More default notary servers? #1208

New issue

Open

opened 2025-12-01 16:50:43 +00:00 by Jade · 2 comments

Jade commented

2025-12-01 16:50:43 +00:00

Owner

matrixrooms.info?
our own MRS instance proxied from continuwuity.org?
Beeper, envs, etc?

We default to only using matrix.org as our trusted server, but there was an incident or matrix the org was down this year, which caused issues. We should consider adding more servers, but which ones should we add? - matrixrooms.info? - our own MRS instance proxied from continuwuity.org? - Beeper, envs, etc?

rooot commented

2025-12-02 08:21:42 +00:00

Contributor

fwiw; my current trusted_servers are set to:
["matrix.org", "envs.net", "tchncs.de", "blex.gay", "maunium.net"] (blex.gay being a friends' synapse instance that i can administer too)

i personally think a sane default would be 3 widely used and generally trusted instances, to provide reliability without sacrificing safety (n+2 redundancy)
imo, ["matrix.org", "envs.net", "maunium.net"] would be a good starting point.
if we want go go overkill, we can measure latency to a larger set of default trusted_server instances on first start (or if trusted_instances isn't set) and use the ones with the lowest latency as default values to speed up key retrieval from notaries (e.g. a server hosted in australia might want to fetch keys from a notary hosted in australia, instead of a notary hosted in germany)

fwiw; my current `trusted_servers` are set to: `["matrix.org", "envs.net", "tchncs.de", "blex.gay", "maunium.net"]` (blex.gay being a friends' synapse instance that i can administer too) i personally think a sane default would be 3 widely used and generally trusted instances, to provide reliability without sacrificing safety (n+2 redundancy) imo, `["matrix.org", "envs.net", "maunium.net"]` would be a good starting point. if we want go go overkill, we can measure latency to a larger set of default `trusted_server` instances on first start (or if `trusted_instances` isn't set) and use the ones with the lowest latency as default values to speed up key retrieval from notaries (e.g. a server hosted in australia might want to fetch keys from a notary hosted in australia, instead of a notary hosted in germany)

nex commented

2025-12-02 14:08:08 +00:00

Owner

If we were to add more third party servers, we should ask the server operators first, since being a notary does generate significant load at times. Also, they're supposed to be trusted, so we would need to be able to confidently say we and everyone else can trust the servers to not be malicious (for example, unredacted.org is a charity and it'd be against their interest to act with malice, etc).

I was holding off on changing our default notaries until #784 was implemented, however there's nothing stopping us spinning up some stuff on continuwuity.org (even including an MRS instance). I already allow my server to be used as a notary by reverse proxying the notary endpoints to my synapse, we could run a [dedicated keyserver](https://github.com/t2bot/matrix-key-server) on `keys.continuwuity.org`, room server on `rooms.continuwuity.org`? If we were to add more third party servers, we should ask the server operators first, since being a notary does generate significant load at times. Also, they're supposed to be *trusted*, so we would need to be able to confidently say we and everyone else can trust the servers to not be malicious (for example, unredacted.org is a charity and it'd be against their interest to act with malice, etc).