Technology

Seeing lots of dislike for Matrix lately. Hosted a Synapse server for many years, never had issues with encryption keys, but have to agree that Element the company (formerly Vector, but they now control the protocol too?) rolls out more new things than they fix old ones. E.g: Element X is slower and calls are not backwards compatible (!). Synapse server keeps getting some (corporate-looking) auth stuff added while on-boarding and registration for plain accounts on self-hosted servers is still a pain. To give them credit, Element app is consistent across platforms (for purposes of convincing people and troubleshooting), and bridges work pretty well.

But it seems any self-hosted solution has its can of worms.

XMPP, being old, implements all modern-expected functionality as extensions, and servers are not guaranteed to have them (common argument). Spam was an issue as well (but simplicity of the on-device and server database allows easy message and attachment deletions). iOS clients for XMPP are meh and require integration with Apple push servers (Snikket and Monal do that, but for how long?)

Tried SimpleX years ago, loved the idea, but it was going through growing pains. In the same vein as metadata leaks for Matrix and XMPP, if you host your own SMP server with a few users, that exposes some info vs using default servers (along with thousands users)

Whoa now, author sees a censoring filter as a most basic feature of a free and open chat infrastructure? It's not a social media client, you know? It was made for closed groups like governments and companies.

I use Fluffychat to talk with family and friends and for that it's good.

Edit: ok, looks like spam really is a problem.

The awful spam was the reason I left, I got mass invited to rooms with really nasty names, and there's no way in the client to mass ignore invites, you have to go to each one and click ignore.

That wouldn't be the end of the world, except their client seems to rely on waiting for the server to respond to an action in the foreground, so every time I click ignore it sits there processing for like 10-20 seconds before I can click the next one. There's no select all, there's no way to just rapidly tap ignore and have it process in the background like it should be doing.

Also they said even after banning the accounts, there's no way on their end to remove the invites the banned account sent out.

Overall it's just painful to use, the clients are bad, the moderation system doesn't work (what kind of system lets 1 account send out thousands of invites?? It should have auto-banned them within the first 10 or something), their cleanup system doesn't work, and everything just feels slow as molasses.

it's crazy, we'we had no issue with matrix even though i was sceptical at first and there was some teething issues, but we've onboarded non-technical users no problem.

the main thing is, we don't federate.

i've used fluffychat on desktop and android with zero problems.

We moved our instance Matrix to Zulip. It is much better now and makes peoples talk way more than on Matrix.

I assessed Matrix a few years ago and came to the same conclusion. I went with IRC3 which is a new standard that overcomes most of IRC's issues. I think IRC is still quite good, and actually has working clients for everything, web etc

I became adept in IRC in early 90s when I was under 10 years old, before my BB provider was even a full ISP (so I couldn't even look up help on what existed of the early web). Every time I hear an adult claim its too complicated/obscure/esoteric I realize how close to the medical exam scene in Idiocracy we've gotten in a few short decades.