For the third year in a row, I attended FOSDEM, a Free and Open Source Software conference. I enjoyed the previous two years, and Automattic paid for me to attend, so I decided to make the hop across the pond to attend again. FOSDEM is one of the main gatherings of the Matrix community every year (probably second only to the Matrix Conference), and there is also a sizeable Go presence at the conference as well.

Today I’m announcing that Sublime Music has reached end-of-maintenance. This announcement is greatly overdue, as I have not been actively maintaining the project for over a year, and have not been actively developing new features for even longer.

Thank You!

I would like to start off by thanking everyone who used Sublime Music, reported bugs, interacted in the Matrix room, and wrote code for the project. This project is the most successful open source project I’ve started, and I am grateful for the community that formed around it.

This week, Beeper had our second meetup after being acquired by Automattic earlier this year. Unlike the last retreat in Porto which had lots of other Automattic employees in attendance, this was just our team and was focused on work and planning less than team-building.

Automattic is a remote-only company, so work retreats are the only time that we can connect with our co-workers in-person and build stronger personal relationships among the team. The best part is that we get to go to cool locations for these meetups. You can read about all the previous work retreats on this blog.

End-to-end encryption is one of the things which brought me to Matrix, and I’m sure that it’s one of the factors that brought many of you to Matrix as well.

However, Matrix’s user experience with cryptography is often confusing. I mainly blame the other chat networks for their incompetence. Most other chat networks don’t even provide any cryptographically-guaranteed security and privacy. Some networks provide encryption in a way that does not truly leave the user in control of their keys. Only a few networks (Signal) truly leave the user in control, and their UX is arguably worse than Matrix.

In Matrix, message security is provided by Megolm. The goal of message security is twofold. We (a) want messages to be encrypted on the sender’s device and (b) only be able to be decrypted on devices of users who are a part of the conversation. As a corollary, we want to prevent other parties (rogue homeservers, man-in-the-middle attackers, etc.) from decrypting the messages.

Understanding Matrix cryptography requires understanding some basic cryptography primitives. This article intends to explain those prerequisites in simple terms. This article is not a rigorous, mathematical description of the cryptosystems in use. Rather, it is a practical guide to what functionality each of the cryptography primitives provides. I’ve tried to include links to external resources if you are interested in learning more about a specific topic.

Background

When we at Beeper started working on the new Android app, based on mautrix-go, we initially tried using goolm as the crypto implementation instead of libolm. We almost immediately ran into issues for unknown reasons, and rather than fighting with cryptography, we decided to just put in the work to get libolm working in the Android app.

However, libolm is annoying for multiple reasons.

I’m running for the Matrix Governing Board as an Individual Member (see my Platform) and I am only eligible to vote as an individual member, but I would like to endorse a few Ecosystem Member candidates who are well qualified to represent the ecosystem.

Kim Brose

I endorse Kim Brose (HarHarLinks) representing Matrix Community Events as an Ecosystem Member candidate.

I met Kim in Berlin at the first Community Matrix Summit and has been active in organizing many other Matrix community events including the 2023 and 2024 Matrix Community Meetups at FOSDEM. He is a great community builder and is consistently welcoming to newcomers at the events. His Matrix pedigree is also deep and includes running a homeserver for multiple people, contributing to the simplematrixbotlib, and contributions to many other projects. He also is a public figure from Nordeck and presents their work on widgets regularly. Kim would provide a valuable perspective on the Matrix ecosystem as he has been involved so many aspects of our community.

On the Saturday after the retreat I did my own sightseeing and adventuring around Porto. However, as I mentioned in my post about the retreat, a bunch of us went on a walking tour of the city on Wednesday, but since it wasn’t really meetup-related, I decided to combine the info that I got on the tour with this post, as I think it fits better.

The past few weeks have been exciting for Beeper. We made Beeper available to everyone without a waitlist, launched a new Android app based on our own internally-built Matrix SDK written in Go, and were acquired by Automattic for $125M. As part of the acquisition, the Beeper team is merging with the Texts.com team that was acquired by Automattic last year. We are going to unify the products under the Beeper brand. All of this is only a few months on the heels of our Beeper Mini launch which brought fully end-to-end encrypted iMessage to Android devices.