Why reinvent the wheel? You can add your Matrix handle in your profile and get people to chat with you that way.
One can send private messages to other users on Lemmy but the messages are not end-to-end encrypted. Matrix can be used also for chatting with one other, making a “chatting service” for Lemmy would be just redundant.
Why would there be?
I don’t wanna talk to you fuckers.
:(
I’d personally love to see some sort of integration with another federated chat service, like Matrix, to avoid reinventing the protocol. That said, you can already just make a matrix account and use that so I’m not sure how much value putting it directly into lemmy really adds.
There actually is a “matrix user” field when you edit your profile; if you put something there you’ll have a “Send secure message” button on your profile that does something with matrix.to. See https://lemmy.ml/u/dessalines for an example of a user who has this button.
Also note that the unencrypted direct messaging feature here has a ⚠ which says “Warning: Private messages in Lemmy are not secure. Please create an account on Element.io for secure messaging.”
I’m not sure of the difference between direct messaging (current implementation) and chat. They’re basically the same. I know someone will tell me different, but it’s just how I feel.
