Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org
-
I have to wonder if there is a major commercial interest in that though.
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.
-
Don't fucking clone the godaweful mess that is Discord. Please, for the love of God start with something else.
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
-
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.
-
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
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.
-
This post did not contain any content.
Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org
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.
マリウス (xn--gckvb8fzb.com)
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 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.
-
Don't fucking clone the godaweful mess that is Discord. Please, for the love of God start with something else.
Discord is what people like and are used to though. If you want the average user to switch it needs to be somewhat familiar.
-
I think the barrier to entry is kind of high, you need to use a bouncer to see what happened while you were offline.
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.
-
Shit, I had such high hopes.
And that's dashed because of some random blog?
-
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
If you want 1:1 chat, Simplex should work well.
-
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.
-
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.
Are video calls really that important? I almost never do that.
-
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.
The CSAM spam is so annoying. I don't understand who is doing this or why.
-
This post did not contain any content.
Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org
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.
マリウス (xn--gckvb8fzb.com)
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.
-
This post did not contain any content.
Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org
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.
マリウス (xn--gckvb8fzb.com)
Iv tried matrix a couple times. I wanted to like it but couldnt get on with it.
Signal and simplex are still my prefrence
-
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
-
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
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.
-
This post did not contain any content.
Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org
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.
マリウス (xn--gckvb8fzb.com)
all this stuff just made me go back to IRC and realize how much I missed it.
-
This post did not contain any content.
Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org
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.
マリウス (xn--gckvb8fzb.com)
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.
-
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
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.