Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org

a year ago by mesa to c/technology

The Matrix.org network has great potential, but after years of dealing with glitches, slow performance, poor UX, and one too many failures, I’m done with it.
drkt 82 points a year ago

The protocol is bloated to hell so third-party clients stand no chance, and the foundation spends more time bikeshedding or pissing away money than they do developing. It's a doomed project.

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eleitl 24 points a year ago

So what's left? Jabber?

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ProdigalFrog 37 points a year ago

Slrpnk hosts an XMPP/Jabber for our users, mods and admins to communicate. Its worked pretty darn well for the past couple years, with very low resource needs.

The clients are pretty slick now too, such as Cheogram or Monocles for mobile, and movim is an excellent web app with support for group calls.

I'd certainly recommend it over Matrix/element.

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Ulrich 4 points a year ago

The clients are pretty slick now too, such as Cheogram or Monocles

I wouldn't call either of those, or any other XMPP clients "slick" and it's my biggest complaint about the protocol.

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sem 1 point a year ago

What would make them slick?

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eleitl 4 points a year ago path: 0 18320061 18320165 18320284 18320357, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 33
poVoq 14 points a year ago

Significant improvements to certificate pinning and validation have been added to all major XMPP clients as a result of this incident, but it should also be clear that hosting a server on infrastructure under control by an antagonist government (see also Signal) is a very bad idea and hard to mitigate against.

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ProdigalFrog 6 points a year ago

I'm afraid that's quite outside my field of expertise. I can only report how my experience on XMPP has been as a user, though perhaps @poVoq@slrpnk.net, who hosts it, may be able to weigh in on that. Edit: ah, I see you already have πŸ˜„

Though from my untrained eye, it seems that Jabber.ru was compromised due to not enabling a particular feature on their server

"Channel binding" is a feature in XMPP which can detect a MiTM even if the interceptor present a valid certificate. Both the client and the server must support SCRAM PLUS authentication mechanisms for this to work. Unfortunately this was not active on jabber.ru at the time of the attack.

And it seems that hosting it externally on paid hosting service (hetzner and linode) left them particularly vulnerable to this attack, and tgat it could've been mitigated by self hosting the XMPP locally, as well as activating that feature.

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moonpiedumplings 2 points a year ago

https://www.devever.net/~hl/xmpp-incident

This article discusses some mitigations.

You an also use a platform like simplex or the tor routing ones, but they aren't going to offer the features of XMPP. It's better to just not worry about it. This kind of attack is so difficult to defend against that it should be out of the threat model of the vast majority of users.

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muppeth 3 points a year ago

Not to mention you can run a server on anything pretty much and for surprisingly big amount of users. Toaster or potatoes will do just fine.

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Sickday 18 points a year ago

Back to IRC we go...

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eleitl 17 points a year ago

It is entirely insecure.

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ExFed 13 points a year ago

Not when the entirety of your conversations are jargon and in-jokes!

/s

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InFerNo 7 points a year ago

The argument has always been, if when chat rooms are public, anyone can join and start logging the chats, encryption does nothing.

It has the ability to connect over TLS, but that's about it.

I loved using it for its simplicity, except when using all the different flavours of nick registration (Q, NickServ, ...).

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undrwater 3 points a year ago

Define secure. You can run your own network.

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Vanilla_PuddinFudge 2 points a year ago

xmpp isn't.

(Ok I get xmpp alone is but every modern client supports the same two encryption methods so judge for yourself)

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Telorand 11 points a year ago

Depends what your goal is. Revolt seems pretty cool, but I don't think it has any kind of encryption. It is based in Europe, though, so it gets GDPR protection, and it's open source, so it could be forked to fit other needs and uses.

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eleitl 9 points a year ago

No, Revolt checks neither of my boxes unfortunately.

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Jakule17 3 points a year ago

What about delta?

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Yaky 5 points a year ago

You can interact with Matrix server through basic curl commands... and I thought the documentation was pretty good. There are plenty of third-party clients.

Sure, E2EE, keys and cross-signing is not trivial, but I don't know where it is.

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drkt 3 points a year ago

I didn't imply that you can't strip the protocol down to its bare essentials and still use it, but what's the point of a protocol if everyone is on their own personalized version of it? Version / Feature fragmentation is a massive problem and basically none of the third party clients are up to snuff. Synapse is a massive bowl of lukewarm dog water, and most alternatives to it die in a year because it's impossible to keep up. There's too much shit in the protocol.

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Yaky -1 points a year ago

What specific version/feature fragmentation and clients are you referring to? As is common now, newer Synapse drops support for older Postgres (for example). Voice and video calls is the only feature that I can think of that is half-assed in Element/ElementX or not implemented in some clients.

