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)

Matrix is commonly used for public, discoverable rooms, much like IRC or Discord. Perhaps it's not good for that use case, but the author seems to wish it was.

An effective spam prevention approach is a basic feature of any public communication service that reaches a certain size. Perhaps keyword filtering as the author suggests isn't the right approach, but some rate limits would help:

• Private messages from a new contact could notify just once until approved instead of once per message.
• Servers could limit the number of outstanding message requests, with a low limit for new accounts.

Yes! Another Splatoon player on the Fediverse! I've seen like 2. Tbh I barely play the game after the Final Fest but, still love the series.

Also yeah wish Matrix and SimpleX didn't suck, they have some awful groups

I was in the Cinny room at one point and it got spammed with CSAM at one point. It was traumatic.

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

SimpleX public rooms work smoothly, IMO, but a lot of rooms have problems with casual Nazism and general rudeness. Some are more moderated than others. I gave up on groups eventually and just use it to talk to people I know.

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 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.

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

Do you have any tips for others looking to move their matrix/irc activity over to simplex?