Anonymity On The Internet – The Matrix Case

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We want to believe in the good in all people. We want to believe that everyone will be kind to each other, accepting and loving. But we also know that things go wrong, that people, organizations and governments do bad things from time to time and that it is vital that these bad things can be reported anonymously – to protect the whistle blower. We have seen good examples for this necessity in the past and present, cases of abuse and crimes, abuse of power and crimes against humanity.

But there is also a dark side to humans, it seems. Some perceive themselves safe in this anonymous environment of the internet that let go of all rules, all good manners and behavior, it seems. It is a shame! I would have hoped that we humans have evolved a bit and have gained some control over our lower instincts. It does not seem to be the case, very sadly.

At Purism, the company I work for, we use the Matrix messaging system a lot for our communication between our very distributed team members. We use our own Purism hosted Matrix instance for this. Matrix is a federated system, much like email in the old days, you can message any user on any server, as long as you know their address, i.e. user name and server name. Also group chats on other servers can be joined. Users of any server can also invite each other to join private chats or whole groups.

Some time ago at Purism many of our team received a wave of weird invites to chats with names that really did not ring a bell. So what do you do? As with email you may want to be polite and accept the invite, maybe someone would like to talk to you, discuss something about a product or service? Have an idea? With email you just open the email, probably not clicking on any link or attachment right away, and if you find it spam or inappropriate then you simply delete the email and be done with it. Not so in Matrix.

The first problem is that you only get to see the address where the invite comes from, but not a kid of preview or anything else that could give you a hint about what you may or may no be getting into should you accept the invite. Once you accept it, you are in, done. In the case of a group chat you instantly get presented with the wealth of messages that rushed through there.

The invite that we got at Purism back then have been to a group chat with hundreds of members where some total idiots, and forgive me the word, total a**holes tried to lure people into this chat room that was full of hatred, and worst of all also full of the worst media, pictures and videos, that I have ever seen in my life! Dead and half rotten human corpses, rape, dismantled human bodies, humans covered in feces etc. etc.

And these morons thought that this would be funny !?
That they were ding funny pranks !?

I am a pretty stable person and usually do not get traumatized by such content. But this chat room experience haunted me for days! It was the most disgusting thing I have ever experienced.

The thing that enabled all of this was the anonymity these bastards could hide behind. That made them forget everything about human dignity and behavior. It brought out the worst humans can be. This was and still is a deeply unsettling experience for me since I want to believe in the good in humans! That we can be good and kind to each other! But it seems we can not, it only works as long as we realize that bad actions can have bad consequences, for ourselves. A pretty egoistic world view 🙁

So this experience was now maybe two or three years ago. It faded a bit but when I get remembered, like now, it all comes back.

A few weeks back I set up a Matrix server for family and friends, to have a safe chat server, open source, self hosted, for the ones I love, to protect us from big tech and from being spied upon by whoever. During setup of that server I made the quite conscious choice to leave registration open, i.e. anyone who knew where to reach that server was able to create an account and use it. I thought, well, maybe friends of friends would like that too? Or maybe even folks I did not know. The server runs anyway, so why not provide a little something to society.

Turned out this was a bad mistake!

Anonymity fosters the bad, seriously. On one day alone some moron misused my server and created over 1700 (one thousand seven hundred !!!) fake accounts – for whatever bullshit that person wanted to achieve, I do not know. I just recognized it because my server became really sluggish and slow, so I looked and found that. The other problem with Matrix is the end to end encryption along with the federation. This basically intrinsically requires that if a user fro server A joins a chat room on server B then pretty much the whole history of that room has to copied over to server A. Since Matrix also allows for media (pictures, video, audio) this can be a lot of content! If you have multiple users joining large rooms on other servers then your server will quickly create a ton of traffic, use up a lot of local disk space and your server CPU will be pretty busy handling all that traffic. Exactly what happened on my private server, limiting my use of the machine that I pay for.

That is really sad, seriously. The consequence is that first of all I had to disable new user registration. Second I am now in the process of deleting all these accounts. Depending on what these seem to have been used for, i.e. how deeply these have been networked in the Matrix federation, deleting a single account can take up to 10 minutes! Now guess how long my server is already working on deleting these round about 1700 accounts. It takes like forever.

This is really sad.