this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Matrix is entirely self-hostable, and you can turn off both federation, and the requirements for any linkable identifiers.
Signal by contrast requires your phone number, isn't self-hostable, and is based in a five-eyes country.
Matrix doesn't protect metadata, which is arguably just as (if not more) important than message data. Signal by contrast does protect metadata and proper implements Perfect Forward Secrecy for all chats. I do think Signal's centralized design and phone number requirements problematic, but Signal still has many merits. Such as its massive user base for a AGPL-only project.
Citation needed. It is undisputed that the software that runs on their servers is not identical to the code they release; if they release at all because sometimes they just stop for a year, until people complain 🫠
This is false. You still need a phone number to sign up and it is used as an internal identifier.
All they did is to allow you to hide your phone number from other users.