The question of what should be done can be interesting, but that was not my question. It's obvious this is not the motive here.
If you are in your own country opposition it's better to use a foreign tool, even better if it's in a country that's not gonna collaborate with yours.
My question was more about the motives in this case.
I don't get it, are you really arguing that Russia and Venezuela are blocking Signal to protect their citizens from American snooping?
Telegram is not secure, I guess if you can listen to it better not block it.
I mean, that's not specific to Matrix. Telemetry is the tool used to get the numbers, so I don't see how you would collect numbers on servers that don't report numbers.
Maybe I've misunderstood how it works. I thought that when connecting to a matrix instance you would point to the domain name and the text file would be on a standard location (as with /robots.txt or all the files in /.well-known/) so it would be easily discoverable. In fact I just checked and matrix does use /.well-known/ so one should be able to identify matrix servers by querying these URLs. Unless their is a way to use a non-standard location, but that would require further configuration on the client I guess.
And just to answer your question, the only way to find some hidden file would be to brute force. This could obviously be extremely time consuming if the URL is long and random enough, especially if you add rate limiting (this last thing could be circumvented by using multiple IPs to scan, which would be easy for a state actor).
Edit: I've just realized I wasn't answering to the same person, the first part of the message was more for @[email protected]
How would you?
Thanks, nice to have someone knowledgeable.
Would you say matrix is censorship resistant? I've very limited knowledge of it but given what you said I imagine that if I was trying to block matrix I would just need to query the url of the text file and check the DNS text entry, if either exist just add the domain to the blocklist.
Being decentralized prevents DNS or IP blocks but not blocks through DPI.
Signal has an option to masquerade it's traffic as regular HTTPS, I don't know if Matrix can do such a thing.
That's weird, something is definitely wrong. Are they set up in a similar way? The first thing that comes to my mind is: Are you using the same DNS server on both? Differences in DNS response time should be more noticeable than rendering time on most hardware. And I think Firefox doesn't use the system DNS by default but I might be wrong. Do you mind checking? I'm curious now.
Have you tried Tree Style Tab or Sidebery?
But you would miss all the numbers from non-federated instances.