How about jabber/XMPP

Element Desktop has profiles. But sadly there are no profiles on the mobile app.

XMPP is still an option

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.

Fluffy chat allows multiple accounts

I wish xmpp was p2p. I can self-host but it could be way simpler if people didn't have to.

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.

I see what you did here. Say something wrong on the internet to get multiple helpful tips.

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.

The article author went back to XMPP, which does appear to be the best option currently.

I like this client. Thanks for the tip.

GitHub - matrix-construct/tuwunel: Official successor to conduwuit

Official successor to conduwuit. Contribute to matrix-construct/tuwunel development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub (github.com)

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.

xmpp mentioned, I'll add IRC

I forgot to add nextcloud talk!

Nextcloud talk?

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.

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.

If I want to send and receive messages from another account, I have to press 2 buttons to switch to it. Otherwise, I still get desktop notifications from all of them, I think.

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