Signal is centralized, closed-source, not-selfhostable and requires being attached to a phone number.
Matrix is decentralized, federated, fully open source with multiple client and server implementations, self-hostable, and does not require being attached to a phone number.
Used Ubuntu for ~15 years, switched to NixOS a couple months ago and haven’t looked back.
I’ve made a habit of clean installing all of the desktops/laptops/servers in my life on the first point release of each LTS (i.e. 22.04.1). That would mean there was time for the dust to settle and for me to tweak my install/customization scripts from the previous LTS.
So since I knew I was gonna have to modify my Ubuntu install scripts to work with 24.04 anyways, I fiigured it was a decent time to try and see if I could get the install scripts converted to a nix config instead, and it ended up working a treat.
Given how common it is for people to use the ‘reset password’ link for this exact purpose, it does make it seem kinda redundant to even implement passwords on many services to begin with.
Is there a non-video source for this information?
After much fighting with and trying of other solution, that’s what I ended up settling with.
Something something “Looking Glass”
Where the metadata goes I think is important as well.
All Signal metadata necessarily goes through Signal’s servers and is tied to your phone number, but not all Matrix metadata ever gets near the Matrix.org if you are using a different homeserver.
I think both are less than ideal in that regard, and I think Briar (strictly P2P) has a much better model for dealing with this at the expense of generally being a UX disaster.