Otherwise, Element, Element X, FluffyChat, Fractal, freaking Cinny on Ubuntu Touch (!), and terminal-based gomuks all support basic functionality, DMs, rooms, encryption, and attachments.

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edent 63 points a year ago

I agree with all this. The thing which caused me to uninstall was suddenly being pushed lots of abusive message with disturbing contents.

When I complained about it, Matrix told me that my public complaints were hurting the ecosystem and I should be quiet.

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AbnormalHumanBeing 19 points a year ago

I had a wild ride with matrix, originally wanting to run a node on my server. That did not turn out well, because I was a bit stupid and just assumed there would be more admin/mod tools out of the box. As it turned out, I had inadvertently allowed spam/abuse accounts on my node without even noticing, because naive as I was, I assumed my admin-level account would get informed of stuff like user registrations and abuse reports in the standard Element frontend. As a bonus, when I checked what was supposedly the official matrix support channel, it was repeatedly getting spammed with CSAM and gore at the time. That was when I realised, that it definitely was not the ecosystem for me, and running a node without experience had been a pretty stupid idea on my end.

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muusemuuse 5 points a year ago

I have to wonder if there is a major commercial interest in that though.

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AbnormalHumanBeing 1 point a year ago

Not impossible, although, sadly - any system where anonymity is the prime focus will also invite fucked up shit in addition to legitimate use, without any complicated motives behind it. There's just a relevant fraction of humanity who are, sometimes essentially, sometimes temporarily, messed up fucks. Which is why I think providing ways to combat abuse has to be a high priority for the underlying development of any project like it, unless it explicitly doesn't aim for mainstream adoption.

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VeganCheesecake 3 points a year ago

Yeah. I an hosting a homeserver for my ttrpg groups, but it doesn't have any federation enwbled at all, and sign ups are invite-only.

The amount of work needed to moderate a public instance, especially with the lacking tools available, seems crazy. Also, I don't love it that New Vector has an implementation for an admin console, that seems to be available exclusively for paying subscribers to the enterprise version of their element server suite.

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swelter_spark 2 points a year ago

The CSAM spam is so annoying. I don't understand who is doing this or why.

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brunoqc 10 points a year ago

When I complained about it, Matrix told me that my public complaints were hurting the ecosystem and I should be quiet.

Weird. I think they did some improvement to prevent those abusive messages but it took a while and it was embarrassing. Maybe it's hard to prevent them with a federated network but still, the abusive messages where basically a copy paste.

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muusemuuse 8 points a year ago

Oh fuck that culty nonsense!

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2910000 46 points a year ago

I just want a self-hostable open-source alternative to the shitty closed-source IM systems I'm forced to use

I'm sticking with Matrix for now, hopefully some of the issues I've had will get ironed out

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pineapplelover 8 points a year ago

Revolt is a self hosted discord clone

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VeganCheesecake 2 points a year ago

The lack of group voice calls is what mainly kept me from adopting that. Hope they get that working soon.

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pineapplelover 1 point a year ago

I swear there were calls when I was testing it a year or two ago. Guess not then.

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VeganCheesecake 2 points a year ago

Take this with a grain of salt, I don't have it deployed right now, but if I remember the current state correctly, one on one calls are a thing, group calls aren't.

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undrwater 6 points a year ago

Nextcloud talk?

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2910000 1 point a year ago

I'm not sure how much it would make sense for me as I don't use Nextcloud for anything else

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sugar_in_your_tea 2 points a year ago

If you want 1:1 chat, Simplex should work well.

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Yaky 2 points a year ago

Snikket is the rebranded-dockerized XMPP environment (uses prosody for server, Conversations clone for Android, and Monal clone for iOS).

Worked pretty well for me in the past.

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AnimalsDream 37 points a year ago

We really need to stop abandoning existing foss projects and thinking a whole new thing needs to be invented. Free and open-source software is not a product, it doesn't abide by the same rules and relationships that proprietary tech does.

It's more organic. It's also a commons that we can continue to draw on, and reshape. If I recall correctly, there were something like three different vector graphic editors from the same codebase before Inkscape managed to be the one that gained traction.

Matrix isn't perfect, but abandoning it just to reinvent it all over again just because some people really need a thing that works like Discord, even though Discord is absolute hot garbage; is just going to re-create all the same problems. Matrix today is better than it was two years ago. And Matrix in a year will be better from now.

