Matrix seems to work well. I'm on a smallish non-profit server. I regard it as the premium open-source step forward from IRC.
The worst problem is that there are really no channels that I care to follow.
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2025
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Synapse was too heavy on my resources. Moved to XMPP despite I like Matrix more.
matthew the ceo addressed aot of the criticisms recently, check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyuqM7RbX5E
transcript with links: https://gist.github.com/ara4n/190ad712965d0f06e17f508d1a45b554
other than that, push notifications work fine for me with Ntfy. but as I heard matrix.org hs users have problems, possibly because of serverside firewall issues, investigation is stuck somehow
Matrix works perfectly for me, if you're setting up a new server, I'd go with tuwunel. I'm stuck on synapse, when the tuwunel team makes a way to migrate, I'll do it.
I believe the machines are currently struggling against the humans
Unable to decrypt message. Please try again.
This is quite annoying. When will devs learn to tell people to resolve the problem instead of just showing a pointless error messages?
afaik those errors can't really be solved by users. I mean other than using an up to date client and server.
If users cannot do anything because all encryption keys are lost, then they need to know that and also how to avoid the situation in the future.
I think it's not a bug. It's simply no one online who can share a decryption key.
While I appreciate the joke, I have not seen that problem in quite some time :D
I've last seen it last month. And I have an old chat, where FluffyChat and ("old") Element show all messages by now, but Element X can't decrypt many and both Elements report that they can't guarantee the authenticity of many messages (even my own). For a long time, my chat partner could only read messages I sent via FluffyChat but not those sent by Element. I have not checked if that is still the case.
definetly report the problem. there's a function for it in the app, 3 points menu on the chat list menu, use it after making those errors show up. tick the contact me box. ceo recommends to also notify himself directly: https://gist.github.com/ara4n/190ad712965d0f06e17f508d1a45b554
Some months ago, I had UTD issues with Element X too. My hs has been up for some years, and the devs claimed they had done a lot to fix UTDs.
I was about to bring the server down, but as a last resort decided to log out all but one Element web session which was able to decrypt the messages and try resetting the key backup. Haven't had any UTD issues since then.
Maybe worth a try.
"can't guarantee the authenticity of this message" just means it was restored from backup. In the same vein, if you can decrypt a message in any client, it should upload the keys to the message backup so it can be decrypted on other clients, even ones that haven't logged in.
I've only seen this message in the last months where different servers are having network issues and can't talk
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- DNS adjustments aren't needed if you do .well-known delegations which is easier
- Can recommend continuwuity, it runs much better on less resources. Lacks certain features compared to Synapse but overall good
- Notifications (and read markers) depend on client-specific black magic to work
- Federation do sometimes silent-fail completely, you can reset continuwuity's cache + restart when that happens. But full room history convergence needs patience
- Don't join large rooms unless your server can handle the load
- Don't host public rooms without modbots
The many small bugs make Matrix still bad - I wouldn't recommend a non-tech user unless accompanied by a 24/7 admin. It is trying to improve but very slow because of reasons
Damn. That sucks. (Edit: Referring to the comments saying Matrix is dead and dying.)
I get that IRC and XMPP are more stable and built around federation from the ground up, but... they're not Discord replacements.
That was IMHO, the point of Matrix/Element.
Tell me if I'm wrong, but a significant part of a network's resilience is the number of nodes and users.
Without a glowup or some kind of repackaging, IRC/XMPP are doomed to stay niche.
I had the same experience as OP when I tried Matrix a few years ago. No hate on it but it was not easy and I gave up because I already had a simple IRC setup that's working for me and my friends.
Some IRC clients are now web based and it's been enough to keep a few of my friends there instead of Discord. We use The Lounge. It can keep a history, display images, videos, play mp3s, and show previews of most URLs. Like, we can simply copy/paste images into a channel and they are uploaded on the server and displayed in the chat. There's also push notifications and it's mobile friendly.
Convos also does something like this. Apparently it can also do video chat but I've never got it to work.
I've recently been thinking about giving Matrix another try but I'm pretty sure my friends are going to stay on "modern" IRC anyway.
Well Discord started as a replacement for IRC and TeamSpeak/Mumble, then began to add more and more things and got used as a forum replacement and everything went down the hill. Why not going back to the roots? We had fucking IRC scripts for matchmaking in Q3CTF.
