With Vector you have the choice between using the hosted version of Vector or host it yourself.
And being built on the Matrix (http://matrix.org) standard, it's a completely distributed architecture: run your own server and own your own data!
Like any other Matrix compliant app, Vector supports out of the box all the bridges and integrations the community contributes to the Matrix ecosystem. So today it bridges to Slack and IRC, soon Mattermost, Rocketchat, Skype, Lync... And Github, Jira, Jenkins for the integration side, with much more to come, including Slack webhooks.
On the UX side of things, Vector doesn't force you to create an account per team like Slack does and allows the creation of public chat rooms which can be referenced in a directory.
Rooms can be invite-only or just "hidden" (anyone with the link can access) or fully public (anyone can access).
Also every message is indexed and has a permalink to it, so easy to share information, especially given people can access rooms as guests (if the room allows), no need to create an account.
In terms of Real Soon Now stuff:
- End to end encryption will be landing in a couple of weeks
- Vector web and Android support voice and video conferences via WebRTC (it needs additional polish so consider it as beta, but it's here)
- Proper nice UI to provision the bridges and the integrations in the room (couple of weeks)
And I feel like I'm missing stuff... But that's probably the main bits
> In terms of Real Soon Now stuff: - End to end encryption will be landing in a couple of weeks
Will this be based on Axolotl? If so, and you want to avoid the Signal problem of there being a log of messages being passed between users, how are you dealing with that? Or is the idea that to make that type of security guarantee you have to self-host conversations? If so, surely there's still a log of messages being sent there. Maybe you could employ a rubberhose-like setup where you send fake messages that mask the real ones?
Yes, it's using a Double Ratchet implementation - an independent implementation we wrote in C/C++ called Olm (https://matrix.org/git/olm/about). We've also added a new group ratchet called Megolm which lets users in the room share the same ratchet to decrypt the group messages.
The actual ratchet itself does nothing to protect metadata - it's just encrypting the payload of the messages in the room, and providing a 1:1 ratchet to exchange the details of the group ratchet for the room.
Obfuscating metadata is a Hard Problem, and if you don't want your server admins to be able to see who's talking to who, you'll need to look at something like Vuvuzela or Ricochet or Pond. In future we may go down the metadata protecting rabbit-hole, so to speak: https://matrix.org/~matthew/2015-06-26%20Matrix%20Jardin%20E... has the details.
Like any other Matrix compliant app, Vector supports out of the box all the bridges and integrations the community contributes to the Matrix ecosystem. So today it bridges to Slack and IRC, soon Mattermost, Rocketchat, Skype, Lync... And Github, Jira, Jenkins for the integration side, with much more to come, including Slack webhooks.
On the UX side of things, Vector doesn't force you to create an account per team like Slack does and allows the creation of public chat rooms which can be referenced in a directory. Rooms can be invite-only or just "hidden" (anyone with the link can access) or fully public (anyone can access). Also every message is indexed and has a permalink to it, so easy to share information, especially given people can access rooms as guests (if the room allows), no need to create an account.
In terms of Real Soon Now stuff: - End to end encryption will be landing in a couple of weeks - Vector web and Android support voice and video conferences via WebRTC (it needs additional polish so consider it as beta, but it's here) - Proper nice UI to provision the bridges and the integrations in the room (couple of weeks)
And I feel like I'm missing stuff... But that's probably the main bits