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Blemish5236 9 points a year ago
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AnimalsDream 4 points a year ago

Sure, go for it. Though XMPP has so many features at this point, it might already have Matrix, irc, Discord, and email for all we know. Β―\_(ツ)_/Β―

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Tattorack 6 points a year ago

Can't agree on Discord being hot garbage, unless you're specifically talking about how monetisation has creeped its way into it.

However, with Vencord I don't have to see any of that shit, while also having a far more functional and feature rich client.

Of course, a FOSS, potentially federated alternative would be greatly preferred, but it must have at least the basic functions of Discord.

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poloqualle 2 points a year ago

None of the popular/successful apps are bad.

They usually have great ui/ux and are being actively developed or at least maintained. Think google maps, apple wallet, or of course discord. What is hot garbage, however, is having to accept massive privacy violations if you use them. Vencord unfortunately does not mitigate that. :(

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AnimalsDream 1 point a year ago

A large part of it is the obnoxious monetization and general enshittification and privacy violations, but that's not all. There are a number of usability annoyances. If I've been away from Discord for a little while and try to continue where I left off in a thread on a server, it never properly preserves where I last stopped reading. There are often times when I get notifications but it won't actually take me to the relevant message, and that can even result in situations where the ping just gets lost entirely.

Then there's things inherent in Discord's design and how people use it. It's become a tool that people have decided is a convenient replacement for chats, wikis, and forums - but it's a shittier version of all of those things. Pinned messages are such a tucked away and half-baked feature. The fact that people are using Discord both to organize and discuss projects - as well as using that same space to host documentation or other critical knowledge-bases has made information significantly less accessible. I don't want to join someone's niche club just to "learn more." If I want to read something I would rather just go to a wiki on the actual open web.

Discord is hot garbage ultimately for the same reasons as Facebook. It's trying to be everything to everyone, and dropping a black box on the open web by doing so. It's just another example of people trading convenience for actually using the appropriate tools for the kind of job they're trying to do.

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Auth 3 points a year ago

Often, the problem is that projects get to a point where they're happy and the maintainer doesn't want to add any new features. So people then are forced to build a new project to get those features.

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AnimalsDream 4 points a year ago

Sometimes, but my point is you don't have to start from scratch. It's free software. You are allowed to make extensions or even fork it.

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Vinstaal0 2 points a year ago

I agree with you, my main issue with Matrix is that it is a pain to self-host at the moment.

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kxzaon 3 points a year ago path: 0 18341699 18351646 18353839, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0
AnimalsDream 1 point a year ago

Isn't everything a pain to selfhost?

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MangoPenguin 1 point a year ago

Most things are super easy, like 2-5 minutes of set up and it's running and working.

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AnimalsDream 1 point a year ago

Such as?

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Vinstaal0 1 point a year ago

Honestly, setting up things using Docker Compose is generally a question of copying and pasting and editing the file locations.

The moment you need SSL and/or a reverse proxy it becomes a bit more complex, but once you set up a reverse proxy once you can generally expand that to your other applications.

Something like a Synology nas makes it very easy and to some extend even the Truenas apps are kinda easy.

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MangoPenguin 1 point a year ago

It's gonna be like 100 years before Matrix and the clients are in a good place at this rate. It only seems to be getting worse right now with more fragmented clients and servers with more and more spam issues, and the performance just keeps getting worse too.

Even their very own Element app is being retired and replaced by Element X which is missing a ton of features.

They still don't have any of the features people coming from Discord/TS/Mumble are expecting like voice chat rooms, push to talk, or streaming to a room. They don't have the features Telegram users are expecting like stickers, threads inside groups, read only channels, and so on..

The vast majority of users have no reason to switch since it's nothing like the apps they are used to. And it's buggy and slow on top of that.

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VeganCheesecake 1 point a year ago

What I don't like about Matrix is that it's most visible homeserver and client implementations feel like they are being developed as a product by New Vector Ltd., not a community project.

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AnimalsDream 1 point a year ago

How so?

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VeganCheesecake 1 point a year ago

New Vector forked the matrix foundation owned projects for synapse, dendrite, and element, and pulled all their devs, changing the license and bringing them under closer control. The foundation repos are now archived, and only the new vector owned ones are being actively developed. They sell an enterprise license for their element server suite that, at least according to their copy, seems more performant, and also offers admin tools that the free version lacks.

If you want to run a public instance that allows registration, you pretty much need some kind of external admin tool for moderation.

It's of course still better than pretty much all proprietary options, but also quite some room for improvement.

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cupcakezealot 28 points a year ago

i want 90s era icq and 2000s era msn back :(

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anon5621 19 points a year ago

But they both closed source protocols locked down to specific corp

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pastermil 3 points a year ago

What would you propose, then?

