On HN I'm always seeing a fight between Signal and Matrix. Can someone explain this to me? As far as I see it: Signal replaces SMS; Matrix replaces Slack/IRC. These seem like different products that work in different spaces.
Matrix doesn't use phone numbers, and is federated (that's what makes Matrix interesting), so it's naturally the "antidote" suggestion on threads when people bring up these aspects of Signal.
The fact is that they're not really comparable projects; they have different audiences and different goals. People have an innate narrative bias that constant hunts for horse races to spectate, and so you'll see a lot of "Signal vs. Matrix" arguments, but it's an artifact, not anything substantive.
Agree on the second part, but two messaging solutions can and should be compared. 1-to-1 (text/voice/video) messaging is entirely possible with both Signal and Matrix, and evaluating that narrow use case is a reasonable way to compare the two.
I always see Signal as being "really good" crypto. Bulletproof? No, surely not. That doesn't exist. If I were a dissident or something I would be using gpg religiously and all that jazz.
But is signal significantly better than basically every mainstream sms-like thing? Absolutely! imessage, sms, mms, whatapp, facebook messenger, whatever google's current chat app is, etc. All of them don't even try to be a secure/privacy-respecting chat tool and reall y make no secret that they're usually totally the opposite (facebook messenger....).
So when it comes to getting my parents onto something that sends videos of the kids real good and also will make dragnet state surveillance efforts a bit harder, I pick Signal.
And of course more broadly, Matrix as a whole isn't even limited to only messaging apps, although that's where most of the focus has been thus far. There have been some fun demos/projects in the past though:
- Synchronized presentation slides: https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-presents
- MIDI over Matrix: https://github.com/McOmghall/midi-over-matrix
- VR videoconferencing: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/other/matrix-vr-demo
And of course, there is the Matrix spec itself, but I learned most of what I know idling in matrix channels (#matrix:matrix.org and #synapse:matrix.org) and hosting my own synapse instance.
FluffyChat is similar, and seems to be a bit further along (it has basic e2e crypto support for example) -https://christianpauly.gitlab.io/fluffychat-website/en/
But Signal just works and is fast (though not as fast as WhatsApp)
Matrix in the default login also works, but when you choose the default open Matrix Server ... it is slow.
So I also will continue to use .. not only 2 but 6 different text sending applications. But in the future I would love to just use the Matrix protocol and one software.