I’m probably older than many here and have used messaging systems since UNIX “talk” and “write”. Commercial IMs such as icq, msn, yahoo, google chat, WhatsApp, signal. Federated and open systems such as irc and Jabber.

I have tried to jump into Matrix, but it is terrible. The resource usage is crazy, the user experience (even for an expert like myself) is incredibly bad, I lose messages, federation breaks all the time, and it doesn’t even bring anything new to the table regarding features! I cannot recommend it to anybody, not even my nerd friends!

Curious, I dived down into its specifications, and it is clear that the people who designed it didn’t learn anything from past systems. They just wanted to create a new and shiny messenger: “theirs” — cue in XKCD 927

I understand the push for a “modern” messaging system (xmpp is from the late 90s, during the hype of xml, etc) but Matrix, while “modern” in the sense of recent, is definitely worse than the previous alternatives. It is plain unusable. I wish I was wrong. I have used it for 3 years waiting for improvements but it is simply broken by design.

  • Midnight WolfEnglish
    10·
    23 hours ago

    I’ve been running a discord ‘server’ for a decade and I fucking hate it. UI has shit all over the place, some are menus, some buttons, some only access able from left/right click, tons of things are buried in menus, if you want api access or ‘apps’ you need to use the dev site which the application does not tell you about at all, they say they will send server admins info on new features and changes but that’s a fucking lie, so things that were in one location and accessibility via xyz now are nowhere to be found…

    It’s genuinely awful. When I think about discord, I think fondly of Xfire and Skype. Skype. Even after the MS buyout.

    E: and that’s ignoring the advertisements, ‘quests’, paywall features for p2p functionality…

    • HubertManne@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      23 hours ago

      I sorta question some uses of chat. Like there is real time communication and non realtime. I don’t feel non realtime is really chat. A forum like this is more appropriate to non realtime. chat should be instances.