Matrix & Digital Sovereignty

Things have been changing fast on the internet. Especially for people outside of the bubble that is the USA.

A couple of years it was laughable to think having your business relying on Google, Facebook and Slack was a problem, now it’s not uncommon to hear people talking about it as a potential business risk.

It all comes down to Digital Sovereignty, the idea that the more you own of your digital footprint, and the closer that is to you geographically, the simpler looking after it will be in times of crisis.

To that end we use as many open source and open standard tools as possible. Thunderbird for email, Firefox and Vivaldi for web browsing, Ubuntu and Kubuntu as work station operating systems and from yesterday Matrix and Element to replace Discord/Slack.
What is Matrix

Slack pioneered the use of chat channels within a single workspace. The idea being that separating concerns was better than having a single company wide chat. It really works.

Matrix is an opensource project that recreates the idea but lets organisations run their own code, the messages are also end to end encrypted. It’s Ad free and doesn’t try to get you to buy virtual gems or rubies or whatever (Grrr Discord)!

What we’re using Matrix for:

• Team communications
• Catching events and errors into an Activity Feed so we can all see what is going on within our servers (using a purpose created Matrix user and Curl it’s surprisingly easy to setup)
• Customer support room – most of our customers don’t seem to need much support but it is there if they need it 🙂