Whatsapp, Messenger, Signal, Discord, Teams, Slack

Some better than others, some truly encrypted and some not. What they all have in common is that they’re controlled by one single entity - yet those are the services we trust to handle our digital person-to-person communication.

This is not how the Internet began, or the other early networks that were the first forms of social media. Fidonet was a network where individuals used their computers and modems, paying the bills themselves, creating a global discussion network. The idea that this was a common good for society meant that those who had the means were happy to keep it running.

IRC - Internet Relay Chat - was the first truly realtime chat system where there were almost as many servers as there were universities, allowing for people all over the world to interact. No single point of control, yet all connected.

We lost something along the way - but it doesn’t mean we have to accept it. Slowly, another distributed protocol has been gaining traction. Many open source projects are already using it, and since the encryption is well-written where you don’t need to trust a corporation to not eavesdrop on you, many European governments and institutions have standardized their communication on it as well.

Matrix .

As with many other open source projects, it’s developed by a team that besides the free community version of the software also sell support services and a software suite intended for corporate customers. You might have heard about Matrix being referred to as Element since that’s the name of the client and server suite made by that development team.

If you want to start using Matrix for your own communication you need an account on a Matrix server. This is no different to needing an account with an email provider to be able to send and receive email. You can either hop on a server run by the Matrix organisation, or you can think back to the point about decentralization above and rememeber that true resilience needs that we all decentralize as much as we can instead of allowing our communications to be held at the whim of individual corporations, governments or projects.

Just as I ran a BBS and Fidonet node in the beginning of the 90s to help bring a global communications network into everyone’s computers, I’ve launched a Matrix server - Argot . Primarily - but not exclusively - targetting Swedes, I want it to be a natural place you can direct people to if they want to privacy-protect their communication from eavesdroppers, surveillance, authoritarian overreaches and single point of failures.

Welcome.