Worries about Matrix.org elections
Worries about Matrix.org elections
Recently, the Matrix.org foundation board was elected. This has me concerned.
Out of 19 people elected, 6 mentioned moderation and/or trust & safety in their platform goals. 4 people mentioned ecosystem diversity. The remaining people mentioned a variety of goals.
When I saw these results, I was was confused why some listed no pronouns at all. When I inquired about it, I was told that it was optional.
Your concern about cisnormativity is totally valid, but I see little correlation with the mod tools? What improvements could be done on the technical side?
ETA: thanks for sharing.
well the statistic you show does make it clear that little people expressed interest in moderation and/or trust & safety.
As for how I relate cisnormativity and the demographics of the board, I feel that people who may have no experience with harassment may not prioritize the construction of moderation tools.
On the technical side, I've expanded here in another comment here.
I am just, slightly, concerned about this. If the Matrix protocol shits the bed entirely, then I'll be happy to wait for the next wave of innovators to solve this.
That may sound dismissive to some, but I've already lived through things like this happening.
Over thirty years I've seen so many tremendous leaps in telecommunications. I'm not too worried.
Look how hard it is to make folks switch from discord to matrix. All that fracturisation is exhausting.
I'm curious as to how you would improve the mod tools Lionir. I have found mod/admin tools and especially Mjolnir to be quite good.
I've personally heard that Mjolnir works not great when it comes to admin things but the biggest problem that I'm aware is that Mjolnir does not really solve the problem for individuals with their rooms and spaces to moderate. I believe Draupnir (https://github.com/the-draupnir-project/Draupnir) is trying to help with this particular flaw with Mjolnir.
One of the other things in terms of T&S is that it is my understanding that the team is too small and the tooling to handle the reports of abuse on matrix.org are not good enough.
As for mod tools more concretely, I think that people who are admins of rooms or spaces should have the following abilities:
- Clearer moderation roles
- More interaction between permissions in rooms and spaces
- Filters for slurs
- Blocking homeservers (in case of abuse)
- Reports that actually go to them
It should be noted that I'm not very familiar with the tools on matrix as I largely have little trust in my ability to moderate there.
It sounds like you are more concerned with the matrix.org homeserver than matrix itself. Matrix.org homeserver will eventually go away for personal use, this is the plan for the future. Matrix has always kept this homeserver open as proof of concept, but has not planned to keep it open forever as the goal is the widespread adoption of the protocol and for people and orgs to host their own servers and build tools using matrix.
The bullet points you listed are all currently able to be realized on any self-hosted homeserver.
Did anyone express interest in making the platform more secure? The fact that so much data can be sent without e2ee (and some data can't at all be e2ee) is a big blocker for a lot of users looking for an actually secure messenger for their org
I know there are MSCs to make sure more data is e2ee like reactions.
As for anyone putting that in their platform pitch, it seems the closest was the representative of Gematik, the German Health service though most platform pitches are rather vague in details. You can read all of the candidates (do note that not all candidates were elected so do double check) https://matrix.org/governing-board/elections/2024/