I'm still trying to find the source of this "60 million users" claim. Any idea where that came from?
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2022
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~~Maybe some New Vector press release: https://pressreleases.responsesource.com/news/103000/decentralised-matrix-network-hits-60-million-users-sets-sights-on-100-million/ ?~~
But they have been IMHO artificially inflating user numbers by not counting only active users.
~~> The press release you're looking for is no longer available.
Please use the menu above to view other relevant releases.
heh
Now I wonder whether I should delete the posts that I made on Reddit.~~
actually, Matthew (the main Matrix dude) clarified this:
the >60M users (actual figure is 64M) is based on the phone-home reporting to matrix.org that synapse optionally does
the graph looks like this:
Screenshot 2022-07-14 at 10.58.51.png
of these, around 30M are natively on Matrix (the others are bridged in from other platforms)
and of those about 14M are long-term matrix users
That's a much better response. 14 million sounds more realistic. Very strange that they count bridged users (30 million!) as matrix users though.
Indeed strange without quantifying that number in any way, but at least it still sort of tells that you can reach 60 milion people (or bots ;)) via Matrix, even if 30 million of them don't use it.
The IRC bridge is AFAIK also recreating a lot of ghost users everytime it breaks, and that happens a lot 😅
It's more like Matrix is using them
By that count we could also count every Matrix user as a Jabber user. And every SMS user!
Such easy round single numbers do well in advocacy of the technology. In the Netherlands the social network project PubHubs has just started (with some serious backers, like Dutch public broadcasters, 2 universities), and they'll use the Matrix protocol. Though they will be cryptographically separated from the rest of the Matrix network. In their presentations couple of weeks ago they mentioned a Matrix user base of 30 something million, influencing their technology choice. And I was like "Huh? Wow. That's a lot".
Given Matrix's decentralized nature, I don't think they can count active users.
Perhaps but they can still count many. Plus the vast majority of users are on one server
Signal has a lot of things going for it Matrix doesn't have... more convenient, simpler, easier to use, more focus on privacy, better calling. Matrix does some things Signal does, but they have different feature sets really. Matrix being free software, unfortunately, doesn't matter to most people. Matrix also arguably isn't really about security and privacy. It's more of a universal chat platform, so they don't compete directly.
The fact the Matrix is usually marketed as a platform for secure and private communications is somewhat difficult to understand.
I think the reason they are considered similar is the usage of Double Ratchet encryption.