I really don’t understand why so many people like Signal. It’s an utter piece of shit in terms of UX, has questionable security practices, harvests phone numbers, and it’s located on a central server in US.
I really don’t understand why so many people like Signal. It’s an utter piece of shit in terms of UX, has questionable security practices, harvests phone numbers, and it’s located on a central server in US.
Matrix (as a protocol) appears to be very strong end-to-end encryption and is federated/decentralized. It can do encrypted and unencrypted chats for any number of users, so it can replace discord (which is not at all private or secure) and do private 1:1 communications (which I’d say is the best use case for it). It also does not require a phone number like signal does (which is usually tied to your legal identity and can be used for geolocation).
I wouldn’t trust any electron apps, which is the framework the official Matrix client, Element, is built on. It’s fully open-source so there are other clients out there which may be better. Of course, the biggest weakness is probably going to be the OS/firmware of device you run it on.
Edit: The desktop element clients rely on electron (which is a webapp framework built on google chrome, which is spyware). If you’re on android, the app also renders in chrome (which is spyware), but that matters a bit less because android itself is a massive pile of spyware. iOS is also spyware that openly just copies all your files to a server in the US where they are “scanned for very bad things”, retained indefinitely and may be accessed by your favourite state agencies without warrant.
On android, element, and it’s newer version element X, are native android, not electron at least.
Thanks, I should have been more specific.