Ive been using Signal almost 10 years and this is the first time I recall it being down.

This writer, apparently: Signal is unreliable and we should abandon it.

It's almost like there's a concerted effort to discredit Signal /tinfoilhat

Signal is centralized, on the Signal foundation. It went down because Signal put all their eggs in one basket (data center). This is a (arguably) reasonable and common business decision/practice, and there's no way to predict outages. However, all users of the Signal app are at the mercy of these business decisions made by the Signal foundation. Whether or not Signal is using a distributed architecture internally is irrelevant.

Compare Signal to Delta Chat, which uses standard Email servers as well as custom optimized chat relays to implement the chat network. That is truly decentralized. It doesn't matter if all of AWS goes down, delta chat users will still be able to communicate using other email servers.

I tried SimpleX but the UX is still lacking. Even worse, as I've recently learned, apparently the creator is an antivax conspiracy theorist maga/trump supporter. I cannot support that.

I have re-read their website twice, I might be too stupid to understand how it works.

How have I not heard about this?

You're lucky, it was down yesterday for a significant portion of users.

Matrix is a bit of a dumpster fire with a good idea, terrible execution. There was a blog post recently by someone pointing out all the problems, but don't have the link.

I would avoid it.

If you took Element/Matrix and removed everything from it that is required for federation, then it would perform like Signal. Similarly if you removed everything related to end to end encryption it would become much more performant. The combo of federated + E2EE is just kinda hard, especially once you add big groups/rooms.

There are very minimalistic implementations of the matrix protocol that barely require any resources, but they miss many of the fancy features people want (calls/widgets/etc). Thats not to say its impossible to make a lightweight matrix client with all those features, but the Element company simply doesnt have the luxury of prioritizing that. They are busy at a much larger scale, with things like trying to get Governments and Companies to adopt Matrix to get stable funding and trying to deal with idiot lawmakers in the EU trying to ban E2EE...

At the end of the day the only really hard issue of most messenger solutions is scale. You can make an amazing messenger system, but if nobody uses it, then its useless. Element decided to set scale as their No. 1 priority and then improve functionality later on and frankly it has been working amazingly well.

Most medium to large universities in Germany run their own Matrix servers and this is the kind of thing that will inevitably get it into the hands of young people (i can attest to that because its only been a year and all my uni friends now use matrix and they are not nerds). This is how email came to be the defacto standard too. If you convince universities, the government and companies then you have already won long term.

XMPP is the way! I recently dove in as a replacement to matrix and have really enjoyed it.

it is, its just that there needs to be a universally agreed upon list of hardware/software combinations that everyone uses. people would need to volunteer as nodes. and information would need to be stored locally. you woild have to volunteer your own hardware to complete the node. likely for nothing in return, and you would also risk your data with each node as a user. depending on how its made.

kind of hard to explain to older generations or even younger ones. even more difficult to get corporations that have a monopoly on hardware like cellphones and computer components to cater to a movement that would restrict their access to our data.

people are working on it, its just a complex and difficult issue.

Isnt.. Isnt that what we're doing here? Matrix is the decentralized signal replacement

Yes

But also No, because we have to use it before/so that it becomes simple and easy to use.

I've gotten most of my family, friends, and several coworkers onto it, using a technique I call "refusing to communicate literally any other way"

I pressured all my family into using it.

What do you mean by “really, really bad at IM”?