Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org

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.

- 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. ¯(ツ)_/¯
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.
- 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. :(
- 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.
I agree with you, my main issue with Matrix is that it is a pain to self-host at the moment.
- https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
  Honestly, with this, it is easier than ever. Great documentation !
- Isn't everything a pain to selfhost?
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
- How so?

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.

So what's left? Jabber?
- 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.
- Back to IRC we go...
- 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.
- What about delta?
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.
- 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.

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.

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.
- 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.
- I have to wonder if there is a major commercial interest in that though.
- The CSAM spam is so annoying. I don't understand who is doing this or why.
Oh fuck that culty nonsense!
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.

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

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.

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.

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

Revolt is a self hosted discord clone
- The lack of group voice calls is what mainly kept me from adopting that. Hope they get that working soon.
Nextcloud talk?
- I'm not sure how much it would make sense for me as I don't use Nextcloud for anything else
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.
If you want 1:1 chat, Simplex should work well.

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

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.

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

I think the barrier to entry is kind of high, you need to use a bouncer to see what happened while you were offline.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
- I had such a pain trying to get a consistent client working on mobile.

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

But they both closed source protocols locked down to specific corp
- What would you propose, then?
- 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.
A/S/L?
- 400/F/krynn oh sorry i was in the red dragon inn room :3
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. 😉
- 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...
- Are video calls really that important? I almost never do that.

Self hosted matrix works great. /thread

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.
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.

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.

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.
- 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.
- 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
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.

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.

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

XMPP is still an option

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

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

Signal and simplex are still my prefrence

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

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

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

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.

Why don't people trust Signal?
- Its a 18 months old but OP means this on the same site. https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/if-you-must-use-signal-use-molly/
  The blogger also stopped using proton mail. So idk. Seems to be their thing atm.
- 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.
Counterpoint: this is just some random blogger and you don't need to follow any of their advice.
The article author went back to XMPP, which does appear to be the best option currently.
- In what universe is XMPP better than Matrix?
xmpp mentioned, I'll add IRC
Going back to TS3 and IRC. They never left
xmpp?
I forgot to add nextcloud talk!

This url is amazing lol

It's マリウス.com but the "internationalized domain name" system pynycodes it to gibberish to prevent spoofing urls using lookalike characters.
Like https://xn--mzon-43db.com/ is аmаzon.com. Those are cyrillic lowercase 'а', not 'a'.
[EDIT] The blog itself actually has a great article explaining it.

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

Edit: added mobile.

NeoChat on KDE allows me to choose which account to login to when I start it.
- Does it let you be logged in as both ?
Fluffy chat allows multiple accounts
- I like this client. Thanks for the tip.
I see what you did here. Say something wrong on the internet to get multiple helpful tips.
Element Desktop has profiles. But sadly there are no profiles on the mobile app.
https://commet.chat/

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Shit, I had such high hopes.

And that's dashed because of some random blog?

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

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

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.

♻️ какой смысл пользоваться этим медленным гавном прекратите, ватсап, имхо очень хорош