Binzy_Boi

Feel free to disagree, but it’s a bit of a moral thing for me as to whether I’d be comfortable utilizing tools developed by a group with issues like this.

As said in another comment, I’m already on a separate server, that being tchncs. I just personally wouldn’t like to see my usage of the protocol possibly being seen as me being content or indifferent to these heavy moderation issues in their official rooms.

As the other comment said, it’s less used than Matrix, but it’s moreso I’ve heard that XMPP, unlike Matrix, doesn’t really have their own official chatrooms directly managed by XMPP Standards Foundation.

Whether that’s true or not, I’m not quite sure, I still need to do some exploring with XMPP and see for myself, but that being the case alone would prevent a situation like with Matrix where this kind of content is being posted under their direct supervision.

Again, I’m reiterating just to make sure I’m being clear, but it’s not an issue for me if there’s going to be CSAM on the protocol or even on an official server for it, but I’d be uncomfortable using a protocol if that kind of content was being posted and not properly dealt with in official chatrooms.

I’m currently on tchncs. As said in my last paragraph, that while I understand this doesn’t reflect on all servers, rooms, and spaces, it still makes me wonder if I should be using a protocol where the official space for it ran by the foundation building the protocol has such ineffective moderation to the extent that CSAM can exist in their biggest official room for multiple hours.

To give a comparison, let’s take Tor. Tor is used for people to stay anonymous online. Now this of course is a bit of a double-edged sword since on the one hand, you have the intended purpose where people utilize it to circumvent censorship or just as a method to increase their privacy in their daily browsing habits. The other side is people who use it to access and distribute illegal services or content such as buying and selling drugs, or distributing and viewing CSAM.

Now do I feel uncomfortable utilizing Tor because I see them as not doing enough to prevent the bad people from being on their network? Of course not, there’s a lot of great people who use the network from hobbyist projects to simply enhancing people’s privacy. However, if the Tor project had an onion site directly administered by them that constantly had moderation issues with CSAM or illegal services, then I would be more likely to utilize something like I2P because I wouldn’t be comfortable utilizing a service where the developing organization didn’t properly moderate that stuff on their own onion site.

That’s the case with Matrix. I’m not even quite expecting them to be on top of everything sent to their server immediately, but this was the biggest room in their official space, and it becomes a question of whether I’d be comfortable using a protocol where the foundation behind it’s development doesn’t take adequate action dealing with CSAM in their own rooms.

While there are 60K users in the room, only an incredibly small fraction are active there. It works like a Discord server where despite a server having multiple thousands of people in the server, only a small fraction of them will actively post in said server.

These 60K users could be anything from dead accounts to lurkers outside of small percentage that post to the room. However, as an official room under direct supervision of the Matrix Foundation, this still gives a ridiculously bad first glance of the protocol to people.