Setting up a personal Matrix home server in AWS
So the big idea behind Matrix is all your data is hosted on your home server, and anyone can host their own home server. All the various home servers federate out authentication to each other based on the rooms a person chooses to enter (a room in the Matrix model is any grouping of participants and is distributed, not centrally managed). There is this sort of eventual consistency to chats in Matrix that is noticeably different from other chat applications but it's fast enough that real time chat is reasonable. There is also built in end to end encryption, but it is not on by default. There is good reason for this as there is also a privacy model to the encrypted chat that asks you to authorize every participant and device for the encrypted conversation. This is great, unless you are in a big chat room where you may have to authorize thousands of people and many of them may be using different devices to access Matrix (I know I use 2).
That's the big summary as I understand it, and you may be wondering why I am talking about this again after going over how to get on Matrix some weeks back. Well the apps I've been planning to write make the most sense on mobile phones, and honestly I hadn't thought through the peering and networking model completely, but Matrix being a thing now means I may not have to work through that part very much.
What are these apps you want to write? Consensus and Dialogue I came up with this idea 3 years ago while working with the Transhumanist political movement as a way to enhance group self governance and compete with AI governance. But in general the apps could just be generally beneficial in helping people work together and problem solve more effectively.
Using Matrix as the communications base solves a lot of the fundamental problems with Consensus allowing me to work on the higher level problems and not the networking or authentication.
The big problem as I see it, is that I'll need my own home server to get started developing. This presents a serious problem for me as a security focused person. The last thing I want to do is spin up a server anywhere. Every server has to be secured and maintained, and servers that deal with user input in particular have massive security concerns.
So the plan is to again leverage the AWS serverless architecture to get a home server up and running while minimizing the hardening and maintenance needed and just get to work. So off to do some more research and planning.
