“Signal is a great messaging app with amazing privacy and encryption, but it’s built on a decentralized system based in the US. A service that exists only in one place becomes much easier to block or attack.”
These were the first words that the Co-Founder of Matrix (an open-source protocol for decentralized and secure communications), Matthew Hodgson, told me when I sat down with him last week. Little did I know that this scenario would leave the theoretical realm and become a real-life event only a few days later.
Signal is one of the many tech services impacted by the ongoing AWS outage. Short for Amazon Web Services, AWS provides virtual servers to half of the web to let them run applications and websites. A truly centralized system, now showing its intrinsic weaknesses – a dependence on Big Tech that makes it vulnerable.
“The AWS outage is yet another reminder of the weakness of centralized systems,” Amandine Le Pape, the other Co-Founder of Matrix, reiterates to TechRadar. “When a key component of internet infrastructure depends on a single US cloud provider, a single fault can bring global services to their knees.”
On the Matrix protocol, Hodgson explains, users don’t even know that a server exists. Most importantly, this server might not even need to be on the internet.
This means that, “You have genuine sovereignty over your communication there without even being exposed to the internet. Whereas good luck using Signal if you’re not on the internet,” Hodgson added.
Getting Matrix mainstream
If making people switch from WhatsApp to Signal may have seemed challenging, those behind the Matrix now have an even bigger task on their hands – getting Matrix mainstream.
First entering the market in 2016, Element was the first UK-based encrypted communication and collaboration platform harnessing the power of Matrix.
After almost a decade, however, you may have never heard of them. That’s because Element has primarily focused on helping governments secure their own communication with solutions that can combine Signal-style privacy and security with decentralized control.
“The reason was funding. We needed to find a way to generate enough money to keep working on Matrix and to be sustainable,” Hodgson told me. “Now, having got almost to the point of sustainability there, the challenge really does become: how do we take Matrix mainstream?”
Element expects that a Dutch government investment in Matrix peer-to-peer technology could now support this quest. The goal is to develop a version of Element that can operate on a mesh network without requiring an internet server.
“That can suddenly be used for genuinely decentralized distributed communication as an alternative to WhatsApp and Signal,” said Hodgson. “It is literally the total opposite of Signal. Similar end goal, looks the same, encrypted messaging, but here the server is effectively running on your app.”
A decentralized distributed communication is literally the total opposite of Signal
Matthew Hodgson, Matrix and Element Co-founder
I know what you’re thinking: a messaging app running on a mesh network seems too techie to appeal to wider audiences. Yet, the truth is that there have been some iterations that got very popular.
FireChat, for instance, was one of such apps developed by Open Garden that allowed users to send messages without an internet connection by creating a wireless mesh network using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi Direct.
The app became very popular among activists and demonstrators during the Arab Spring and Hong Kong protests to fight back against internet throttling.
Square’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, recently built Bitchat, a decentralized messaging app that uses Bluetooth to create a peer-to-peer mesh network for offline communication.
“It shows that there is interest in this mesh style of communication. So, I think we can bridge the technological gap,” said Hodgson.
Beyond Element
Element may have been the first to run the Matrix, but lots have changed since Hodgson and Le Pape first came up with the idea in 2013.
Now, there are many applications that are built on Matrix, and while most of them serve government agencies and the public sector, there are some other apps that are more focused on a mainstream crowd.
Commenting on this point, Hodgson told me: “I hope the peer-to-peer Matrix will be part of Element’s route into mainstream, but alternatively, there are other great apps like Beeper or Filament coming on the scene, or Fluffy Chat, another Matrix client.”
A need to cut ties with a centralized (mostly US-based) infrastructure isn’t a prerogative of the Matrix community nor messaging apps, either.
Andy Yen, the founder and CEO of Proton, which developed one of the best VPN and encrypted email services around, suggested that the Signal AW-based outage shows that “an European alternative not run on Big Tech cloud will be necessary to safeguard strategic autonomy.”
To sum up, as Le Pape explains: “Centralized systems may offer convenience and scale, but they also create single points of failure. True resilience comes from decentralization and self-hosting.”
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chiara.castro@futurenet.com (Chiara Castro)
