I was sold on Matrix as a viable alternative to Discord but recently read this article which made it look not so good.
What are you talking about? Metadata is information about your messages besides it’s encrypted content; i.e. time of send and who the recipient and sender are. Matrix has a large weakness, as most users use matrix.org. This is bad because metadata can reveal a lot about ones communications, and most every message sent on matrix (unless it is in a private message with someone not using matrix.org) is passed through matrix.org. This pools a lot of metadata in one place, and there are other messengers do not have this issue, or if they do, they do not have it as badly. Metadata is not magically hidden because your server is located in Switzerland.
I’m very aware of what metadata is. I’m not sure what’s confusing you.
If my data is not on matrix.org, no one can get my data from Matrix.org.
If my data is on a Swiss server, the government can’t get it, even if they have a warrant.
If I have some data on matrix.org and some data on a Swiss server, they can only get my data on matrix.org.
This is called reducing your attack surface.
Yes, but Matrix leaks way more metadata to other servers, negating more of the benefit of using a Swiss server compared to if you used XMPP for example.
Yes, but Matrix leaks way more metadata to other servers
FUD, Matrix doesn’t leak any more data than XMPP in that regard. Admins of either service can know what rooms you’re in and information about events such as time they were sent.
XMPP isn’t any better in this regard.
Not FUD, Matrix syncs entire chats to all involved servers, unlike XMPP. This post explains and links to why Matrix does leak more data than XMPP in this regard.
Also, using the term FUD makes you seem stupid.