Switch Riot Beta tag to Experimental

[jonaharagon]

Closes #1004 (this PR is an alternative modification): Riot is out of beta. Replaces beta tag with experimental tag:

More info links to this comment: https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io/pull/562#issuecomment-502681069

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[Mikaela]

Is it possible to have links in tooltips or could there be footnotes pointing to the Riot issue on finalizing E2EE and either to our issue on Riot being recommended instead of Wire or our official forum thread on Riot where I collected links to different issues and threads about it or even The Grid essay on how information is leaked to Matrix.org/Vector.im even when selfhosting?

Good night, I may be having a busy day tomorrow

[Perelandra0x309]

The experimental tag isn't really correct either. Something better might be "Caution" since the purpose is to just point out that care must be taken to enable E2EE and be aware of meta data issues. Experimental actually seems like a worse tag than Beta, since beta usually means almost ready to make final and just doing final testing to find any remaining major bugs. Experimental is more like this project can break at any time. Matrix was officially "Beta" until recently so that was appropriate until a few weeks ago. I haven't seen anything calling this project experimental.

[Mikaela]

I think element-hq/element-web#6779 could be a better link for more info.

[five-c-d]

Second the opinion, that "experimental" is very much the wrong word to use.

• back-of-the-napkin
• work-in-progress
• experimental
• proof-of-concept
• alpha-stage
• beta-stage
• release-candidate
• v1.0
• v2.0
• mature

Riot+MegOlm has been in the "late beta" aka release candidate stage for a long time now, and Riot (but not yet MegOlm which is still off-by-default) has moved to the v1.0 stage officially. Calling it experimental would give me the wrong idea, that it was just barely past the work-in-progress (aka mostly broken) stage and had made it to the partly-working stage

There is a different classification system used for "things we want the readership to be aware of" which is somewhat distinct from the above, and follows the classic software-severity-system of identifying error-messages and such:

• danger (most severe)
• warning (pretty severe)
• note (worth highlighting)
• explicitly stated (but not highlighted in color)

I think these severity-ratings can be used by themselves to highlight worries and concerns that privacy-aware endusers might want to be cognizant about.

• Danger: encryption is off-by-default.
• Warning: stores a lot of metadata.
• Note: firm is based in the UK which is a FiveEyes country.

But I also think we can combine the dev-stage labels with the severity-ratings:

• Danger: experimental
• Warning: early beta-stage
• Note: software only recently moved from late-beta to v1.0 development-stage.

Depending on who the readership of the site is, would shift the points at which the shift from danger-to-warning occurs, and the shift from warning-to-note occurs. Everyday endusers should typically not be using v1.0 software, other things being equal, so that might actually merit 'warning: software is not yet mature' type of label be slapped on it. Anything that is not a very stable beta, should probably not be recommended to everyday endusers at all, and thus would merit the 'danger: software in an early and unstable stage of development' would be put on the late-alpha and early-beta stuff ... or those things would just NOT be counted as WorthMentioning until they achieved a modicum of stability, more likely.