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.

  • oranki@nord.pubEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    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.