• 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.

      • That’s fair, though surely the metadata does go near matrix.org if either you contact people on matrix.org’s servers or use the fallback for calls since a lot of servers don’t have their own TURN server for that.

        I thought Signal didn’t really have much metadata or is it more that it is extremely temporary to the case where it doesn’t matter?

        And yeah, definitely agree that most extremely private (or at least marketed that way) messengers have a terrible UX and in a lot of cases UI too.