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tias 21 points a year ago

How about jabber/XMPP

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brunoqc 3 points a year ago

I wish xmpp was p2p. I can self-host but it could be way simpler if people didn't have to.

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pastermil 1 point a year ago

How active are communities on these nowadays?

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paraphrand 1 point a year ago

But locked in a way where nice third party clients could still interact with them. I never used official clients after a time.

That seems to have gone away.

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negativenull 8 points a year ago

A/S/L?

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cupcakezealot 5 points a year ago

400/F/krynn oh sorry i was in the red dragon inn room :3

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rivalary 3 points a year ago

Who was 400 years old from Krynn? Sylvara? It's been a long time since I've read those books.

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cupcakezealot 3 points a year ago

it's been a while so i just picked random names for the bit but now i kinda wanna go back and read the dragons o autumn twilight series (mostly to get to time of the twins)

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naht 3 points a year ago

XMPP works, but there are no video calls. Matrix has those, and they are very good. But since it is not possible there to see the online state of my friends (turned off everywhere due to horrible performance), it defeats the purpose. I want to see if they are at their computer, not if they own a mobile phone. πŸ˜‰

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sugar_in_your_tea 2 points a year ago

Are video calls really that important? I almost never do that.

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naht 1 point a year ago

I use them regularly, and switching to another software is a hurdle I would like to avoid. Also I am not happy with existing software (Teams etc.).

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caseyweederman 1 point a year ago

Almost never, but when they are: very much so yes

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sugar_in_your_tea 2 points a year ago

I just use dedicated software for video calls, it's easy enough to ask the other person to jump on a video call on something else.

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matlag 2 points a year ago

I do 1:1 videocalls on XMPP. Quite some clients implement that now. But there were no videoconferences until very recently. That's changing, though. See Movim right now, for example.

Main 2 issues with XMPP are inconsistent clients (in terms of GUI but also features wise) and the incredibly, astonishingly, ridiculously sloooooooooooooooow evolution of the protocol through the XSF. Nothing can get in there until it's "perfect". Clients devs are reluctant to implement things until the extension is stable. And the best part is this approach hardly work: the best way to figure if something works is to deploy it in larger and larger scales and improve it on the way as you identify corner cases you didn't think about. Not to review the description for months/year until it qualifies as literature...

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deadsuperhero 27 points a year ago

I always liked the concept of Matrix, and still actively use it, but there's some serious jank. Synapse is generally bloated and not fun to run an instance, Dendrite is perpetually in Beta, and the clients themselves range from adequate to awful. The default Element client on Android is so broken for me that I'm forced to use Element X, because I can't even log in with Element.

It's disappointing, but there's a ton of issues that aren't so easy to resolve. New Vector and the Element Foundation are basically two separate entities that have some kind of hard split between them, neither of which seems to have the money necessary to support comprehensive development. The protocol is said to be bloated and overtly complex, and trying to develop a client or a server implementation is something of a nightmare.

I want to see Matrix succeed, I think a lot of people see the potential of what it could be. I'm not sure it'll ever get there.

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EndlessNightmare 5 points a year ago

I always liked the concept of Matrix, and still actively use it, but there’s some serious jank.

I use Element as well as Beeper, which is at its core an Element client based on network bridging. I'm a big fan of Matrix, but it isn't as approachable as other messaging services and requires some technical know-how to use effectively.

It seems like the Linux of messaging services.

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supermurs 19 points a year ago

For me Matrix is fine, I can use IRC, Whatsapp and Discord with it. But Element is not my cup of tea, especially with Firefox as it doesn't play any videos other users are sharing. The same videos work fine with Cinny.

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sxan 7 points a year ago

I can use IRC

The fact that many Discord and IRC channels (servers?) block Matrix connections has drastically reduced its usefulness for me. When I was running my own Matrix server, I could have gotten around it by using a puppet, but Synapse is such a hog I had to shut it down, and most of the IRC rooms I want to use don't allow Matrix proxies.

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poVoq 8 points a year ago

The IRC (Biboumi) and Discord bridges (slidge.im) for XMPP work still fine and running your own server is super lightweight.

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sxan 1 point a year ago

running your own server is super lightweight.

Not IME. Are you running Synapse? Gigabytes of disk usage and memory leaks requiring restarts.

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psycotica0 2 points a year ago

They're taking about switching to Jabber/XMPP, which is what those two bridges are for, and they're saying XMPP servers are lightweight.

It's a bit confusing in context, I'll admit.

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poVoq 2 points a year ago

I am talking about xmpp servers 🀷

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picnic 1 point a year ago

I've been running the same matrix instance since ubuntu 18.04lts, just upgraded the virtual machine along the ride, so that has to be +6 years it's been running 24/7.

