Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org
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Self hosted matrix works great. /thread
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 ofmatrix.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. -
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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)
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.
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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.
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.
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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. We should all abandon Matrix and implement any missing features into IRC or maybe XMPP
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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.
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
there should be a more efficient re-implementation but i don't have time to even attempt that
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XMPP works, but there are no video calls. Matrix has those, and they are very good. But since it is not possible there to see the online state of my friends (turned off everywhere due to horrible performance), it defeats the purpose. I want to see if they are at their computer, not if they own a mobile phone.
I do 1:1 videocalls on XMPP. Quite some clients implement that now. But there were no videoconferences until very recently. That's changing, though. See Movim right now, for example.
Main 2 issues with XMPP are inconsistent clients (in terms of GUI but also features wise) and the incredibly, astonishingly, ridiculously sloooooooooooooooow evolution of the protocol through the XSF. Nothing can get in there until it's "perfect". Clients devs are reluctant to implement things until the extension is stable. And the best part is this approach hardly work: the best way to figure if something works is to deploy it in larger and larger scales and improve it on the way as you identify corner cases you didn't think about. Not to review the description for months/year until it qualifies as literature...
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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.
Often, the problem is that projects get to a point where they're happy and the maintainer doesn't want to add any new features. So people then are forced to build a new project to get those features.
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I agree. We should all abandon Matrix and implement any missing features into IRC or maybe XMPP
Sure, go for it. Though XMPP has so many features at this point, it might already have Matrix, irc, Discord, and email for all we know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Often, the problem is that projects get to a point where they're happy and the maintainer doesn't want to add any new features. So people then are forced to build a new project to get those features.
Sometimes, but my point is you don't have to start from scratch. It's free software. You are allowed to make extensions or even fork it.
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there should be a more efficient re-implementation but i don't have time to even attempt that
Yeah thats fair.
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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)
️ какой смысл пользоваться этим медленным гавном прекратите, ватсап, имхо очень хорош
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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Are video calls really that important? I almost never do that.
Almost never, but when they are: very much so yes
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Almost never, but when they are: very much so yes
I just use dedicated software for video calls, it's easy enough to ask the other person to jump on a video call on something else.
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Try out Session. It's one of the best ones that are lesser known
Iv used session before, its not for me Not sure how i feel about the onion routing using the loki and oxen network.
Signal has that "whatsapp" feel friends and family find easy and simplex has no identifiers some other cool features but can be a little complicated for some users
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there should be a more efficient re-implementation but i don't have time to even attempt that
Conduit is a Rust implementation that runs OK, but obviously doesn't have feature parity