They could explain things better, you are right. I actually think I remember having almost the exact same confusion a few years back when I started. I still have two keys stored in my pw manager, no idea what the other one is for…

The decryption has gotten much more reliable in the past year or two, I also try out new clients a lot and have had no issues in a long time. Perhaps you could give it a new go, with the info that you use the same key for all sessions.

I have a feeling you are overthinking the Matrix key system.

• create account
• create password you store somewhere safe
• copy the key and store somewhere safe
• when signing on a new device, copy-paste the key

Basically it’s just another password, just one you probably can’t remember.

Most of the client apps support verifying a new session by scanning a QR code or by comparing emoji. The UX of these could be better (I can never find the emoji option on Element, but it’s there…). So if you have your phone signed in, just verify the sessions with that. And it’s not like most people sign in on new devices all the time.

I’d give Matrix a new look if I were you.

Oh the times when getting GTA from a friend required 30+ 3½" floppy disks IIRC. That plus making 5 or 6 round trips to friend’s house, because one of them almost always got corrupted during the zip process.

And since no one had the disk space or knowhow to store the zip packets on HDD for the inevitable re-copying, had to redo the whole pack from scratch each time.

Edit: disk->HDD

This must be related to people in their 20’s not knowing how to read a traditional clock anymore.

I’d go the SSH + sudo way.

Sudo can be quite finely tuned to only allow specific commands. If you want to lock the SSH session further, look into rbash.

Plain NGINX has served me well.

+1 for rootless Podman. Kubernetes YAMLs to define pods, which are started/controlled by systemd. SELinux for added security.

Also +1 for not using auto updates. Using the latest tag has bit me more times I can count, now I only use it for testing new stuff. All the important services have at least the major version as tag.