Yeah this is exactly what turned me off from it when I looked into it. I kind of like that it would lend a more physical-space quality to it, but ultimately I'm hardly ever online, so it would just be me being totally out of the loop all the time without a bouncer. I know I could figure out how to do it, but it's a lot of effort for something where I'm not even sure I'll like what it gives me.

And that's dashed because of some random blog?

If you want 1:1 chat, Simplex should work well.

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.

Are video calls really that important? I almost never do that.

The CSAM spam is so annoying. I don't understand who is doing this or why.

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.

Iv tried matrix a couple times. I wanted to like it but couldnt get on with it.

Signal and simplex are still my prefrence

Try out Session. It's one of the best ones that are lesser known

yup I went back to IRC. got tired of discord and matrix just wasn't for me. IRC is where it's add. still remember all the stuff from the 90s so it was just like riding a bike. plus I can have it in my Terminal which is a plus.

all this stuff just made me go back to IRC and realize how much I missed it.

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.

Suppose for text messages, sharing files, contacts and such we have solutions, and with a set of libraries solving the hard parts, that can be done relatively easily. Encryption is hard, but suppose we are not even doing E2EE yet, that we are fine with TLS till the server, mutual TLS between servers, and additional something like OTR or PGP for 1-on-1 conversations.

Voice/video calls, and especially group voice/video calls, are a different matter entirely. You have to think, solve latency problems, congestion problems, so that those were usable at all.

Discord UI is not very nice.

Yeah, I finally pulled the trigger and moved to my own domain from matrix.org. Man, it is just so much faster. Which is sad, because the performance is pretty bad. (Element Web seems to do some per-room request as part of the initial loading screen which is obviously not scalable) but getting off of matrix.org is a huge performance improvement.

That being said there is nothing really wrong with matrix.org. The problem is really public rooms. People will join and spam. It is true of any protocol (have you heard about email?) but Matrix definitely needs to (and they are slowly working on) make it more expensive for spammers.

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.

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.

I agree. We should all abandon Matrix and implement any missing features into IRC or maybe XMPP

Its running about 1GB for me and my server setup. It spikes a bit if there is a lot going on, but it can get low than that when its just idling. Its not terrible, but given irc and other clients which take MB for RAM...its a bit of a hog-ish.

well there's the problem, i have a small server available but it only has 4 GB in total and i'm also hosting other things on it, including a luanti game world

Im running the equivalent to a pi 5 so yeah it can run with a slight delay. You may have some issues with the spikes, definitely if its more than a couple of people. 4GB in total, you will probably have to figure out if its worth it.

Also updates sometimes borks the server. Ive stopped updating until I have time to really sit down and understand what changed.