I want to setup a matrix instance to help increase friends and family’s privacy. Is there much value in creating my own instance?
I’m a beginner to linux and coding, but am good at following the steps on a video tutorial.
Alternatively i could get everyone to sign up on a preexisting instance + download the element app.
Thanks for sharing your opinions !
Its like a Linux distribution…not like Prosody itself that basically is like a “roll your own OS”. Snikket comes all preconfigured for the typical use-case of a small private server, has a few bleeding edge extensions like nicely integrated invites and a administrative GUI, and also has some rebranded clients (based on Conversations & Siskin) with some small usability improvements and preconfigured to work best with the Snikket server.
It is basically an attempt by one of the main Prosody developers to make XMPP more accessible and under a unified “brand” to solve some of the “too much choice” issues XMPP has.
My one prosody server has 3 different type of clients (including iOS and android), all sending fully end to end encrypted text, video, audio to each-other. Works very well.
In my opinion the “too much choice” is not an issue with XMPP. It’s users opting for convenience while sacrificing privacy. Most people avoid investing the time it takes to figure out XMPP, even if just using a client on a preexisting server.
I even saw that my server can talk to other XMPP servers. So technically, my family could receive messages from other users on different servers.
The thing about Snikket is, just like matrix, they get funding from shady sources.
See my comment above, to the best of my knowledge (and I somewhat know the developer) Snikket has only received funding from NLnet (a non-profit Netherlands based foundation in charge of the .nl domains) that was part of a larger grant by the EU Commission. That is about as non-shady as it gets and by the way the same as Lemmy has got. Otherwise the Snikket developers try to establish a hosting service, but AFAIK funding is tight as the above mentioned grant will end soon.
In any case, this is a faaaar cry from crypo-currency and venture capital funding that New Vector / Matrix has received (both in quantity and quality), so I don’t think it is fair to put them in the same bucket.