this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2024
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

~~That article may as well be sponsored by WhatsApp. Zero direct mentions of Signal, but tons pushing people to WhatsApp. That's a bit disappointing.~~

Edit: I was wrong, it does talk about Signal as well.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 days ago (2 children)

The second half of the article is about Signal.

It sucks they mention WhatsApp first, but I think the bigger omission is that they don't mention non-US entities or anything you can self-host and federate like Matrix.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

Oh, fair enough then!

ETA: Yes, the lack of mentions of Matrix, etc are a bit disappointing. But I think Matrix is waaay outside their target democratic.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago

Yeeahhh, they're talking to like Grandma who barely knows what a text message is

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

Their target democratic is still in the matrix.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Matrix isn't super private though. It's halfway there, but compared to something like XMPP, it falls short due to the fact that any instance a user federates with gets a gigantic copy of all of their metadata, and the server operator can do whatever they want with it. So all you would have to do is spin up a new host, message a target user and get them to respond, and you're done.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

any instance a user federates with gets a gigantic copy of all of their metadata,

No, it does not. Instances get metadata only for the chat rooms in which they participate, not all of a user's metadata.

When chatting with someone on Matrix like you would with text messaging, only your instance and your contact's instance are involved. Because they have to be, in order to exchange messages. Just like every other chat protocol that uses servers, including XMPP.