Discord has quite a few good features that IRC doesn't. I will agree that it being used as a replacement for a forum, while also being unsearchable, is amazingly stupid. However, it's used by almost everyone for a reason, and to ignore that (if you were to develop and alternative) ensures you won't succeed. Yeah, we don't need every feature from Discord, but easy voice/text/video chats, image/file sharing, and all the other useful things are required. Yeah, we can probably lose the emotes and crap and be fine.
I wouldn't mind going back to IRC roots if it could be made more user friendly and integrate voice and video chat.
Good UX/UI goes a long way to make it so non-technical people can join and strengthen the network.
Xmpp supports group chat, 1:1 messaging, you've got webtrc support for voice/video, and its extensible.
Jingle even has screen sharing (and I think a WIP remote control function).
What is missing from xmpp?
Technically, nothing.
In practice, who do you know that's using it and doesn't run Arch, by the way?
My point isn't that IRC/XMPP aren't technically capable.
It's that they're not designed for non-technical users.
I want corporate social media to die. Mastodon and Piefed are far from killing the beast, but they've made the more progress than most projects have seen in a long time.
I want corporate messaging to die. Matrix is far from killing the beast, but for a little while, at least it was trying.
Quicksy and Prav apps allow you to easily signup via SMS verification like WhatApp etc. Super easy and the app works like Whatsapp, completely usable for non technical users (much more so than any Matrix client).
And Snikket is an super easy all in one solution for running a XMPP based small group server with invite based onboarding. Also completely non-technical user compatible.
In practice, who do you know that's using it and doesn't run Arch, by the way?
Well I mostly run Debian, but I do have arch on a machine so maybe I don't count.
It's that they're not designed for non-technical users.
Have to agree there, it takes some effort if you're setting it up for friends and family.
Snikket was easy to setup for my family.
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damn, was not expecting to see so much hate towards matrix.
it sure was annoying to set up, but once I got it up the way I wanted, it kind of just worked from that moment on. I’ve had it for some 5 months now and it works as intended with no issues, aside from some small glitches here and there which get fixed very fast (on the mobile app).
my use case was getting off Discord with a bunch of friends, so we needed a reliable way to have multiple chats, channels/rooms and good voice chat with screen sharing. element call does those well. my federation is of course also closed. for me e2ee is just a bonus
I think that if that’s your use case, it’s good for that. synapse does seem a bit inefficient but I guess you can’t do much about it
My experience is the same as yours, but I think the people complaining are the ones who are federated and are in large communities. Matrix apparently doesnt handle large rooms very well.
fair enough, that’s true. it was one of the reasons I turned off federation, even on a beefy server synapse still lagged and timed out when I would join medium sized rooms.
It's still bad, and the foundation keeps digging itself into a deeper and deeper hole. Dead project.
Absolutely unbased take. Please ignore.
Matrix works fine, I have hosted a server on my own for several years through an ansible playbook here.
IRC and XMPP are infinitely less painful, honestly, and both were designed around federation from the ground up, long before it was cool.
IRC does not have any federation, and XMPP does it in a completely different way from Matrix that has unique pros and cons.
IRC is designed for you to connect to a specific server, with an account on that server, to talk to other people on that server. There is no federation, you cannot talk to oftc from libera.chat. Alongside that, with mobile devices being so common, you'd need to get people to host their own bouncer, or host one for nearly everyone on your network.
XMPP federation conceptually has one major difference compared to Matrix: XMPP rooms are owned by the server that created them, whereas Matrix rooms are equally "owned" by everyone participating in it, with the only deciding factor being which users have administrator permissions.
This makes for better (and easier) scaling on XMPP, so rooms with 50k people isn't that big of an issue for any users in that room. However, if the server owning the room goes down, the whole room is down, and nobody can chat. See Google Talk dropping XMPP federation after making a mess of most client and server implementations.
On Matrix, scaling is a much bigger issue, as everyone connects with everyone else. Your single-person homeserver has to talk with every other homeserver you interact with. If you join a lot of big rooms, this adds up, and takes a lot of resources. However, when a homeserver goes down, only the people on that homeserver are affected, not the rooms. Just recently, matrix.org had some trouble with their database going down. Although it was a bit quieter than usual, I only properly noticed when it was explicitly mentioned in chat by someone else. My service was not interrupted, as I host my own homeserver.
The Matrix method of federation definitely comes with some issues, some conceptually, and some from the implementation. However, a single entity cannot take down the federated Matrix network, even when taking down the most used homeservers. XMPP is effectively killed off by doing the same.
