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-As you might know if you've been following me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/BrenAbolivier) for some time (or if you know me in real life), I'm very fond of free software and decentralisation. I love free software because it maches the philosophy I want to live by, and decentralisation because it enlarges a user's freedom and individuality, and I find working on decentralised systems fascinating. Doing so forces one to change their way of designing a system entirely, since most of the Internet now consists of centralised services, which leads people to only learn how to design and engineer these.
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+As you might know if you've been following me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/BrenAbolivier) for some time (or if you know me in real life), I'm very fond of free software and decentralisation. I love free software because it matches the philosophy I want to live by, and decentralisation because it enlarges a user's freedom and individuality, and I find working on decentralised systems fascinating. Doing so forces one to change their way of designing a system entirely, since most of the Internet now consists of centralised services, which leads people to only learn how to design and engineer these.
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Today I want to tell you about one of my favorite decentralised free software projects right now: [Matrix](https://matrix.org). Let's get things straight first, I'm talking about neither the science-fiction franchise, nor the nightclub in Berlin. Matrix is a protocol for decentralised, federated and secure communications, created and maintained by New Vector, a company split between London, UK and Rennes, France (which I joined for an internship in London during the last summer). It's based on RESTful HTTP/JSON APIs, documented in [open specifications](https://matrix.org/docs/spec/), and is designed to be usable for anything that requires real-time-ish communications, from instant messaging to IoT. Some people are also experimenting with using Matrix for [blogs](https://github.com/lukebarnard1/journal), RSS reader, and other stuff that's quite far from what you'd expect to see with such a project. Despite that, however, it's currently mainly used for instant messaging, especially through the [Riot](https://riot.im) client (which is also developed by New Vector).
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