To be clear, I'm not installing those things either. Everybody has WhatsApp, so that's my fallback, it's a common denominator. Signal is superior, so that's my preference. For personal conversations, I don't use anything else.
Then for work, I have to use the tools we get (be it Slack or Discord or Teams). And when a community is on Slack or Discord or IRC or discourse or whatever they use, well I have to go there to talk to them.
> My employer uses Microsoft 365 where all our data is on Microsoft servers
Yes I agree, that's a problem. Slack, Discord, same thing everywhere. Companies should self-host e.g. a matrix server, or at least use a provider from their own country. But I believe that self-hosted Matrix would be better than Slack for companies.
> I don't agree, [Matrix] is superior for me.
Out of curiosity, why not Telegram then, if you don't care about privacy and encryption?
> if they grow the "normies" will rapidly outgrow the evangelists who would be inclined to donate
They currently have 70M active users. Those are not evangelists.
> If the main matrix instances enshittify, I'll just run my own
Which is more complicated for approximately everybody than "if Signal enshittify, I'll move back to WhatsApp or to the next alternative to Signal".
Matrix brings its lot of issues. For instance, startups obviously wouldn't care, but corporations would never accept "any Matrix client" to connect. So they would somehow want to make sure that their employees use approved clients. I don't think this is currently a thing in Matrix. But even if it was, it means that corporations wouldn't benefit from "I can use any client I want", and chances are that they would self-host and not federate. Better than giving their data to third-parties, but still not the dream of federation or freedom.
For personal use? Normies use the main Matrix server, it's not really federated. And Matrix servers collect a lot of metadata. Wasn't there also security issues, where a Matrix server could inject ghost users into rooms?
All that to say, Matrix does not solve the problems that Signal solves. Matrix solves other problems (well, mostly "I want to self-host a chat and I want something cooler than IRC"), but then it makes sense that Matrix is not a replacement for Signal and Signal is not a replacement for those Matrix use-cases.
Bridging is a weird hack. I have only been confronted to Matrix bridges to IRC channels, and it was making everything worse for IRC users (essentially forcing the IRC users to either move to Matrix or ban the bridges).
Regarding telegram: I do use that actually, but not on my phone. I just use it on the PC in a webbrowser (which is one of the things I like about telegram, they're not so phone-centric and you can connect wherever you want and from however many clients you want at the same time). I only use it for group chats though. With notifications off, so it's like 'whenever I get around to reading it' service level :)
> Yes I agree, that's a problem. Slack, Discord, same thing everywhere. Companies should self-host e.g. a matrix server, or at least use a provider from their own country. But I believe that self-hosted Matrix would be better than Slack for companies.
Yes or at least use something that's verifiably E2EE. It's totally possible to use someone else's cloud without giving them any way to read the information stored on it. It's just not really offered by the big names. I think part of the reason is that they love running analysis. Especially Microsoft loves "data-driven" everything.
> For personal use? Normies use the main Matrix server, it's not really federated. And Matrix servers collect a lot of metadata. Wasn't there also security issues, where a Matrix server could inject ghost users into rooms?
Yes but those can be resolved. It's still being developed. And once it gets big there will be more servers, I'm sure. Popular sites and services can host their own and direct their existing users to it.
> Bridging is a weird hack. I have only been confronted to Matrix bridges to IRC channels, and it was making everything worse for IRC users (essentially forcing the IRC users to either move to Matrix or ban the bridges).
Well that's for IRC channels, that bridge multiple users on both sides, yes. But this is for 2 reasons: IRC is more limited than matrix so some stuff has to be crammed in a text field somehow, and many IRC servers don't allow full bridging where the bridge can pretend to be multiple users. Libera is an example, they had some personal conflicts with the matrix team and turned it off. Since then it's difficult because the bot puts the username of the matrix user in the body of each message instead of making it appear to come from the username.
If you bridge 1:1 chats or things like whatsapp groups with one user on the matrix side (which is the case for personal bridges), there is no issue. The whatsapp users don't see anything different. Your messages just show up under your regular name. On the matrix side everyone also shows up as a matrix user, the bridge creates a user for everyone in the group chat (called a 'puppet'). It's quite good. The only thing is that if I run a transcribe bot, its output gets bridged back to the other party I'm talking to, so I redirect those to a separate chat. It would be nice if there was a "don't bridge" flag for messages. Whatsapp has transcribe functionality now, but it only works on the phone, not web. And the quality is awful. Whisper-large which I run a server for, blows it out of the water.
The biggest issue with the whatsapp bridge is that it doesn't do voice or video calls. The telegram bridge works even better because it uses the regular telegram protocol (whatsapp doesn't support third-party clients or bots so it uses a hack through whatsapp web).
To be clear, I'm not installing those things either. Everybody has WhatsApp, so that's my fallback, it's a common denominator. Signal is superior, so that's my preference. For personal conversations, I don't use anything else.
Then for work, I have to use the tools we get (be it Slack or Discord or Teams). And when a community is on Slack or Discord or IRC or discourse or whatever they use, well I have to go there to talk to them.
> My employer uses Microsoft 365 where all our data is on Microsoft servers
Yes I agree, that's a problem. Slack, Discord, same thing everywhere. Companies should self-host e.g. a matrix server, or at least use a provider from their own country. But I believe that self-hosted Matrix would be better than Slack for companies.
> I don't agree, [Matrix] is superior for me.
Out of curiosity, why not Telegram then, if you don't care about privacy and encryption?
> if they grow the "normies" will rapidly outgrow the evangelists who would be inclined to donate
They currently have 70M active users. Those are not evangelists.
> If the main matrix instances enshittify, I'll just run my own
Which is more complicated for approximately everybody than "if Signal enshittify, I'll move back to WhatsApp or to the next alternative to Signal".
Matrix brings its lot of issues. For instance, startups obviously wouldn't care, but corporations would never accept "any Matrix client" to connect. So they would somehow want to make sure that their employees use approved clients. I don't think this is currently a thing in Matrix. But even if it was, it means that corporations wouldn't benefit from "I can use any client I want", and chances are that they would self-host and not federate. Better than giving their data to third-parties, but still not the dream of federation or freedom.
For personal use? Normies use the main Matrix server, it's not really federated. And Matrix servers collect a lot of metadata. Wasn't there also security issues, where a Matrix server could inject ghost users into rooms?
All that to say, Matrix does not solve the problems that Signal solves. Matrix solves other problems (well, mostly "I want to self-host a chat and I want something cooler than IRC"), but then it makes sense that Matrix is not a replacement for Signal and Signal is not a replacement for those Matrix use-cases.
Bridging is a weird hack. I have only been confronted to Matrix bridges to IRC channels, and it was making everything worse for IRC users (essentially forcing the IRC users to either move to Matrix or ban the bridges).