this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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Signal is centralized, ~~closed-source~~, not-selfhostable (edit: in any meaningful way) and requires being attached to a phone number. (Edit: server source is available, but self-hosting requires recompiling and distributing a custom app to all of your contacts to actually use it.)
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? It no longer requires a phone number, you can use a username
I don’t think the server software is open source.
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server
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.
Signal is open source, session copied their entire protocol for their own messaging stack. Client and server
Sure, some of those things are accurate (some are accurate-ish). However, 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 contact 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.