Wake up, the matrix has you

There is a big issue in the modern world – the number of channels you can talk with other people. Slack, Teams, Mattermost for work; iMessage, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Instagram for personal life. Moreover, most of the apps we use on a daily basis have internal messengers with the aim of increasing our daily usage metric.

The amount of information, sometimes private, sometimes not, we share daily with the owners of communication platforms is truly incredible.

There are two main reasons we keep using messaging services – they are free and they are very convenient to use.

But everything has a price. We pay for any of these services with our data, whatever the companies running the services tell us, and we pay with our loyalty to the selected company whose messenger we use the most.

It is fine, until we realize that everything important we say in this service can be completely removed. Simply because of tricky service terms or a management decision. No matter why, the key is that your information is not yours; it is owned by the service provider.

But the internet was built for privacy by design. There are so many incredible people and incredible developers who care about keeping the things people share with each other. So, they invented the matrix. The messaging protocol is independent of the central server and messaging client. I honestly don't know why the project gets the name of the biggest computer network in the sci-fi movie, but it has the fully opposite purpose. Servers are decentralised; nobody owns the network and nobody can remove you from it. It does not matter which matrix client you use; they can all connect with each other.

I'm not going to describe all the pros and cons of the matrix foundation here. Honestly, there is only one big cons. It is quite geeky at the moment, but it becomes more accessible to regular users with each release. It might take a little time to understand the project philosophy, but once you get it, you never return to the big tech messaging world.