I have not once rebooted my server due to performance reasons (like a mem leak). And like last 4 years I've ran the instance virtualized on a hp thin client, lately on a hp t640.

While I understand the criticism towards synapse being a complex and slow, and element being slow-ish, I don't feel justified saying synapse would need any restarts in general. At least I have never restarted it in 6+ years and my instance has been working without those required restarts.

Yeah, I miss the irc, too. I still use it via my matrix instance.

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sunth1ef 19 points a year ago

From an outsiders perspective, element has never worked for me and never been stable enough to get anywhere close to discord. Joining servers is buggy AF and Element X is severely hobbied on mobile.

I've been refusing to use discord for about 6-8 months and am often invites to join various discords by IRL friends and online communities. I wish Matrix / Element was a viable alternative but I've never been able to get it working for anythung other than DMs, and I'm already happy with Signal for that honestly.

As a non developer I want to be sensitive to the amount of work involves, and the number of cooks in the kitchen, but the fact that we don't have a FOSS- federated slack / discord killer app is leaving so much interaction on the table.

I've heard of Revolt but it doesn't seem to be there with encryption

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DFX4509B_2 3 points a year ago

You got PeerSuite as a newcomer, and a pretty promising one with the concept of not having any servers tied to it at all, at that.

path: 0 18332088 18332984, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0
yessikg 15 points a year ago

XMPP is still an option

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cmhe 7 points a year ago

That is what the author said they switch to, but TBH XMPP also has issues with MFA and messages frequently not being decrypted (using OMEMO) and 'unencrypted metadata'.

I wouldn't say that it works better than Matrix, it just has some different strengths and weaknesses.

path: 0 18324428 18326854, hotness: undefined, score: 7, children: 1
yessikg 3 points a year ago

I haven't had any issues with it, but it all depends of the client and server

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Netrunner 12 points a year ago

Self hosted matrix works great. /thread

path: 0 18334475, hotness: undefined, score: 12, children: 2
Yaky 4 points a year ago

I've been hosting a server without much problems for several years now.

Synapse and Riot.im (now Element) became much better around 2019 or 2020. But not too long ago, I also found out that Synapse also bloats the DB with state_groups_state table. There are a handful of commands that come with synapse, but no built-in admin tool or panel, so I wrote my own. Moving server to another host has been seamless for my (few) users. TURN/STUN for calls seems to work okay (I don't really use it though).

I appreciate Element being uniform across platforms (which I cannot say about XMPP clients), but the sign-in is pretty tedious, and registration with a token is still impossible last time I checked (which is either a hassle for the user to use another client and then their smart device, or a security issue if you open registration to anyone). Most normal people probably don't care and don't want to deal with keys, cross-verification, and all that jazz.

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kevincox 3 points a year ago

Yeah, I finally pulled the trigger and moved to my own domain from matrix.org. Man, it is just so much faster. Which is sad, because the performance is pretty bad. (Element Web seems to do some per-room request as part of the initial loading screen which is obviously not scalable) but getting off of matrix.org is a huge performance improvement.

That being said there is nothing really wrong with matrix.org. The problem is really public rooms. People will join and spam. It is true of any protocol (have you heard about email?) but Matrix definitely needs to (and they are slowly working on) make it more expensive for spammers.

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sk1nnym1ke 10 points a year ago
path: 0 18320459, hotness: undefined, score: 10, children: 8
RobotZap10000 7 points a year ago

NeoChat on KDE allows me to choose which account to login to when I start it.

path: 0 18320459 18321032, hotness: undefined, score: 7, children: 2
Hadriscus 4 points a year ago

Does it let you be logged in as both ?

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RobotZap10000 2 points a year ago

If I want to send and receive messages from another account, I have to press 2 buttons to switch to it. Otherwise, I still get desktop notifications from all of them, I think.

path: 0 18320459 18321032 18321944 18326169, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0
uzay 6 points a year ago

Fluffy chat allows multiple accounts

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sk1nnym1ke 2 points a year ago
path: 0 18320459 18324650 18325382, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0
ChaosMonkey 3 points a year ago

Element Desktop has profiles. But sadly there are no profiles on the mobile app.

path: 0 18320459 18322496, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0
MonkderVierte 3 points a year ago

I see what you did here. Say something wrong on the internet to get multiple helpful tips.

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missphant 2 points a year ago path: 0 18320459 18323834, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0
shiroininja 10 points a year ago

I don’t know why people don’t use irc, I’m in it daily and it’s busier than Matrix, and even busier than some Discord servers I’m in. And there’s mobile clients. There’s even way less bots and spam

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MangoPenguin 8 points a year ago

I think the barrier to entry is kind of high, you need to use a bouncer to see what happened while you were offline.

