this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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Is everything encrypted yet? Or do they still allow users to send unencrypted messages?
Unencrypted messages are useful for very large rooms, where encryption doesn't provide meaningful more privacy since public rooms have to be considered public space anyway. Encryption does have overhead, so it makes sense to disable it.
Private rooms are E2EE by default and can't be created unencrypted (at least in the Element X mobile UI). This is a good way to handle it IMO.
Encryption is, what, a 10% hit? I (and most companies) would gladly take that tax to ensure that it wasn't possible for me or anyone in my org to accidentally send an unencrypted message.
10% of what? keys are regularly rotated, per-member, and it would soon cost a lot of storage to store historical keys for very large rooms (by their member count)
Sounds like a design flaw. How does this work with other messengers that don't allow users to send unencrypted messages, like Wire, Signal, and WhatsApp?
Groups have an encryption key that I guess you receive from other members upon joining.
probably the same way, and probably with an upper limit on group chat member count
(part 2) it doesn't seem that signal has such a limit. maybe they're just fine with using relatively a large part of their data for key storage
They still allow it