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.
  • sunth1ef@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    6 hours 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

  • Sean Tilley@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 hours 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.

    • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.comEnglish
      0·
      7 hours 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.

  • Mio@feddit.nuEnglish
    0·
    13 hours 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.

    • Turret3857@infosec.pubEnglish
      0·
      8 hours 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

  • kcweller@feddit.nlEnglish
    0·
    16 hours 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

  • 0xD@infosec.pubEnglish
    0·
    17 hours 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.

  • Trihilis@ani.socialEnglish
    0·
    17 hours 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 like session, 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.

    • pulsewidth@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      5 hours ago

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

      • philpo@feddit.orgEnglish
        0·
        3 hours 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.

        • muusemuuse@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          10 hours 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.

        • deadcade@lemmy.deadca.deEnglish
          0·
          11 hours 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

    • cmhe@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      15 hours 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.

      • yessikg@fedia.io
        0·
        14 hours ago

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

  • 2910000@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    21 hours 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

  • edent@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    22 hours 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.

    • AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.spaceEnglish
      0·
      16 hours 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.

    • brunoqc@piefed.caEnglish
      0·
      18 hours 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.

  • sk1nnym1ke@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    23 hours ago

    I am still mad that are no clients that supports multiple accounts. So I am ending up installing for each account a different client.

  • supermurs@kbin.earth
    0·
    23 hours 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.

    • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.socialEnglish
      0·
      22 hours 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.

  • drkt@scribe.disroot.orgEnglish
    0·
    23 hours 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.

      • Telorand@reddthat.comEnglish
        0·
        22 hours 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.

      • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netEnglish
        0·
        23 hours 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.

          • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netEnglish
            0·
            22 hours 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 😄

            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.

          • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
            0·
            22 hours 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.

            • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              20 hours ago

              Signal doesn’t suffer anything worse than DoS if a hostile party controls the central service. That’s its point and role. It’s based on the assumption that such hostile parties as governments don’t like DoS’ing central services, they prefer to be invisible.

              For other points and roles other solutions exist. One can’t make an application covering them all, that never happens.

              Briar again (I’ve finally read on it and installed it, and I love how it works and also the authors’ plans on the future possibilities based on the same protocols, but not for IM, say, there’s an article discussing possibility of RPC over those, which, for example, can give us something like the Web ; I mean, those plans are ambitious and if I want them to succeed so much, I should look for ways to defeat my executive dysfunction and distractions and learn Java). Except it would be cool if it allowed to toss data over untrusted parties, say, now if two Briar users in the same group are not in each other’s range, but there’s a third Briar user not in that group between them, their group won’t synchronize (provided they don’t have Internet connectivity). If one could allow allocating some space for such piggybacked data, or create some mesh routing functionality, then it would become a bit cooler.

            • eleitl@lemmy.zipEnglish
              0·
              21 hours ago

              End to end encryption between clients (also for groups) seems to partly address the issue of a bad server. As for self-hosting, any rented or cloud sevices are very vulnerable to an evil maid. So either in-house hosting or locked cages with tamper-proof hardware remain an option.

          • InFerNo@lemmy.mlEnglish
            0·
            4 hours 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, …).