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shiroininja 7 points a year ago

I don’t really worry about that. I treat it like natural conversation, or traditional chat rooms. I mean I don’t need a recap when I show up at a party. I just jump in. I’ve never heard of a bouncer, but I think it would turn it into more of a feed than a conversation, which is the opposite of what I want.

I’m tired of feeds and timelines. AOL chat rooms were my formative internet years, and I liked that. I think the old style of internet communication is better than the feed silos we have now. Besides, I hardly ever go back and look at older convos in other spaces. I usually hit mark all as read when I open the app.

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MangoPenguin 3 points a year ago

Problem is then you miss important info, for example if friends are talking about a game server they're running and post the connection details, or if they plan an event with a location and time to meet, if you don't have a bouncer and were offline then you can't see those messages.

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sem 3 points a year ago

The bouncer is just the name for the technology that maintains your connection when your client disconnects.

I'm kind of socially awkward, so I really value being able to "read the room" and see what people were talking about before I joined. I have IRC set up so that when I open it up, I see the previous 40 lines or so of dialog from before I connected. (This is a setting you can adjust on the bouncer).

I could achieve something similar by joining a room and then waiting a few minutes, but sometimes the room is very slow and no one posts, etc., it's nice to just always be able to look at the scroll back when you log on.

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mfed1122 1 point a year ago

Yeah this is exactly what turned me off from it when I looked into it. I kind of like that it would lend a more physical-space quality to it, but ultimately I'm hardly ever online, so it would just be me being totally out of the loop all the time without a bouncer. I know I could figure out how to do it, but it's a lot of effort for something where I'm not even sure I'll like what it gives me.

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rozodru 5 points a year ago

yup I went back to IRC. got tired of discord and matrix just wasn't for me. IRC is where it's add. still remember all the stuff from the 90s so it was just like riding a bike. plus I can have it in my Terminal which is a plus.

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blobchoice 1 point a year ago

I think IRC wins by being around the longest, but also being dead simple to set up and use.

I tried using Matrix and it just honestly frazzled my head a little. I know it's just a few extra steps to get registered, but it honestly feels like a few extra bits of friction to what amounts to trying to join a big social circle.

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shiroininja 2 points a year ago

I had such a pain trying to get a consistent client working on mobile.

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Trihilis 9 points a year ago

The thing is... What alternatives are there? Signal can't be trusted (on the very same website there is an article about it). I'm not using closed source alternatives, Simplex is kinda shady too tbh and I'm not even sure I could get anyone to use it.

I don't like Matrix/Element either but sadly its the best open source chat solution we have.

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Probius 13 points a year ago

Why don't people trust Signal?

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GlenRambo 16 points a year ago

Its a 18 months old but OP means this on the same site. https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/...

The blogger also stopped using proton mail. So idk. Seems to be their thing atm.

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muusemuuse 24 points a year ago

I started reading the article but didn’t finish. This guy is a fool. He’s bitching about vendor lock in? The data isn’t supposed to be portable. That’s the point.

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philpo 7 points a year ago

Signal itself is solid. For now. The issue is that signal is a centralized infrastructure service that is based in the US.

While it's rather unlikely that something shady is going on and the current administration manages to pressure someone into installing back doors without anyone noticing, there is a growing chance that at some point the Orange Hitler or his cronies aim at Signal - and simply shut the whole thing down in a single sweep.

Which would mean the whole thing is lost - in theory they of course could rebuild a foundation outside the US, but that would also mean they need people not residing in the US (not like Proton which claims to operate from Switzerland and in reality are US based) and find funding there - enough funding to cover the costs and that is not impeded by US pressure.

This is the scenario that makes Signal a problematic candidate - and sadly the foundation is doing nothing against it.

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PirateFrog 10 points a year ago

The article author went back to XMPP, which does appear to be the best option currently.

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DreamlandLividity 4 points a year ago

In what universe is XMPP better than Matrix?

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deadcade 12 points a year ago

XMPP is significantly less decentralized, allowing them to """cut corners""" compared to Matrix protocol implementation, and scale significantly better. (In heavy quotes, as XMPP isn't really cutting corners, but true decentralization requires more work to achieve seemingly "the same result")

An XMPP or IRC channel with a few thousand users is no problem, wheras Matrix can have problems with that. On the other hand, any one Matrix homeserver going down does not impact users that aren't specifically on that homeserver, whereas XMPP is centralized enough that it can take down a whole channel.

Meanwhile IRC is a 90s protocol that doesn't make any sense in the modern world of mainly mobile devices.

