What is the advantage of using this over an USB to SATA adapter?

Writing wise, it is similar to discord, with a capability for full end-2-end encryption of the contents. Because of how messages are stored, it tends to be slow to go through the backlog (unfortunately).

You can do media embedding, videos, pictures, source code, etc. Because of how history works (and depending on encryption settings) searching has always felt weak to me. Discord search capabilities are quite amazing in comparison.

For finding rooms and communities, you can definitely search for it by name and join the different rooms. You will be searching in a specific server. The interesting piece is you can create a room in server A, and create an alias for it on server B (you must have a local account on server B, the alias can be the same name or different). This makes anyone joining either room go to the same place.

Outside that, you will find several open-source projects either having a room on matrix.org or hosting their own small server (with maybe an alias somewhere else). This just mimics how things used to be on IRC channels. There’s an IRC integration that merges the communications between an IRC channel and a matrix channel. I think there’s also one for discord, so if you type on matrix, the bot types on discord (and vice-versa, but no audio).

Easiest thing to do, go to matrix.org, create an account, explore. You can always delete it or create an account somewhere else later.

If the room is encrypted, not even the server is able to read your messages, only people in that channel, which can also be just 2 people/direct messages.

At this moment, Matrix is fairly different from discord, specially the pieces around voice chat there are some plugins and other things, but it is nowhere close to Discord’s experience).

I have my own Matrix server and I use it to join any other that I need. By rolling my own, I can also leverage some integrations like having my Google chat, signal, and a few others in a single app.

In a way, because you are not looking for a “local feed” like in mastodon or even Lemmy to a degree, it doesn’t matter that much which server you join, any of them will give you the capability of talking to others (sans the integrations I mentioned), kind of like e-mail.

It is very different from the feeling you have with Lemmy, I would say. The only way I have to describe it is as a Modern IRC.

Yet I disagree with the article in many points. It didn’t always belong to Facebook, and that’s how it started, originally it even asked for something akin to one dollar for one year of usage (it was converted to some very small amount for each country).

One should also understand that in countries like India, Brazil, and a few others SMS and Internet on phones are extremely expensive. WhatsApp provided a very nice way to bypass SMS and stay within the lower plans for internet usage on mobiles. The big advantage here was to use your work or home internet to still reach out to people.

I know that in Brazil telcos introduced an entry line phone plan at one time saying that Whatsapp messages would be exempted from data caps.

Eventually, Facebook bought WhatsApp.

Saying it is simple to replace WhatsApp without considering the economic situation of the people relying on it is absurd.

Comparing it to FOSS alternatives at the current stage is easy enough, but every attempt at creating a FOSS alternative didn’t take. It is not uncommon to see the FOSS software not prioritizing the functionality and needs of users, and that will have people flock to whatever is useful to them, despite possible hidden costs.

I say this as someone who uses Matrix for chat, yet there are some critical bugs in usability that developers just ignore (like doing something basic like sharing from IOS breaks the spec and causes errors to several others).

When things like these happen there is always someone who will come ahead and say “this is provided for free” or “learn to code and fix it yourself”.

Eventually we get Pikachu faces or articles talking about the greatness of FOSS while ignoring all the main point “people still need a stable tool that fits their economic power while someone argues about how to fix a problem they don’t really care about”. As someone who mostly uses open source software, this is really frustrating.