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.
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It’s not unpopular. The user experience for Matrix is dog shit. Anyone that tries to pretend it’s not is lying to themselves.
There isn’t a single decent client on any platform. It’s slow and unreliable, even if you self host.
I did heavy testing when discord was about to go to shit earlier this year. I run a small server and was looking for a place to move us. It would be embarrassing to present Matrix to them. Especially being normie and not at all technical.
I praise the effort but it is a slow project with poor results. It’s like taking 10 steps back on chat applications. I would even say running an irc server would be more efficient.
I’m not sure this is very unpopular.
Whenever I look into matrix, these problems (especially resource usage) always seem to come up.
Matrix the protocol or Element the client?
The whole stack. I have tried every desktop and iOS client. The protocol is slow and the chat clients are all over the place UI wise.
Matrix has worked for me basically exactly the same as Discord, with the exception that it takes a smidge longer to get messages, because they are encrypted. Most of fhe problems I have had using it, were related to the client apps and not the protocol.
Its definitely a pain, and someone did a large post several months back showing it has strong israeli ties, if that is something that concerns you.
I didn’t save the post, and don’t remember enough to find it again, but ¯\(ツ)/¯
The resource usage is crazy
I’m running a Synapse server on ~100MB RAM. Element requires HALF the RAM of Discord.
Are you trying to run that thing on the Apollo lunar computer?
Downvoted, because i agree.
I genuinely thought it was an unpopular opinion. I keep reading a lot of Matrix apologists on the selfhosted/tech communities, but it seems that they may be a minority overall!
Yes, everyone says “just srt up matrix instead of using WhatsApp or signal” or whatever. It doesn’t sound awesome to me. Also, it’s more work than I care to put in.
I mean I find discord hard to deal with as a user and everyone else seemed to love it.
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…
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.
In case you missed it, there’s a worthy discord competitor now, and it can be self-hosted: https://fluxer.app/.
Switched over with a group of friends months ago, and it’s been seamless.
Is it E2EE?
Nah, it’s not trying to compete on that front.
True E2EE isn’t compatible with a Discord-like UX due to backward secrecy issues, and it’s a bit of a moot point given that self-hosting mostly sidesteps the core problem E2EE solves.
I unfortunately can’t find a link to the article from a few months ago, but reading about the protocol and its development definitely makes it look like using it for a chat server was an afterthought. IIRC the protocol was good for keeping “events” in sync across multiple servers, and that was the entire intent, there was nothing chat-specific about the protocol.
And TBH after reading that, the “move fast and half-ass things” approach explains a lot of other symptoms. Synapse server is not a memory hog like it was in 2020 anymore, but does zero cleanup, and does not have an admin panel to do so yourself. Until 2-3 years ago, there was no official admin panel, just API calls (very inconsistent at that). And some cleanup (state_groups_state table) needs to be done directly on the DB! The client was generally fine, although timely notifications and attachments were an issue for some people. Onboarding was complete garbage. I give Vector/Element credit for having a consistent web/Android/iOS app though.
But now with ElementX/2.0 “rollout”, it’s a mess. Synapse is now part of corporatesque “suite”, where each module is de-facto required. Element “Classic” is not maintained anymore, while ElementX does not have feature parity and is much slower than Classic for me.
Wrong community. That view is the majority view for everyone but the most die hard stans of Matrix.
And from a technical perspective the pseudo blockchain that is the foundation of the protocol is a terrible idea and should have never left the prototyping stage. But while their former bosses at Amdocs agreed and refused to further fund the project, the Matrix people got lots of crypto-currency funding during the height of that bubble to continue forward with this horrible idea.
Edit: the protocol might have some usecase as an email replacement in highly regulated government setting though.
pseudo blockchain that is the foundation of the protocol
Can you please elaborate on that? 🤔
The data model that the distributed database that forms the core of the Matrix protocol is using has many technical similarities to blockchains, just without the proof-of-work that Bitcoin etc added on top of the Merkle-tree.
doesn’t even bring anything new to the table regarding features
Are there other similar systems with better UX and the same or better privacy guarantees? That’s Matrix’s main feature (+ federation).
I’m probably older than you, started one of the first Fidonet nodes in my country (back when you edited a shared text file to list yourself) and ran a subscription BBS with banks of USR modems for porn and mail when I was a teenager. If we’re dick measuring about being an old.
I think Matrix is fine. Been using it since Skype went away (yah, I know). I started with just a matrix.org account and now I run my own federated server without a problem for friends, family and business.
Sounds like a skills issue. Might want to stick to DIscord and not bitch about a free product provided out of a wish for people to have an alternative to shit like that.
Can’t really disagree. I’ve been running a small Synapse server for personal use for 7 years, I think, still waiting on the ecosystem being actually fully usable.
One problem is the protocol, it evolves too fast for 3rd party (FOSS) clients or server software to keep up. This means that either you run Synapse and Element, or you risk that your server can’t federate with Synapse, which is probably most of Matrix.
Then there’s this Element X ordeal, it’s a marketing disaster. A Matrix client is pretty complicated, and the Element team decided to start writing everything from scratch. Unfortunately I think they got hit with the same problem as 3rd party clients, it’s hard to finish missing client features when you’re struggling to keep up with a rapidly evolving protocol and server. Not sure if the devs still say Element X is even beta, while the marketing people promote it as feature-complete, ready for prime time. This is likely just to raise money, but it sure ain’t helping the confusion with regular people, who to be fair are likely not the target audience for any part of the stack.
