Chat
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Great direction & addition
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- Clients: Any plans for desktop and mobile apps?
- Security: Can you shed some light on the app's message encryption and overall security?
- Media: How easy is it to delete uploaded media to keep app size down?
- Export: Please add HTML and JSON export options for channels.
- Import: some type of migration tool to move rooms from Matrix and other platforms.
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yes so clients (besides the built-in webclient) are planned, so far we have just built the two we have use-cases for, which is an android and a gnome (libadwaita) client. However those are not ready to release.
Security wise, like all our apps, we operate in an environment where the Cloudron server is trusted. So all connections are encrypted (all is just https) but the storage on the server is not encrypted on top. And since we put the trust in the server, there are no plans for e2ee at all as a concious decision. Those make a lot of sense when you don't trust your coordinating server of course (like the typical signal or regular saas and such)
Media handling will come, so far those are just files in a folder, so one can purge on timestamp if that is wanted. But I guess we will provide some better controls over time.
For import, we have a matrix import script, which we also needed, but that will need some polishing and documentation, which will come.
For export, sure we can easily add json/html export but also the whole app has a rest api, so this can even be just put at an AI agent to do these days
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In our attempt to bring better apps for common use-cases to Cloudron we have now also released a chat app. The reason here is similar to the other apps like Contacts, Calendar, Mail, ... where Cloudron was always depending on high quality 3rdparty apps which we have little to no control over fixing issues or aligning long-term vision of those projects (which too often focus mainly on saas offerings to keep those apps funded) with our vision of enabling more organizations to selfhost.
While there are great selfhosted chat apps out there and available also on Cloudron, we were not satisfied even for our own use-cases for various reasons. Be it SSO integration (mattermost) or better search (matrix) or generally better integration between those apps.
By now we have some groundwork in place via internal projects like pankow (common UI framework) and tegel (common auth and backend framework), allowing us to get those apps developed much faster.
So here we are with Chat now (still some early release, but we don't expect major breakage from here on). We use it internally for quite some time now and thus feel confident that it can add value for some of our users also, so it would be great to gather some feedback in the corresponding forum section as usual: https://forum.cloudron.io/category/457/chat
The great thing here is, that we can now actually implement features our users want to see and also can ensure that those are well aligned and can be trusted to not change business direction unexpectedly or simply get abandoned for reasons out of our control.
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yes so clients (besides the built-in webclient) are planned, so far we have just built the two we have use-cases for, which is an android and a gnome (libadwaita) client. However those are not ready to release.
Security wise, like all our apps, we operate in an environment where the Cloudron server is trusted. So all connections are encrypted (all is just https) but the storage on the server is not encrypted on top. And since we put the trust in the server, there are no plans for e2ee at all as a concious decision. Those make a lot of sense when you don't trust your coordinating server of course (like the typical signal or regular saas and such)
Media handling will come, so far those are just files in a folder, so one can purge on timestamp if that is wanted. But I guess we will provide some better controls over time.
For import, we have a matrix import script, which we also needed, but that will need some polishing and documentation, which will come.
For export, sure we can easily add json/html export but also the whole app has a rest api, so this can even be just put at an AI agent to do these days
which is an android
I can help test the app if you're willing to share the APK.
Media handling will come, so far those are just files in a folder, so one can purge on timestamp if that is wanted. But I guess we will provide some better controls over time.
To share some issues I ran into in Matrix. Last time I tried deleting media to save on space, it corrupted the rooms and I had to wipe the entire app. Luckily, I had exported the rooms via HTML/JSON beforehand. I used the Matrix admin tool btw. I didn't manually delete things. But, manual deletion of a room's media folder (assuming each room has its own folder) would be ideal. For instance, for DM rooms between users, we share a lot of media between each other but it serves its purpose once seen. Yet, that accounted for a huge percentage of the app's media storage.
Those make a lot of sense when you don't trust your coordinating server of course
This will limit the app location to on-premise servers, really. I wouldn't trust a VPS provider with my chats.
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E2EE for chats is a critical feature. Times are changing fast and being in control of your communication is a must. VPS of any sort is never a trusted entity. However as soon as you introduce E2EE it becomes a much, much bigger effort.
Without mobile apps this solution will be way more niche. Desktop apps (maybe via Electron) are very useful too. Why the choice of Gnome only with gnome specific libraries? I run KDE, so that app won't be great for me. Why not Qt or other variants?
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I think for E2EE chats matrix is a much better option, tbh one of the reasons we wanted to move away from matrix internally was the e2ee which cases lots of side-effects, but that may just be user-error in many cases. Anyhow I understand that everyone has different trust levels depending on the data type and hosting setup, but just to put this in perspective, we don't plan to add this anytime soon to the chat app.
For the clients, we just started with the systems we use internally, which is Android and me specifically gnome. This is a pure pragmatic decision so we can start using it asap to find and fix issues early.
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Yes, Matrix seems to be a decent system, but who knows how great its security really is. After all lots of people seem to think Signal is a privacy focused chat app.
Understand your position regarding the audience and functionality. Makes sense, I guess. Will this be only chat or video calls as well?
As for the desktop app. Well, if you can consider cross DE app - it'd be a much better time investment (in my mind, obviously) as you wouldn't need to re-write for other platforms.
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G girish referenced this topic
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@nebulon That's a fair statement. With that said I do prefer desktop apps for Whatspp, Telegram, Element.
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I think for E2EE chats matrix is a much better option, tbh one of the reasons we wanted to move away from matrix internally was the e2ee which cases lots of side-effects, but that may just be user-error in many cases. Anyhow I understand that everyone has different trust levels depending on the data type and hosting setup, but just to put this in perspective, we don't plan to add this anytime soon to the chat app.
For the clients, we just started with the systems we use internally, which is Android and me specifically gnome. This is a pure pragmatic decision so we can start using it asap to find and fix issues early.
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Yes, Matrix seems to be a decent system, but who knows how great its security really is. After all lots of people seem to think Signal is a privacy focused chat app.
Understand your position regarding the audience and functionality. Makes sense, I guess. Will this be only chat or video calls as well?
As for the desktop app. Well, if you can consider cross DE app - it'd be a much better time investment (in my mind, obviously) as you wouldn't need to re-write for other platforms.
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@avatar1024 not a lot IMHO, but some don't like that it's connected to phone numbers. Although you can also have usernames too now and even when you've got someone's number Signal doesn't display it so
IMHO it's still the best option that isn't confusing to use for average normal people.
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