> There’s a bunch of work going on already in Matrix to run clientside bridges, so that your laptop or phone effectively maintains a connection over to iMessage or WhatsApp or whatever as if it were logged in… but then relays the messages into Matrix once re-encrypted.<p>At that point, why even re-encrypt? Passing messages from one process to another, or maybe even within the same process probably doesn't require re-encryption. You could even cut out the whole protocol translation and just write a multi-protocol client like pidgin, trilian et al back in the day. Or am I missing something obvious here?
The biggest question mark in this entire DMA ruling is identity federation. If I am using a messaging app, and want to connect with someone who may be on any other service, is there going to be a reliable way to broker this initial exchange or will I have to specify an explicit (service, user identifier) pair, with each service managing their set of users on their own?
Forcing open APIs for messaging services is a great thing. Let’s hope it won’t be as gimped as PSD2 ended up being for open banking APIs.<p>Out of the suggested options the client-side bridge sounds best to me! It wouldn’t necessarily be always on when used on mobile devices (background apps tend to get shut down) but at least it could sync once you open the app.<p>And a home computer bridge that’s mainly on (or VPS/lambda for more advanced users) would be great too and in sync most of the time.<p>Exciting stuff for Matrix.
I think implementing just the e2ee part of the WhatsApp protocol (which happens to be the Signal protocol with open-source libraries available) client-side and have a server-side bridge transport the encrypted messages over to WhatsApp and vice-versa is a sensible option not mentioned in that blog post. Yes, worst-case it means that for interoperability you have to create a bunch of message encryption routines. But we are effectively talking about iMessage and WhatsApp - Facebook Messenger doesn't do e2ee and no other company that built a widely used personal IM system is big enough to be covered by DMA.<p>Regarding moderation and spam: I think a company with €7.5B yearly revenue should be reasonable able to build something such that moderation and spam prevention are also possible with federation. Google already does a pretty decent jobs in spam filtering with e-Mails, I guess they should be able to do something similar with IM.