XMPP also doesn't change much, the last proper addition to the protocol (from what I can tell, on the website) was 2024-08-30 https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0004.html

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psycotica0 2 points a year ago

XMPP doesn't change very very often, but there's actually tons of XEPs that are in common use and are considered functionally essential for a modern client, and with much higher numbers than XEP-0004

The good news, though, is that mostly you as the user don't need to care about those! Most of the modern clients agree on the core set and thus interoperate fine for most normal things. And most XEPs have a fallback in case the receiver doesn't support the same XEPs.

I'm general XMPP as a protocol is a lightweight core that supports an interesting soup of modules (in the form of XEPs) to make it a real messenger in the modern sense. And I think that's neat! But you can't really judge the core to say how often things change.

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isVeryLoud 1 point a year ago

IRC makes sense in a world where people register to bouncers, which allow people to connect to any IRC network they please.

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undrwater 9 points a year ago

xmpp mentioned, I'll add IRC

path: 0 18325194 18325887, hotness: undefined, score: 9, children: 0
pulsewidth 8 points a year ago

Counterpoint: this is just some random blogger and you don't need to follow any of their advice.

path: 0 18325194 18332826, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 0
Zomg 4 points a year ago

Going back to TS3 and IRC. They never left

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undrwater 1 point a year ago

I forgot to add nextcloud talk!

path: 0 18325194 18325935, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
transebding_the_binary 1 point a year ago
path: 0 18325194 18326013, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
Mio 9 points a year ago

I am glad someone can admit it failed and we have to learn from this. I am just wondering what it takes to succeed.

path: 0 18328124, hotness: undefined, score: 9, children: 7
Turret3857 12 points a year ago

start with a discord clone

make it e2ee

make it federated

i feel like it shouldnt be this hard, but I'm not the one developing matrix, nor XMPP, nor the 3rd smaller option you the reader is wanting me to list that I am unaware of

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Threeme2189 6 points a year ago

Don't fucking clone the godaweful mess that is Discord. Please, for the love of God start with something else.

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MangoPenguin 4 points a year ago

Discord is what people like and are used to though. If you want the average user to switch it needs to be somewhat familiar.

path: 0 18328124 18331110 18332316 18338941, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0
Turret3857 2 points a year ago

Discord is where people are at. You start with something else you're asking for another Matrix or XMPP because people will not understand a new interface

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rottingleaf 2 points a year ago

Suppose for text messages, sharing files, contacts and such we have solutions, and with a set of libraries solving the hard parts, that can be done relatively easily. Encryption is hard, but suppose we are not even doing E2EE yet, that we are fine with TLS till the server, mutual TLS between servers, and additional something like OTR or PGP for 1-on-1 conversations.

Voice/video calls, and especially group voice/video calls, are a different matter entirely. You have to think, solve latency problems, congestion problems, so that those were usable at all.

Discord UI is not very nice.

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Turret3857 1 point a year ago

I agree that the UI for discord sucks shit, however my thinking is aligned with what another commenter said, its what people already know and are used to. Trying to make anything new will turn users off. I'm very open to being proven wrong about that assumption though. I'd love for a foss project to have better UI/UX than discord.

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rottingleaf 2 points a year ago

The UI is not that important. Something a bit similar to Discord in appearance and experience is doable in plenty of available UI toolkits and libraries and frameworks and whatever.

The system itself is important, so that it would be functional with federation, yet not as prone to fragmentation as XMPP, yet efficient.

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gandalf_der_12te 6 points a year ago

I've used matrix for a year now and it works, but it seems slow.

Lots of people tried to self-host it and reported it uses too much RAM for what it does. (It allegedly uses 1GB or more of ram even if it only has 1-2 users)

Efficient software is a must. Software must not waste resources simply because "they are there". That's my biggest gripe with matrix.

Disclaimer: i've not tried to host matrix myself, so i could be wrong here.

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mesamunefire 7 points a year ago

Its running about 1GB for me and my server setup. It spikes a bit if there is a lot going on, but it can get low than that when its just idling. Its not terrible, but given irc and other clients which take MB for RAM...its a bit of a hog-ish.

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Auth 3 points a year ago

IRC is dead simple. You cant compare something like matrix to it in terms of resource usage thats not fair. 1GB of ram usage if fine for a server application that does messaging, pictures and video.

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szymon 2 points a year ago

So we need to bring back IRC, if someone doesn't know how it works - well, I don't want to talk with such person. Bring back gatekeeping

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Auth 2 points a year ago

IRC doesnt fit the requirements though. I cant send pictures or videos, I cant make little icons to react, I cant quote reply, I dont get push notifications when pinged. You may think these arent nessesary but to majority of users they are and I dont think IRC is going to adapt to include them.

