[iqihs]

I think Matrix as a protocol has been pretty ineffective, as their top priority seems to be keeping data permanent and duplicated. Both performance and privacy are at the bottom of their priority list. The one good thing I can say about it is that encryption of message contents is enabled by default in conversations and available in groups, but that's about it - nothing else is, or can be, encrypted. In other words, every participating server knows who is talking to who, and how much, and when, and in what rooms, and what those rooms' names are, and what those rooms' descriptions are, and who moderates them, etc.

Meanwhile, an app like Signal can do none of that, and that's by design.

If you're looking for a privacy oriented messaging system, you'd best look elsewhere.

I'm new to Matrix and found this comment on reddit. How much of it is accurate and does it actually contribute to whether or not the future of the protocol is promising?

[xethos]

@Arathorn would be an objectively better person to discuss this, but the Redditor isn't completely off the mark: metadata is (currently) not nearly as well-guarded on Matrix compared to Signal.

However, work is ongoing to improve the situation; more importantly, Matrix is a different threat model (in my opinion), and allows for different trade-offs.

When I use Signal, I have to trust Signal's servers and their admin team. With Matrix, we get to keep trust circles smaller (friends and family on smaller servers, where we already trust the people running them). We have no hard requirement to federate either - if I want something just for people I know, we leak less data than Signal does to the outside world. We also get to host Matrix servers in areas we're comfortable with, whether that's our living room, or any nation that isn't America.

Matrix isn't perfect, but I appreciate how quickly they're improving, and the areas they're focusing on.

[tptacek]

Matrix and Signal have very different objectives. Matrix wants to be an encrypted IRC or Slack. Signal wants to be a secure messenger you can entrust your life to. They are both worthy projects; there's not as much overlap as people think.

[Gigachad]

In the real world friends and family aren’t running their own matrix servers. At most they are signed up for whatever random one came up first in the search results.

So you end up with a similar problem to Mastodon where either you are facing problematic or inexperienced admins, servers shutting down, and everyone centralising on the main server.

[Klaus23]

It's pretty accurate. I was a bit shocked when I saw that room names were not encrypted. I thought that was such a basic privacy requirement, and it's not hard to implement when you already have message encryption.

Matrix seems to have a lot of these structural flaws. Even the encryption praised in the Reddit post has had problems for years where messages don't decrypt. These issues are patched slowly over time, but you shouldn't need to show me a graph demonstrating how you have slowly decreased the decryption issues. There shouldn't be any to begin with! If there are, the protocol is fundamentally broken.

They are slowly improving everything, with the emphasis on "slowly". It will take years until everything is properly implemented. To answer the question of whether the future of the protocol is promising, I would say yes. This is in no small part because there are currently no real alternatives in this area. If you want an open system, this is the best option.

[jeroenhd]

The decryption problems I've experienced have a been fixed a while ago. There was a push to fix these last year or the year before that, and at this point I'm pretty sure only some outdated or obscure clients with old encryption liberties still suffer from these problems.

The huge amount of unencrypted metadata is pretty hard to avoid with Matrix, though. It's the inevitable result of stuffing encryption into an unencrypted protocol later, rather than designing the protocol to be encrypted from the start.

I've had similar issues with other protocols too, though. XMPP wouldn't decrypt my messages (because apparently I used the wrong encryption for one of the clients), and Signal got into some funky state where I needed to re-setup and delete all of my old messages before I could use it again. Maintained XMPP clients (both of them) seem to have fixed their encryption support and Signal now has backups so none of these problems should happen again, but this stuff is never easy.

[tcfhgj]

> These issues are patched slowly over time, but you shouldn't need to show me a graph demonstrating how you have slowly decreased the decryption issues. There shouldn't be any to begin with! If there are, the protocol is fundamentally broken.

This is wrong, because afaik these errors happen due to corner cases and I really don't like the attitude here.

[the_gipsy]

To be fair: signal means everybody trusts one central authority. Doesn't matter that it's a foundation or non-profit or whatever.

And: a phone number is still required, a PIN is not, so by default it's susceptible to phone/SIM spoofing attacks. This one really boggles my mind, it's not that I personally am afraid of this vector, but I don't understand why they would insist on phone numbers at this point.

[this_user]

I think part of the problem may be that Matrix is just pretty complex, because of its modular and decentralised design. Meanwhile, Signal is much more centralised and monolithic. And while they have added a few features over the years, its core functionality is relatively simple, and they were initially just focussed on getting that right.

[AJ007]

The "decentralization" of Matrix is true in some respects, and false in others. Which would be ok, but if all of the complex architecture and issues are in the support of being decentralized, then this seems like an early planning failure.

My suspicion is the real problem that exists now originated from the bifurcation of desktop and mobile. Mobile broke the true p2p decentralization which was easy on desktop, and the split between Android and iOS makes it worse. Users expect an experience on iOS and Android which has parity with desktop. And the entire thing has to be as good as Discord.

I've taken a hard look at all of the truly open source alternative messaging options, and almost nothing handles multi-platform very well. Even when you expand it to commercial options, for a very long time, all of the Slack clones had mediocre mobile apps -- which basically was a death sentence if you weren't Microsoft. This is true today, but I expect it will change in 2026 and onward with the rapid increase in software development driven by AI agents.

[Gigachad]

I remember reading some of the pdf on state management in matrix. The math and logic behind working out what the current name of the group chat is made my head spin.

[kachapopopow]

it's pretty on point, it's mostly a "trusted" platform as long as you trust the host with the messages between two people (or more?) being (optionally) encrypted.

[RicoElectrico]

I wish FOSS communities that want an alternative to Discord or Slack ditched Matrix altogeter. It sucks for that. Better use Zulip or Mattermost, both of which are self-hostable.

Edit: I looked up and apparently Mattermost would be out of the question for their feature downgrades in the community version as of late...

[broken-kebab]

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe Zulip's licensing de facto restrict self-hosting solution for 10 users (others won't see notifications on their mobiles or something like that). This is important for non-commercial communities.

[jrm4]

Okay so -- this and Bluesky.

REALLY feels like no one talks about how "permanent and duplicated" is very much an anti-feature if autonomy and safety and freedom is your goal?

Like, no actually - automatically saving everything all the time is bad. I thought we sort of already knew that.

[sroerick]

Pretty crazy, right? It almost seems like a honeypot