I host my tuwunnel server and I am happy with it. The lack of a top level client is my turn down. Element X is good but still lacking, and fluffy chat is maybe better looking but more lacking.
My matrix use case is only WhatsApp and telegram backup using the bridges, actually... So YMMV.
My experience as well, though you might take a look at the recent fluffy chat 2.0 release. It is the closest to a usable client.
But I agree and it's baffling to me how a project backed by so many organisations and a considerable amount of cash fails to deliver even a decent user experience.
Matrix works good. Two years ago Element should've been what element Next is today. But it is getting there. It still has great backers and lots of users. As long as there is no direct alternative, it'll get there.
I don't want american companies owning all my data and neither do companies want that.
It's not the shiny new kid anymore but there is no other new shiny kid. Hence, it is still the brightest and newest kid.
I didn't like synapse or dendrite at all, but conduit has been great.
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I set it up during the outage last week.
Easy enough to just pull in the synapse docker container and run it on my home server. I wireguard it to my VPS that acts as a reverse proxy.
Both federation and push notifications work.
Way back in 2023, Matrix was the jack of all trades but the master of none. It wanted to replace Discord but the video messaging was not stable enough. It wanted to replace Slack but message searching didn't really work. It was still struggling to get a decent client and server implementation, and message loading times were a huge pain point.
Fast forward to today, most of the problems are still there. Give it a couple more years to cook.
If you want a conduwuit sucessor, I'd choose the continuwuity project over tuwunel. The legitimacy as the sucessor is mainly self-proclaimed, and continuwuity is a community effort. The entire thing is kind of a shitshow, though. If you want to do it like 99% of people, make friends with Synapse.
I think what you describe still holds true. You need a few correct DNS entries and an open port. Once you want VoIP, some more ports and a TURN server will be necessary. And that one took me some effort, but the server itself (including federation) was well within my comfort zone. And I run continuwuity these days because Synapse wastes way too much resources for what I do and their other efforts went nowhere. But I'm not sure about the future of those smaller Matrix server projects.
And if you don't like Matrix or can't get it to run, maybe try something like XMPP.
If you want a conduwuit sucessor, I’d choose the continuwuity project over tuwunel.
You realise that sounds insane, right?
Sure, I believe that is supposed to be uWu or maybe some kind of puppy talk. It's certainly originally started by June, who turned conduit (which is a sane name) into conduwuit.
I figured I've lost all shame anyway, back when we discussed nerd topics in the school bus or the 5 'o clock train, like Linux lore, anime, Star Trek concepts and technobabble. I mean people were staring and I'm aware of that, but I've really lost all F*'s to give. And that turns me into the person who I am today, and I'll happily write sentences like the one above. Or still talk about Star Trek in a crowded train. And these days it's the mycelial network and that really makes people question my sanity. 🫠
I switched from IRC to matrix in 2018 specifically because I found mobile difficult.
I used the suggestion in your linked document by running irssi in a tmux session on a VPS I paid for, then using a bridge to an app on my phone. I found the experience to be cumbersome even for someone like myself (and even then irssi required reboots or else it would lose performance over time).
I wanted to use IRC for a family chat, but I couldn't possibly convince my friends and family to go through the same client setup as I did.
In my opinion there are use cases that either IRC or Matrix would be preferred over the other (not to mention other self hosted communication software).
Just host thelounge, its a web based irc client with integrated bouncer.
My matrix server is nearing 5 years old. I have federation disabled, because I don't need that - we are using it as a family chat. sqlite database I'm using is now 2GB, but other than that it is working great.
I do acknowledge that I'm not leveraging the things matrix is designed for (federation, e2e encryption), but to be honest, it's not really good at that.
I installed synapse some weeks ago. Pretty easy, straightforward. Even managed to install some bridges.
After the last matrix.org incident and some info about the failing message retention, I just killed the server again. I'm not comfy with the service being so greedy/resource hungry and also the usability sucks at certain points.
Tbh I had no issues with synapse.
The problems that persist: Very rare issues with decrypting (as I rarely encounter it, while being in encrypted chats with 150+ users, it's not an issue for me), apart from after you changed clients, slow image loading (a bit annoying, but ok if you multitask anyway) and clients all having different feature sets (some of which you can also hackily make work in others).
I've been wanting to get matrix up for my family and friends to chat with my 6 year old on her tablet. I found nextcloud talk to do all the things I wanted with none of the hassle. My daughter is a ridiculous texter.
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