctly.
nadir_ishiguro
Love matrix. Improving the onboarding is a great step. I've seen less technical people have issues in that area until now.
Mostly a desktop/web user myself, hoping all that Element X work will trickle down to us.
neilv
* Is all matrix.org's server-side for this open source, and able to be self-hosted?
* Do all the Matrix clients need to be modified to support this authentication method?
Arathorn
The new authentication server (MAS) is at https://github.com/element-hq/matrix-authentication-service (AGPLv3) and entirely self-hostable - e.g. https://github.com/element-hq/ess-helm for the brand new official helm charts from Element, or https://github.com/element-hq/element-docker-demo for a very quick and dirty docker-compose setup i threw together.
MAS provides backwards compatibility for the old Matrix auth APIs for existing Matrix clients, so they do not need to be modified to keep working. However, to get the most out of all the new auth features (2FA, MFA, QR login etc. etc.) then clients will need to be upgraded to speak OIDC natively. Element X for instance is already OIDC-native.
https://areweoidcyet.com has more details.
cyberax
1. Yes. Even the public website is open source. The license is AGPLv3: https://github.com/element-hq/synapse
2. Yes.
barodeur
Congrats to Quentin and all the other contributors to this project.
BrenBarn
> No more typing your password in every client you’d like to log in to.
So. . . how will we log in? This post is heavy on vague promises of greatness but light on concrete details of UX.
kuschku
If you use e.g., "Sign in with Google" today, you get redirected to your web browser, log in, and get redirected back to the client. This means you can use the saved passwords of your browser, and if already logged in there, you just have to click "continue" instead of logging in again.
With MAS, every login works like that. If you click "sign in", instead of getting redirected to Google, you get redirected to the website of your homeserver, where you can login and authenticate before being redirected back to the client.
The primary benefit of using a standard OIDC flow is that your authentication server can easily add support for passkeys, webauthn, TOTP or captchas, without having to wait for every single client to support these features.
While matrix.org uses MAS for this, providing the same login features as it used to, your organization might want to use Keycloak to connect their homeserver directly to LDAP.
mananaysiempre
The downside is that you need a full browser to authenticate this way.
palata
> So. . . how will we log in?
I think you will log into your server, and then the server will offer you to give access to the client. The screenshot right below the line you quote seems to show exactly that.
BrenBarn
I guess I can believe that, but it's unclear because there's nothing to tell me what that's a screenshot of. The icon in the screenshot is the Element icon, which is a client, so at first glance I figure it's a screenshot of Element. After reading your comment I can infer that it's actually something else (a website?) showing me the icon of the client that wants access. That makes sense, but it's not obvious just from the screenshot.
One reason I ask about this is I always wonder how it will work for someone writing their own client, perhaps a very basic client (or a bot). Any answer that involves "you will click on X" doesn't apply there. As long as there's a straightforward API based way, that's cool. And I assume there is one here. But my experience has been that such changes aimed at "greater security" often make things more cumbersome for small-time developers.
But we'll see. Certainly a smoother login (and logout!) experience for Matrix would be welcome so hopefully this will be a plus overall.
magicalhippo
The blog mentions right at the start that it's based on OAuth 2.0/OIDC, similar to how you log in to your Google account in Thunderbird for example.
> I always wonder how it will work for someone writing their own client, perhaps a very basic client (or a bot).
For interactive clients, it'll be the standard OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code flow[1]. For non-interactive services they say in the proposal[2] that one uses the existing method but they will implement the standard OAuth 2.0 Client Credentials flow[3], which is effectively like a traditional username/password deal, though the "password" is not the account password.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity-platform/v2...
[2]: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/blob/002...
[3]: https://developer.okta.com/docs/concepts/oauth-openid/#clien...
halJordan
Read the whole blog, and it directs you further for more details. But this blog does tell you they're moving to oidc. That means you will get all the non password flows oidc supports.
This is a reading comprehension problem more than a blog writing problem
yaky
This sounds great for large and corporate servers, but a pain for small self-hosted ones. More configuration and external dependencies. Plus additional confusion for non-techy users on those smaller servers.
jchw
I don't think this will be required for other servers any time soon, if ever. Clients are going to have to support logging in the oldschool way indefinitely, especially since most Matrix servers are basically unmaintained.
t3chguy
You say that, but Element X (Android & iOS) already lacks full support for the oldschool way. It only supports certain flows therein AIUI.
jchw
Yeah, I realize that, but that's exactly why it's Element X and not Element. Element was actually planning on dropping support for older servers, but for ecosystem reasons they had to can that indefinitely. I don't think Element will become Element X anytime soon with the ecosystem in such bad shape.
null
kibwen
Discord's ongoing enshittification may create a market opportunity for alternatives in the near future. I'd like to think that Matrix could be a beneficiary of that, but the common-case UX needs to be polished damn well when the time comes if they want to capitalize.
Arathorn
MAS and Next Gen Auth open up the way to things like QR-login (complete with syncing all E2EE state and verification!) which should help enormously with common-case UX.
See https://youtu.be/ZiRYdqkzjDU?t=966 for a demo of it from The Matrix Conference in Sept, or https://youtu.be/lkCKhP1jxdk?t=1832 showing it working in on a fresh instance of element-docker-demo at FOSDEM 2025.
74848732648
Eh... Discord's enshittified client is still a hundred times more usable than Element — for all its faults, at least Discord is able to deliver and display messages reliably ("unable to decrypt message", anyone?). And for the more technologically oriented, client mods do a lot to improve the Discord UX.
Element X is supposed to improve things, but it's stuck on Android and iOS for the foreseeable future.
genewitch
I haven't seen that message in literal years.
null
oofbey
So Matrix is the new XMPP?
vaylian
Did XMPP ever use these protocols for authentication?
Arathorn
fwiw, there's a XEP for OIDC in XMPP from last year: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0493.html. ATproto is also moving to it as its primary auth mechanism: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/2656.
Cool! I’ve recently consolidated all of my Google Chat and WhatsApp friends onto Matrix (via Element) because it’s E2EE. Gchat isn’t and I assume that Meta has a backdoor into WhatsApp conversations. So, those platforms can’t be trusted. Signal doesn’t have a web interface, so that’s a no-go for me. lol Telegram.
Matrix has been great for me and I recommend that everyone else use it!