There’s a difference between Matter (the interoperability standard) and Thread (The preferred matter communication protocol) and you’ll see a lot of devices advertised as “Matter over thread” which is important because for those you’ll need a matter bridge device to act as an edge router for the mesh “thread” network the devices create. These can be had cheaply though and if you’re one of the like 1 in 3 Americans with an iPad you already own one.
Reddit is dead to me, and given their stance on their apis, should be dead to pretty much all hobbiests deeply interested in self hosting.