Ontimp

Absolutely, it’s definitely one of the major areas work on the Matrix standard is needed.

There is an MSC (= a spec change proposal) from September 2025 where the folks at Element proposed a solution for how to do this going forward: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/3414?ref=element.io

This blog article explains it more clearly: https://element.io/blog/hiding-room-metadata-from-servers/

Wire wrote that article in summer last year to prevent the German IT-Planning Council from adopting Matrix as the communications layer for its consolidated interfederal government-to-citizen messaging infrastructure in the public administration.

So be aware that, to my knowledge, this article is not a good-faith tech blog post but part of public affairs campaign / lobbying attempt.

Would be neat to have meta data encrypted in Matrix, but it’s not a deal breaker for most use cases imo.

Which client do you refer to regarding the bad UX, Element Web?

Matrix is just the protocol. There are a bunch of different clients though that all implement Matrix but are made by different people: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/

There is a difference between funding of the Matrix foundation and the matrix.org instance vs. funding for the companies working in the ecosystem. The Matrix foundation has been struggling financially, yes. But the companies using and contributing to the Matrix standard are doing quite well from what I know - though they should probably cough up a little more money to find the overhead and the public matrix infrastructure imo

Correction they are actually moving away from the Matrix federation scheme in favor of their own federation mechanism to simplify the internal architecture (but they are still supporting Matrix financially apparently :)

Rocket.chat uses Matrix though, too. It’s not only Matrix but it makes use of Matrix federation among other things and they built their own Matrix server implementation in TypeScript last year

Honestly, online service platforms have come up with so many odd and manipulated behavioural patterns they shove down their customers’ throat as long as it makes them money…

If an A/B test actually showed that offering to pick up your food from a traffic accident site led to better customer satisfaction outcomes than just cancelling the order I seem them doing this 100%

You’re probably right in this specific case; this seems suspiciously one-sided. Do you have a link to the source where they explain their methods?

Generally something like this can happen though, especially if you do e.g. random dialing on the landline to survey people; mostly older people still use landlines and mostly retired people actually pick up during office hours. A good social scientist would obviously try to measure and control for those sampling errors though, not make them on purpose to get pre-determined results.

Yes the devil’s in the detail, but there is no such thing as a survey without methods; and every method has its constants and assumptions. Yes, sometimes there are ulterior motives - but frequently it’s just lack of time, money, thematic tradeoffs, methodological complexity, etc.

This is why it’s good to have different mutually independent polling companies asking the same questions. They won’t perfectly align, but they will give a corridor of reasonable expectation.

There is no way they were the first vegans in 2016. There have been 100+ ascents per year for decades, should have been around 6000 in total as of 2016.

Considering the mountain is in a part of the world where significant parts of the population are de-facto vegans without identifying as such, I highly doubt that no one among the 6k people before them was living on a plant based diet

And Super Mario Galaxy

I wouldn’t want to input my personal data on the self-hosted website of some random person.

Also, frequently there are official petition websites for national and European bodies, predominantly parliaments, that will actually force parliaments to discuss the issue instead of just screaming into the void.