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c0smokram3r@midwest.social 5 months agoI’ve been v curious abt matrix but it’s taken me years to get everyone I care abt on signal 😅
Signal is centralized, closed-source, not-selfhostable and requires being attached to a phone number.
Matrix is decentralized, federated, fully open source with multiple client and server implementations, self-hostable, and does not require being attached to a phone number.
Which part of signal is closed source?
I don’t think the server software is open source.
The server software appears to be available and updated now, which they’ve been spotty about in the past. I’ve updated to remove the closed-source part since that is not correct.
As for phone number: Signal still requires me to enter a phone number to create an account as of about 5 minutes ago.
Sure, but there is way more metadata with Matrix than Signal.
To be clear, I use both, but Matrix’ metadata problem bothers me.
Where the metadata goes I think is important as well.
All Signal metadata necessarily goes through Signal’s servers and is tied to your phone number, but not all Matrix metadata ever gets near the Matrix.org if you are using a different homeserver.
I think both are less than ideal in that regard, and I think Briar (strictly P2P) has a much better model for dealing with this at the expense of generally being a UX disaster.
That’s fair, though surely the metadata does go near matrix.org if either you constact people on matrix.org’s servers or use the fallback for calls since a lot of servers don’t have their own TURN server for that.
I thought Signal didn’t really have much metadata or is it more that it is extremely temporary to the case where it doesn’t matter?
And yeah, definitely agree that most extremely private (or at least marketed that way) messengers have a terrible UX and in a lot of cases UI too.
Steve@communick.news 5 months ago
Signal is fine for instant messaging.
Matrix is closer to Discord.