It sucks they mention WhatsApp first, but I think the bigger omission is that they don’t mention non-US entities or anything you can self-host and federate like Matrix.
Matrix isn’t super private though. It’s halfway there, but compared to something like XMPP, it falls short due to the fact that any instance a user federates with gets a gigantic copy of all of their metadata, and the server operator can do whatever they want with it. So all you would have to do is spin up a new host, message a target user and get them to respond, and you’re done.
The second half of the article is about Signal.
It sucks they mention WhatsApp first, but I think the bigger omission is that they don’t mention non-US entities or anything you can self-host and federate like Matrix.
Oh, fair enough then!
ETA: Yes, the lack of mentions of Matrix, etc are a bit disappointing. But I think Matrix is waaay outside their target democratic.
Yeeahhh, they’re talking to like Grandma who barely knows what a text message is
Their target democratic is still in the matrix.
Matrix isn’t super private though. It’s halfway there, but compared to something like XMPP, it falls short due to the fact that any instance a user federates with gets a gigantic copy of all of their metadata, and the server operator can do whatever they want with it. So all you would have to do is spin up a new host, message a target user and get them to respond, and you’re done.