Introduction of a simplified room for conventional 1:1 messaging

[Lalarian]

Is your suggestion related to a problem? Please describe.

Hello! I am just testing Element/Matrix with some friends, for it's adequacy as a future replacement for our current messenger (Signal). Matrix is and will be more and more important, with the EU courts having rules total surveillance of any type of online messaging.

But the room based concept of element makes it less suited for normal 1:1 chats than conventional messengers. The general existence of features for opening a room towards others always leaves participants unsure about the room being actually secure, as:

1. The room could be setup wrong, especially if it was setup by another person
2. The room's settings can be changed anytime by a chat participant, unless you restrict him to user and keep yourself as admin
3. As a workaround you always have to invite the others instead of having them invite you, so you at least have the necessary rights for degrading others to normal users and keep only yourself as admin. Of course this logically cannot work, as other conscious people prefer to be the inviting one with higher privileges, too.
4. The above workaround requires you to patronize others, which isn't adequate in most situations. You don't want to invite your boss, or friend and degrade him to an user, while keeping only yourself as admin so you can be sure, that the chat will never be opened to public. It's just wrong. also you don't want to be at the mercy of anyone else in regards of security and privacy
5. The room being a 'room' instead of a chat is stressful. The pure chance for the room being converted to public, no matter how much you trust for conversation partner, feels bad.
6. Yes, there's a notification, when someone changes a room's settings- but when used as a messenger, it's not needed to ever change a room's settings, and just the very chance that someone, intentionally or by unawareness changes the room's settings is too much and just needless.

Describe the solution you'd like

Implement a new, special room type, which only has the two initial chat partners, with fixed settings, to never be opened for any other person or even public. Also change the UI to not show any room related options anymore for that room type, besides the room's deletion. I think the easiest way to implement this could simply be to have both users start as unprivileged 'users' instead of 'admin' and set all invitation options to disabled/disallowed. This probably could be a pure client-side feature, unless a room's defaults are generally set by the server itself on creation.** (web / Android..)

Describe alternatives you've considered

Go back to Signal? :(

Additional context

I think the suggested solution wouldn't need too much effort, as it's mostly based on blocking features instead of adding new ones. It would be great to see this change to Element, soon, as it just seems obligate to have a trustworthy 1:1 chat. Thanks! :)

[SimonBrandner]

@Lalarian Canonical DMs are on the roadmap

[Lalarian]

Great news, thank you! Maybe my little idea of "abusing" the users permissions by setting both to unprivileged might be useful as a quick temporary workaround for the timespan until there's a better implentation.