Honestly, Telegram sucks. Use Signal for private communications and Matrix for groups/communities.
Matrix is good for personal communications too The us companies made you to use phone numbers for chatting Id’s are convenient
I mean, sure, you can use Matrix for personal chats. It’s perfectly secure, but it’s not as easy to use as Signal. For example, if I told my grandma to install Element and send me her Matrix ID, she would be really confused. Signal is very easy to use, and the user experience is basically the same as on mainstream platforms like WhatsApp. I also don’t think that the phone number requirement is a US thing, as Telegram also has it. Signal only requires phone numbers to prevent spam, but they recently introduced usernames, so you don’t have to give people your phone number in order for them to message you.
Element is just a piece of shit. Matrix is fine for almost all use cases. If you actually need metadata protection use Session.
- You can schedule messages
- Have supergroups, subgroups, broadcasts, admin roles in groups,…
- Channels can be configured in various ways. For example, you can post messages and choose the type of previews links render.
- You can add voting options to posts
- Members of the channel can only reply in threads so the replies are bundled.
- You can decide wheter new group members can view chat history or not.
- Members can be muted.
- Bots can be built withing the app
- Chats can be arranged in folders *…
I could go on.
It’s not great if security is your main goal for organizing, but it has a better user experience than most chat apps. Especially if cross platform chatting is important to you.
I don’t understand why people like it so much, I tried it and found the experience pretty bad. Signal is a million times better and easier to use, and Matrix isn’t that hard to figure out either.
I started using it about 8-9 years ago at this point, back when the options were FB messenger or whatsapp. Both were trash and limited in comparison.
I only use signal for work but I find the app clunky and unintuitive. Telegram, being a somewhat privacy nightmare, but not connected to a big data broker company, also gives me the ability to search through a decade of messages to find an old joke, a picture shared, etc.
Telegram is simple enough that I can tell my aging gen x parents and apathetic zoomer siblings to install it and there’s nearly zero friction to them logging in and receiving messages. It solved the problem of being added to a new fucked up imessage groupchat every other week as an android user.
