Getting Fractal up to speed


Fractal is a popular Matrix chat client for the GNOME desktop which has been in development since 2017. Fractal was designed to work well for collaboration in large groups, such as free software projects. However, there are still two main areas where it would benefit from improvements: its performance and maintainability are limited, and it lacks some important features such as end-to-end encryption (E2EE).
Adding E2EE will increase the confidence that users have in the privacy of their conversations, making it nearly impossible for their conversations to be accessed by others. Because E2EE aims to prevent the service provider from being able to decrypt the messages, because the encryption keys are stored only on the end-user’s device. The direct consequence of this is that some work is delegated to the client. Some of this functionality is the same for each and every Matrix client, and includes technical components that could easily be implemented in the wrong way (especially the various encryption and security features). Most security researchers agree that redoing this work is a bad idea as it can lead to vulnerabilities. More generally, reimplementing the same functionality for each client doesn’t make much sense. On the other hand, sharing it with others allows projects that use it to contribute their expertise and polish it together instead of competing on a multitude of implementations. That shared work is called an SDK and could be considered the future “engine” of Fractal.
When Fractal was created, there was no existing code that we could rely on. We had to implement ourselves bits of the Matrix protocol in Fractal, at a low level. In the meantime, the Matrix Foundation has kickstarted matrix-rust-sdk, a library to channel the Matrix community efforts into a common, efficient library. This library, still in development for now, will allow us to drop a lot of our own code.
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