technically nothing but it serves as a privacy respecting alternative to meta/google controlled messengers.
things like mastodon and pixelfed are rather easy to wrap your head around and replace their big tech counterparts with if you are the average user.
there is no real replacement for an instant messaging/sms like experience. matrix is at the moment still a bit too complicated to get into if you have come to expect a workflow like: download an app -> write your phone contacts a message.
so although it is not federated it is the best we have got at the moment in my opinion
Thanks for bringing it to my attention. It really looks like they managed to make an ID less chat as simple as possible. But the undeniable benefit of using one’s phone as ID is that when people switch, their contacts are already there. I think that friction alone will prevent normies from adopting it.
Yeah they've tried to make it as similar as whatsapp. But it's hard convincing your entire family to switch again after signal just because you found a cool new app to switch to, lol