Could someone recommend how I could create a private Element room with settings that make it easier for my family members with less technical experiences to chat in while ensuring privacy, for example, disabling E2E & session verification etc. I am also new to this app and don’t know the way around it very much so I don’t know what things I need to disable/enable that would make chatting in this app as convenient as WhatsApp. Is there some guide to this or can I do this on my own?
For context, I am really a privacy-focused person and tend to use privacy friendly applications and alternatives, even to the point of tolerating inconveniences of these apps due to them being privacy-oriented, however I cannot say the same about my family. Rest assured I am not a suspect who would have their devices scanned by the police nor am I planning to do something illegal that would require me to enable all the security and privacy features of the apps just to casually chat with my family.
Don’t enable encryption for the room until everyone is there, otherwise if someone sends a message, late arrivers will not be able to see those.
But do enable encryption when everyone has joined.Also, set up automatic key backup (with a good, long random password stored in a password manager, maybe even yours if they don’t want one) for all of them. It’s in the settings. If you don’t do so, and someone in your family loses access to all of their login sessions, they won’t be able to decrypt past messages, because they don’t have the keys for them, and no one client will send them.
Both of these things stem from the same problem, and hopefully it will be fixed some day.
Would highly suggest you to stay away from Matrix and Element for now when it comes to using it with non techies. It‘s simply not there yet. It‘s slow, tedious to use, buggy and the ux is just bad. It‘s also not necessarily more private than the popular choices if used improperly which is imo very likely it you have your aunt use it lol.
Is there any feature of element that you need or why did you pick it? You could ideally just use Signal for group chat and group (video-) calls. Or even whatsapp.
I’m trying to do the same thing. I don’t know if the room settings need much tweeking. But the biggest obsticle is having family members download, install, create an account, join a space/room, and change app/account settings, without my physical presence to help them with the process.
Wait until element x releases, please. My family had terrible experiences with the element app
