This one is probably one of the most disappointing one; Matrix had everything I wanted in terms of chat features. Programmability-wise, all it was an encrypted JSON sender/receiver, but in a good way. It basically could be extended however you want since it provided a useful primitive. But the encryption just randomly fails, and it's hard to figure out why, causing you to miss messages. I eventually gave up on building a side project for it.

I have moved my communications to SimpleX for very similar reasons.

I always found Matrix to be extremely clunky because of key management for rooms and stuff like that.

I'm used to using cryptocurrencies. I know how to manage keys, and yet I was constantly getting hit with the same issues with decryption of old messages, even when I properly saved my keys and imported them.

I figure if I'm not even able to use this thing properly, knowing and understanding technology, how do I expect people I talk to to understand how to do it properly?

Then, on top of that, I found out about all the metadata leaking to your home server. Sure, your communications might be encrypted, but if the sender, receiver, reactions, timestamp, etc. is not encrypted, that's not good.

I still have it on my device, but it very rarely gets opened anymore.

Edit: I use a combination of signal for those I know, IRL, and simplex for groups of FOSS enthusiasts, etc.

Your name gave me a chuckle. Yeah its unfortunate.

No love for Threema?
Guys?
Guys?

Just a little bit of trollingâ€

How are you using Simplex as a replacement for Matrix? That's not a leading question - I'm curious about the use case.

I stopped using Matrix for 1:1 and family chat years ago because of how broken encryption has always been, but I've kept using it for public chats since

• privacy isn't solvable in public chats, so the fact Matrix's encryption is terminally screwed up isn't relevant
• there are many public rooms; not IRC-level, but it's still a large domain with large numbers of users
• Matrix is a better public chat than IRC (fight me!) with replies, comment editing, reactions, emojis (that's mostly a client thing, but it's first-class and not a sporadically supported feature), and offline history syncing (as in, see what happened while you were offline).
• I haven't yet found anything that's as good at public rooms as Matrix, that's still federated and OSS. Discord is very good, but it's SPA crap and centralized to boot.

SimpleX seems to be focused primarily on messaging, not public, large group chat... but am I missing something?

You can use SimpleX for large chats. However, at least the current architecture is not the most efficient way of doing so. Especially not once rooms hit a thousand users or more. Does it work? Yes. Does it work well? Only somewhat. I think the developers were caught off guard when people wanted to start using it for large rooms instead of one-on-one communications and had not planned for that when they made the program.

They are addressing the issue by having devices connect to super peers instead of directly peer to peer in order to make large rooms work better. That way, instead of trying to maintain a thousand individual connections, your device might maintain two or three connections to Superpiers and get messages through them. I make it even harder on myself because I demand that my SimpleX do everything over a tor.

It's a good app. Sadly the price of entry puts people off.

[object Object]

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.

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.

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

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 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

Wow, this sounds like a terrible UX.

what does it mean ?

A VERY common javascript error. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4750225/what-does-object-object-mean

piefed.social now has a Zulip server too although the Matrix rooms are still open. Seems like the tide is going out on Matrix though.

Yes you're missing a lot. SimpleX even has a directory bot to find public group chats.

https://simplex.chat/contact#/?v=1-4&smp=smp%3A%2F%2Fu2dS9sG8nMNURyZwqASV4yROM28Er0luVTx5X1CsMrU%3D%40smp4.simplex.im%2FeXSPwqTkKyDO3px4fLf1wx3MvPdjdLW3%23%2F%3Fv%3D1-2%26dh%3DMCowBQYDK2VuAyEAaiv6MkMH44L2TcYrt_CsX3ZvM11WgbMEUn0hkIKTOho%253D%26srv%3Do5vmywmrnaxalvz6wi3zicyftgio6psuvyniis6gco6bp6ekl4cqj4id.onion