27

Matrix Metadata Problem: the server sees everything except your messages

People pick Matrix because of end-to-end encryption. But E2EE only protects message content — everything around it is plaintext.

The server sees:

  • Your ID, IP, client type and version, device you use
  • Your presence, typing status, read receipts
  • Which rooms you join and when you join/leave
  • Who else is in those rooms → your entire social graph
  • Room names, topics, avatars (all plaintext state)
  • For every message: who sent it, which room, a millisecond timestamp, type, size

And federation copies all of that to every other server whose users are in the room. Your "social footprint" isn't one copy — it's as many as there are servers.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] illusionist@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

It depends on your threat profile. I'm fine with that data being public on matrix - which I use for communities.

The less data is known, the better

[-] verifytheposter@leminal.space 1 points 2 days ago

These aren’t mutually exclusive trade-offs: Matrix could support communities while minimizing or encrypting metadata by default. There should be a protocol that doesn’t require device details and profile data to be exposed just to participate.

[-] illusionist@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 days ago

Yes, it's good that there is a solution to the problem

this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2026
27 points (90.9% liked)

Free and Open Source Software

22920 readers
169 users here now

If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS