I have known the Matrix project, always very active at FOSDEM, for a long time. The idea of a decentralised, end-to-end encrypted messenger that does not use mobile phone numbers as the (only) identifiers and that treats desktop and mobile clients without distinction is very appealing. Of course it’s open source and open standards, so there are many clients and servers available.
When I picked Conduit a long time ago for a small “family-and-friends” installation, it looked great: written in Rust and leaner than the more common Synapse server. The Matrix project itself shows all available servers and invites you to choose. This choice has more consequences than you might think!
You see a healthy project and the involvement of a German ministry, but you cannot predict the future. And if it had been a mail server, that wouldn’t have been important: you can easily change from Exim to Postfix and keep your domain name. But with Matrix, that’s very hard if you want to keep your accounts. In other words, once you choose a server for your domain name, you’re stuck with it, unless someone wrote a specific migration tool for your situation.
I did not follow Conduit’s development closely: there were forks, forks of forks, a large amount of discussion, and in the end, when there emerged a larger community around one fork, a migration from the original Conduit was no longer possible: “We also feel that 12 months has been plenty of time for people to seamlessly migrate” (from the Condowuit GitHub page). Well, if maintaining your small family installation is just one of many side projects, and if you’re a bit conservative about jumping on to new forks, it’s not that much time…
The original Conduit was still supported from a security point of view, and calls with Element Classic worked; but Matrix specifications advanced with new versions, and Conduit has a small community and was lagging behind. So calls with the Element X client were not possible, and Matrix developers hinted that Classic calls would also disappear at some point from Element Web…
This deadlock is lifted now that Tuwunel supports migration from Conduit! It went flawlessly, and all accounts, all content is kept. Thank you! ❤️