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gandalf_der_12te 2 points a year ago

well there's the problem, i have a small server available but it only has 4 GB in total and i'm also hosting other things on it, including a luanti game world

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mesamunefire 2 points a year ago

Im running the equivalent to a pi 5 so yeah it can run with a slight delay. You may have some issues with the spikes, definitely if its more than a couple of people. 4GB in total, you will probably have to figure out if its worth it.

Also updates sometimes borks the server. Ive stopped updating until I have time to really sit down and understand what changed.

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gandalf_der_12te 1 point a year ago

there should be a more efficient re-implementation but i don't have time to even attempt that :/

path: 0 18341908 18343184 18343236 18343277 18343318, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 2
auraithx 1 point a year ago

Matrix 2.0 is much faster, but seems like they've been building it for a decade.

The app is out, but still no Spaces support; which is what makes it a competitor to Discord.

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0xD 6 points a year ago

https://github.com/matrix-construct/tuwunel

Plug for tuwunnel.

Easy to set up, and just works. I can't share any of the OP's annoyances - everything is fast. Admittedly, I don't really use the web client. Just the Android app from F-Droid and the linux AUR package element-desktop.

path: 0 18325582, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 1
boonhet 3 points a year ago

Does this come with fewer mental health issues than conduwuit? Because I remember the latter had an author that was a... Mtf puppydog? And had 4 years of work experience at like 19? Who claimed that the entirety of the nix, queer and some other communities were waging a conspiracy against her and her users?

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Shape4985 5 points a year ago

Iv tried matrix a couple times. I wanted to like it but couldnt get on with it.

Signal and simplex are still my prefrence

path: 0 18340879, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 2
atmorous 0 points a year ago

Try out Session. It's one of the best ones that are lesser known

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Shape4985 2 points a year ago

Iv used session before, its not for me Not sure how i feel about the onion routing using the loki and oxen network.

Signal has that "whatsapp" feel friends and family find easy and simplex has no identifiers some other cool features but can be a little complicated for some users

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polle 3 points a year ago

Subjectivr experience against another. I switched an peer group from skype to matrix when matrix went offline. It was way better than i would have expected. Perhaps the timing was better. The element client seems really good, beside some minor jank(like screen share doesn't work) that was probably waylands fault, its a very good experience.

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bitwolf 3 points a year ago

I'm completely afraid of logging into fedora.im now. It's so engulfed in spam, not even normal phishing spam. Absolutely horrifying spam, like gore and killing and other deranged shit.

I had to move back to matrix.org and abandon my account.

path: 0 18340589, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 1
MangoPenguin 2 points a year ago

Don't get your hopes up, I deleted my account on matrix.org because of that same spam, and there's no way to mass ignore invites to the hundreds of rooms from all the spam accounts they let run rampant.

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szymon 2 points a year ago

This url is amazing lol

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JohnEdwa 4 points a year ago path: 0 18351796 18352031, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0
mat 2 points a year ago

I did not enjoy finding out only at the end that the images in this blog post are generated/made using AI.

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UltraGiGaGigantic 2 points a year ago

Shit, I had such high hopes.

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sugar_in_your_tea 8 points a year ago

And that's dashed because of some random blog?

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kcweller 2 points a year ago

I tried it, joined a couple rooms. Wanted to leave those public rooms but I kept getting notifications of rooms I already left.

Very wonky experience, so I dropped it and I use deltaChat now for my Tech-aware contacts

path: 0 18326178, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0
brunoqc 1 point a year ago

I wonder if Keet with every be open sourced. They still are missing a lot of features that I personally find important like trying notification, read receipt.

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rozodru 1 point a year ago

all this stuff just made me go back to IRC and realize how much I missed it.

path: 0 18341635, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
romantired -1 points a year ago

♻️ ΠΊΠ°ΠΊΠΎΠΉ смысл ΠΏΠΎΠ»ΡŒΠ·ΠΎΠ²Π°Ρ‚ΡŒΡΡ этим ΠΌΠ΅Π΄Π»Π΅Π½Π½Ρ‹ΠΌ Π³Π°Π²Π½ΠΎΠΌ ΠΏΡ€Π΅ΠΊΡ€Π°Ρ‚ΠΈΡ‚Π΅, ватсап, ΠΈΠΌΡ…ΠΎ ΠΎΡ‡Π΅Π½ΡŒ Ρ…ΠΎΡ€ΠΎΡˆ

path: 0 18344009, hotness: undefined, score: -1, children: 0
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