i’m sorry if this isn’t linux related but recently i’ve been struggling with some stuff, so i usually talk to my friends on matrix (used to actually!!), i decided to leave matrix and talk to them on email (because email always works and is a much calmer version of instant messenger i think so). but now i think i would like to go back to matrix, i can only choose one, sorry, please tell me which one… oh and i’d be using nheko of course because my debian-based xfce distro runs kind of slowly on my 2006 toshiba
Use Matrix or any good messenger like Signal or Threema for daily communication with friends.
If you want to see a good table of messenger recommendations, see https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html
E-Mail is not a suitable replacement because it lacks end-to-end encryption (unless you and your friends use PGP or S/MIME for that but since that’s rare and slightly too complicated for the common user to use, I’ll just assume that you don’t). While mails are usually encrypted during transport, they lie in plain text format at their destination servers. Depending on which e-mail host you or your friends use, that means the whole content of your e-mail might be scanned and analyzed automatically. Especially if you or your friends use privacy-disrespecting mail hosts like any big commercial one or Gmail or Outlook or what have you. Then your communication via unencrypted mail to or from that person isn’t private.
I will add if you send a proton encrypted email to a non proton user they get like a weblink version that decrypts for viewing. And it has an expiration date.