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

That is what the author said they switch to, but TBH XMPP also has issues with MFA and messages frequently not being decrypted (using OMEMO) and 'unencrypted metadata'.

I wouldn't say that it works better than Matrix, it just has some different strengths and weaknesses.

Why don't people trust Signal?

Its a 18 months old but OP means this on the same site. https://マリウス.com/if-you-must-use-signal-use-molly/

The blogger also stopped using proton mail. So idk. Seems to be their thing atm.

running your own server is super lightweight.

Not IME. Are you running Synapse? Gigabytes of disk usage and memory leaks requiring restarts.

I am glad someone can admit it failed and we have to learn from this.
I am just wondering what it takes to succeed.

In what universe is XMPP better than Matrix?

Going back to TS3 and IRC. They never left

XMPP is significantly less decentralized, allowing them to """cut corners""" compared to Matrix protocol implementation, and scale significantly better. (In heavy quotes, as XMPP isn't really cutting corners, but true decentralization requires more work to achieve seemingly "the same result")

An XMPP or IRC channel with a few thousand users is no problem, wheras Matrix can have problems with that. On the other hand, any one Matrix homeserver going down does not impact users that aren't specifically on that homeserver, whereas XMPP is centralized enough that it can take down a whole channel.

Meanwhile IRC is a 90s protocol that doesn't make any sense in the modern world of mainly mobile devices.

XMPP also doesn't change much, the last proper addition to the protocol (from what I can tell, on the website) was 2024-08-30 https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0004.html

I'm not sure how much it would make sense for me as I don't use Nextcloud for anything else

I started reading the article but didn’t finish. This guy is a fool. He’s bitching about vendor lock in? The data isn’t supposed to be portable. That’s the point.