To a certain degree I'd say this is apples vs oranges.
Before you shoot me down, let me explain. The reason I say that is because of the core focus of the different platforms.
Signal's priority-one use-case is clearly person-to-person IM and communication. The UI, setup-process and entire architecture is optimized for this one use-case, with all other use-cases being shoehorned in to fit whatever was built for that.
I'd say Matrix (for the moment disregarding a key feature, bridging) has as its primary use-case to be a discord/slack/IRC alternative, to handle "channels", long term group chats and basically persistent online collaboration workspaces.
Sure. Technically speaking, Matrix has a full support for E2E encrypted person-to-person IM and communications (even phone-calls and audio!), and you can use it for that. But this was clearly not the primary use-case Matrix was designed to solve.
Therefore IMO Matrix person-to-person chat has this slightly shoehorned-in feeling, so you may have a somewhat lesser user-experience when using Matrix to do these things than other platforms which had this as their primary goal.
Disclaimer: Happy Matrix-user, running own server, bridging both FB, WhatsApp and Signal into the matrix-verse.
I’m just saying that if you try to suggest Matrix as a “drop in” replacement for WhatsApp or other dedicated IM platforms, it may not immediately give you that “at home” feeling right now.
It’s much more capable, but different. For better and worse.
There are already Matrix mobile clients focusing on this use case, aiming at being a WhatsApp replacement. Examples are: Ditto Chat[1], Nio[2], and FluffyChat[3].
Before trying to solve the network-effect issue (i.e. all people using WhatsApp), we should make one of the mentioned clients at least as good as WhatsApp, or else users won't switch.
[2] https://nio.chat
Apart from that it integrates fairly well with other networks through bridges.[3]
It can be self hosted and it federates, which is a pro. Not too sure about audits and security, it has improved much, when I started using it (2019) they didn't have login throttling[4] and shortly after that were breached.[5] Much has improved since.
[1] https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is...
[2] https://matrix.org/docs/projects/server/dendrite
[3] https://matrix.org/bridges/
[4] https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/1452
[5] https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/83751/data-breach/matri...
Searching on an issue tracker for the word 'performance' is not a good source for claiming there are performance issues.
Synapse used to have scaling issues. Those are pretty much fixed.[1]
[1] https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapses-sca...
More details about my specific case are found here: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/8612 - and occasionally other performance issues pop up for other people too.
I'm sure this will eventually be fixed, and honestly the performance is probably good enough for most people, but Synapse is definitely not as performant yet as a homeserver should be.
Fluffy chat may be the best, but still needs lots of love.
I did find a native macOS Matrix client and quite honestly I'd love to be able to use a native client since all platforms really only have Electron apps. But the macOS client only gets me so far since I also want to use it on my phone.