About four months after deploying Mozilla’s Matrix instance at chat.mozilla.org, community participation in the Mozilla project has increased between 4x and 10x across all the projects that had previously relied on IRC. Today the number of people participating in channels either homed on our instance or with which we’re federating is approximately four times the size all of Freenode, and that number continues to grow. Our decision to transition off IRC to Matrix was not taken lightly, and the speed and quality of improvements the Matrix team continues to deliver has reaffirmed that we made the right decision.
Today, Riot-web (The web front-end for chat.mozilla.org Matrix service) was updated with a number of new features and fixes:
- End-to-end encryption is now on by default on new private messages (you can enable it on old PMs)
- Interface updates to signal e2e encryption, verifications, private rooms and online presence.
- Various fixes to the flows that were notworking due SSO.
- You can now add your email on your profile and then enable email notifications.
- You can now remove old sessions from devices you no longer use.
Once you refresh the page you will be prompted to update your encryption keys, and you will need your recovery passphrase or local key to do so. Also you will be able to verify all your devices; we encourage you to do this! This will allow people to send you e2e encrypted messages without having to verify individual devices or get noisy warnings.
The chat experience at Mozilla is now even more polished, secure and enjoyable; our thanks to the Matrix team for their work in this update.
You can learn more about the details here:
- https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing-is-here/
- https://matrix.org/blog/2020/05/19/synapse-1-13-0-released
Mike (mhoye) and Ruben (nukeador).
I really love that now we can add an email to our profiles and set up on notifications when you want to get an email (keywork, mention, pm…).