Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org
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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.
The bouncer is just the name for the technology that maintains your connection when your client disconnects.
I'm kind of socially awkward, so I really value being able to "read the room" and see what people were talking about before I joined. I have IRC set up so that when I open it up, I see the previous 40 lines or so of dialog from before I connected. (This is a setting you can adjust on the bouncer).
I could achieve something similar by joining a room and then waiting a few minutes, but sometimes the room is very slow and no one posts, etc., it's nice to just always be able to look at the scroll back when you log on.
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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.
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.
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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 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.
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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.
I agree with you, my main issue with Matrix is that it is a pain to self-host at the moment.
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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)
This url is amazing lol
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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.
So we need to bring back IRC, if someone doesn't know how it works - well, I don't want to talk with such person. Bring back gatekeeping
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This url is amazing lol
It's
マリウス.combut the "internationalized domain name" system pynycodes it to gibberish to prevent spoofing urls using lookalike characters.Like
https://xn--mzon-43db.com/isаmаzon.com. Those are cyrillic lowercase 'а', not 'a'.[EDIT] The blog itself actually has a great article explaining it.
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I agree with you, my main issue with Matrix is that it is a pain to self-host at the moment.
GitHub - spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy: 🐳 Matrix (An open network for secure, decentralized communication) server setup using Ansible and Docker
🐳 Matrix (An open network for secure, decentralized communication) server setup using Ansible and Docker - spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
GitHub (github.com)
Honestly, with this, it is easier than ever. Great documentation !
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I agree that the UI for discord sucks shit, however my thinking is aligned with what another commenter said, its what people already know and are used to. Trying to make anything new will turn users off. I'm very open to being proven wrong about that assumption though. I'd love for a foss project to have better UI/UX than discord.
The UI is not that important. Something a bit similar to Discord in appearance and experience is doable in plenty of available UI toolkits and libraries and frameworks and whatever.
The system itself is important, so that it would be functional with federation, yet not as prone to fragmentation as XMPP, yet efficient.
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The lack of group voice calls is what mainly kept me from adopting that. Hope they get that working soon.
I swear there were calls when I was testing it a year or two ago. Guess not then.
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I agree with you, my main issue with Matrix is that it is a pain to self-host at the moment.
Isn't everything a pain to selfhost?
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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.
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.
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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.
Problem is then you miss important info, for example if friends are talking about a game server they're running and post the connection details, or if they plan an event with a location and time to meet, if you don't have a bouncer and were offline then you can't see those messages.
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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.
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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.
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.
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Isn't everything a pain to selfhost?
Most things are super easy, like 2-5 minutes of set up and it's running and working.
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Most things are super easy, like 2-5 minutes of set up and it's running and working.
Such as?
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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.
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Such as?
Most of the stuff I run on my server is just a basic
docker-compose.yamlfile and it's up and running in a minute or two. Some random examples:- Immich
- Peertube
- Pinchflat
- Vaultwarden
- Mealie
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Most of the stuff I run on my server is just a basic
docker-compose.yamlfile and it's up and running in a minute or two. Some random examples:- Immich
- Peertube
- Pinchflat
- Vaultwarden
- Mealie
So, going from Mealie's instructions, having to learn how to work with Docker, whatever underlying server you're working with, and a database system is easy 2-5 minutes?
