You can’t know with certainty on Signal that the client and the server are actually keeping your messages encrypted at rest, you have to trust them.
This is untrue. By design, messages are never decrypted on servers when end-to-end encryption is in use. They would have to break the encryption first, because they don’t have the keys.
Decentralization actually can be really powerful to give you a backup even if you prefer Signal; Signal’s servers very infrequently go down, but when they do, you entirely lose that channel for an unpredictable amount of time.
Yeah, “Matrix as IRC” with general interest rooms is an unmonitored cesspool. “Matrix as IM” for staying in touch with mates is doing just fine.
But then what’s the benefit to Signal? Just that it’s decentralized?
You can’t know with certainty on Signal that the client and the server are actually keeping your messages encrypted at rest, you have to trust them.
With Matrix, if you self host, you are the one in control.
This is untrue. By design, messages are never decrypted on servers when end-to-end encryption is in use. They would have to break the encryption first, because they don’t have the keys.
Isn’t Signal E2E encrypted? How would it be able to decrypt them?
Decentralization actually can be really powerful to give you a backup even if you prefer Signal; Signal’s servers very infrequently go down, but when they do, you entirely lose that channel for an unpredictable amount of time.