Matrix is getting traction though...
What I do like about them is the zero server trust stand they are taking on their clients which makes migration a pain in the butt, but that is what one would expect from a true e2ee chat app.
And now they have two stable servers in rust. The French and German government including military are using the protocol to make their own apps. Maybe it should be something the EU should put some more resource into it?
Last time I checked, the Matrix servers had access to a lot of metadata. Did they fundamentally change it?
No thanks on that. I don't have time or energy for these things.
The UX is still pretty bad, with many rough edges around sign-in and device verification. The message/encryption story has gotten better (it's been a long time since I've gotten spurious errors about being unable to decrypt messages), but it's still not particularly easy to use. Performance-wise I've found it to still be fairly bad; loading messages after I've been offline takes a noticeable amount of pause, something I rarely see with other messaging platforms.
On the plus side, Matrix does have many chat features that many people like (or even require) in a chat platform, like formatting, emojis, message reactions, threads, etc.