Hi,
I recently came to know about Mattermost and it’s a nice project you people are developing. Kudos.
I would like to know if mattermost provides any kind of privacy or encryption features for its messgaes. Also, is it possible for people from different instances (installations of mattermost) to join a team, i.e is decentralization supported?
Thanks
Just for the sake of keyword stuffing because I actually searched for this under another name once, the term for what you are asking about is federation. From my observation the current Mattermost code base does not support any kind of federation between instances, but I cannot comment on the developers plans in that direction. You might add it to the feature request uservoice board.
Hi @balasankarc,
Thanks for the questions, regarding decentralized support, there are two parts we think about, connecting teams and connecting channels.
In terms of managing authorization to join different Mattermost instances, you can setup individual Mattermost servers to authorize account and team creation based on GitLab SSO and/or a list of white-listed email domains, and later LDAP (Preview: LDAP/SSO support).
In terms of connecting channels (some users think of channels as teams), our priority is offering the infrastructure and APIs to enable these scenarios, which have been raised by the community previously.
There’s three key steps to enable the synchronization of channels across Mattermost instances (and potentially Slack instances as well):
a) Mattermost ships incoming webhooks API (should be available in Oct 2 release, just waiting final review https://github.com/mattermost/platform/pull/715)
b) Mattermost ships outcoming API (https://mattermost.atlassian.net/browse/PLT-235)
c) Circle back with projects and companies like Slackline to discuss integration
Regarding encryption, it’s highly recommended that config setting options like STARTTLS be enabled, and to use additional modern protocols and standards (to be documented in detail along with config UI in admin console. Also, there’s additional work on OTR v2 being investigated.
Are there specific encryption scenarios you were looking for?
I’d really love to see a feature to encrypt private messages within Mattermost, e.g. via ort. Image this scenario:
You are using a corporate installation of Mattermost. Your employer and other people with access to the database are able to read private messages that you send to your colleagues etc., possibly without them knowing that this is possible anyway.
Is there a way to vote for this feature or support it in any other way?
I’ll close this issue off for now and we can track via the feature request above.