All that said, I host Synapse, use Element and Element X, and haven’t had any issues in many years. But I just don’t trust them to work well enough to suggest a non-tech-savvy friend to try. I really wish they’d put the brakes on a bit.
https://keet.io/ has group chats, i have only tried dms and it’s great
Anyone dabbled in movim?
Matrix user experience
Matrix is a protocol. I too have these issues with Element (the popular Matrix client), but this doesn’t mean that the protocol is bad.
This is like saying you hate HTTP or the Internet just because Internet Explorer is bad, or that the Fediverse (ActivityPub) is bad just because you don’t like lemmy.today’s default website theme.
UX problems are solved just by choosing a different client/website/mobile app. That is indeed an issue, the lack of more mature native clients. There are many ( https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/ ), but last time I tried to test them, some feature or another was missing :(
The same goes even for e.g. bugs in federation, since we have competition even on the server software! https://matrix.org/ecosystem/servers/
Do you have any technical comments about improvements that can be made on the protocol? 🤔 https://spec.matrix.org/latest/
XMPP is a protocol too, can run on a Pentium-II (I hosted a server with 100s of users on a P2) and it doesn’t suffer from federation issues or message loss.
When there is not good client or server available, maybe it’s because the protocol was poorly designed.
Agreed, this comes up every time anyone complains about matrix. Someone says “matrix is the protocol, you’re complaining about a client”, and my response is always “then what is a client without these problems”. No one ever names a proper client, they just say to look at a list and choose a different one.
Matrix is horrendous.
What would you propose using instead?
Matrix is horrendous
It is far more productive to recommend, have a discussion and help develop alternatives, instead of pointing out that everything is just bad
[show a client whithout these problems]
These issues are at least solveable by a client though. The fragmentation that seems to be happening around XMPP however, is not. No one can do anything e.g. if half of the public XMPP servers (instances) don’t support federation, or encryption, or images
IRC while you can’t do many of the things you can in matrix, is a much better solution right out of the box.
If you want an actual alternative messaging platform then Zulip is fantastic. OSS, self-hostable, and is the forum for massive online communities like rust and redhat with no issues.
why is this such an issue. like some instances get defederated. servers that are not federated would be like instaces that almost every other instance has defederated. If a server does not have images the people on it should know that and if they wanted them they should change instances. encryption though is a big issue. I would hope unencrypted instaces would not federate to encrypted ones. I guess im saying if servers lack popular extensions they would just die on the vine, no?
[XMPP good]
That’s true! I tried looking into using it because it seemed pretty good, but the fact that every simple little feature is a protocol extension is a flaw as well:
e2e encryption, federation, communities and community features (which are impotant points of focus for Matrix), even sending an image or an audio message, and synchronizing chat history (!) are not guaranteed to work on all servers/clients! I’m not sure if this is even possible on Matrix
[no good implementations because it may be poorly designed]
Same goes for XMPP 😅 XMPP seems to be losing adoption (instead of feeling more mature) even though it’s a 27 year old protocol, while Matrix (started in 2014) is gaining 😅 XMPP seems to have ~3 clients on F-Droid (and their forks) which look like a default SMS app, while Matrix clients, SDKs, bridges etc continue to pop up on flathub and F-Droid
(I don’t think these alone should be a reason to not use XMPP! I’m just mentioning it as an answer to your point. However, I think that the fact that image support is an optional after-thought of the protocol, shows the age of the protocol a bit)
(Also please correct me if I’m wrong! I haven’t looked into it in a while, but the ecosystem definitely felt less consistent than Matrix’s)
In any case, while good points can be made for either protocol, in the meantime centralized services (like Signal) are gaining adoption, which are not great things to rely on with Chat Control (etc) on the horizon 😕
We should try promoting, using, helping to develop anything we believe is the best and seems to have more potential and be more resilient!
I also like the work that’s happening on SimpleX.chat (even though I’m not sure if it’s going towards “Web3”-territory), since the distributed design and the privacy features (no UIDs, support for many profiles, quantum-resistant encryption) may prove more resilient to the Chat Controls of the future 🤔 At the same time it seems to have a more “centralized service”-feeling UX and user on-boarding, while in fact being less centralized
I actually do agree with you quite a lot. XMPP has two important issues: everything is an extension, including encryption (n 1998 we were still using telnet…) and relying heavily on XML, which was a good idea en 1998 but now we have better formats.
Thanks for the fair arguments. It may seem I’m defending XMPP, actually, I’m not… I ran a server and it was not great. I was trying to compare an --as you say-- 27-year-old protocol with a modern one, and Matrix doesn’t seem to be significantly better. It’s a shame, because I’d love to use it, but it just does not work well.
Everything being an extension is a good feature. And given how the monolithic nature of the Matrix protocol has not solved the problem of client fragmentation and partial spec implementation that they originally pointed at being a problem in the XMPP ecosystem proves that this was an naive assumption.
As for XML: unless you are tying to shoehorn a chat protocol into HTML5 like Matrix does, json is a horrible format. There are many good reasons to use XML and from a client developer perspective you don’t really need to deal with it that much if the verbose syntax isn’t to your liking.
the actual unpopular opinion: xml was, and continues to be a good choice for a chat protocol
Everything being an extension is a good feature
You’re right! I thought about it as I was typing, that having a mechanism to evolve in the future is important! And both protocols can evolve over time
Though I think that the “Matrix evolves, server implementors should follow the specification” model/mentality may work better (even if not all implementations follow it, but most probably will)
Than the mentality of “the base XMPP protocol only sends text messages, everything else is optional, before joining a server and downloading an app users are advised to check if they support images, encryption, federation, and chat history synchronization”
