---
taghome: matrix
title: "matrix" 
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tags: ["technicalities"]
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{% oembed https://giphy.com/gifs/the-matrix-saD01LsKDzxL2 %}

[Matrix](https://matrix.org/) is a federating database, kind of? It's generally less useful to define it by its actual technical spec than by saying it's the underpinning for "matrix chat", i.e. [this thing which is now being officially called "Element"](https://element.io/). If you think of it like "Discord but open source, [end-to-end encrypted](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_encryption#E2EE_and_privacy) by default, and self-hostable" you're not far off.

If you're curious and want to pay someone instead of spending your own time to admin it, check out [Beeper](https://www.beeper.com/) which handles not only running the underlying Matrix instance, but also a bunch of bridges that let you talk to closed-source corporate messengers, e.g. WhatsApp, iMessage, etc. etc.