Matrix is a “An open network for secure, decentralised communication”, which provides “A cozy, safe, supercharged place for your community”. What does this means?
Imagine Whatsapp or Telegram, but without a for-profit company that backs it. Imagine Signal, but not dependent on a single company to carry out, and care for, the development. Imagine Discord, but without all the annoying monetization and ever growing demands to buy or pay for it. Imagine the good old IRC (Internet Relay Chat) but on steroids, and upgraded to modernity.
Matrix is the future of chats. Both personal and cummunities, both private and public. Matrix is a set of open standards for which there are some great implementations to choose from.
The advantages of the Matrix approach:
Whatsapp is the chat standard nowadays. Telegram is growing more and more, Signal push it all on privacy and encryption, Messenger is quite common, even Instagram is commonly used to chat today. So why Matrix?
With Matrix, using bridges, you can connect to all those services (and more) above. Yes, one app to rule them all… A single app from which you can see all your chats.
When an old friend of mine died, after about one year, all the chats i shared with him disappeared because his account got deleted due to inactivity. If i had used Matrix, those messages, pieces of my life and fond memories of him, wouldn't be lost.
With Matrix, your chats stay with your server and don't get deleted just because some third party says so.
In theory what you say should be private to the participants of the chat. I wouldn't be surprised if in the future backdoors or other means of snooping came to light. Or maybe the chat starts to be harvested for IA purposed, or for marketing purposes. Commercial services, after all, needs to make money.
On my Matrix server, my data is private, encrypted and protected.
The idea of Matrix can be reduced to:
A Matrix server is like the home to all your chats. It's where all the messages are stored (encrypted). It's like, say, gmail.com or hotmail.com, but yours. In fact, you can choose a public Matrix server, like matrix.org, or create your own by installing a Matrix server software.
There are many Matrix servers around, you can even pick the one you prefer. A very popular one is Synapse, another growing, younger, and promising one is Conduwuit.
There are lots of Matrix clients. For Android, for PC (Windows and Linux), for IOS… Take your pick.
Bridges are pieces of software that you connect to your Matrix server and let you login into other chat systems and interact from Matrix with them.
This page list all the currently available Matrix bridges. The best ones, in my experience, are the so called Mautrix bridges, that can be found here. They are stable and actively supported.
You should always enable double-puppeting
Some examples are:
And the list grows over time.