Matrix

“Matrix is a superior concept to proprietary Signal, Whatsapp, Telegram etc but the implementation needs some help yet and UI is far behind.”

“I loathe how difficult Matrix is for normal people though. It's a nightmare to find a client, get an account, connect to your server”

“hosting Matrix is a nightmare -- as much as I admire what the Matrix crew is trying to do, the architecture is unwieldy and always has been”

“Matrix gives you plenty of options to be flooded with CSAM or have all your chats become inexplicably unable to ever be decrypted again”

“Matrix was the easy find. Encrypted chat, e2e support, and encrypted voice and video chat rooms with screen share.”

“I find the bridge setup rather suboptimal, but with a complete lack of a good Pidgin alternative for the modern age, it's the best system around”

“being able to have all my chats bridged to one thing where I can comfortably sit in a client I control and can freely modify?”

“I have some internal experimental setup involving Matrix, OpenClaw, and some skills that actually is super useful for this”

“Matrix is far from perfect but if I were to make a website now, I would offer the choice of a Matrix address”

“The key is only necessary as a backup these days. You can share the key from one client to another which works well.”

“it's a known problem, with a known solution (finish ElementX and/or wait for other clients to catch up), and a weakness of an open ecosystem”

“for chatting with friends, you still only need one app - and because Matrix is an open standard, you can even change which app you want it to be.”

“No in-app purchases, hype generation, or kyhrt predatory designs, just the bare basics to get a functional chat app”

“I use matrix with several non-technical friends. Its UI/UX has improved greatly over the last two years or so.”

“issues with thier project organization forking and funding the last few years has made one of thier primary contributors give up on the project”

“So in a sense, it is decentralized already, and it's only a matter of designing and building an interface to manage those packs”

“Every time I've tried to use Element / Matrix it has failed dismally for me and everyone else in whatever community is trialling it.”

“Hiring 10 full time devs to work on Matrix would probably be more effective than 500 full time devs on Slack/Teams”

“Both Matrix the protocol and implementations like Element X have improved immeasurably over the last year or so.”

“My team started using Matrix/Element after years of frustration with Teams and Slack. It's far from perfect, but using a simple application with no built-in ads, AI, bloat, crap, etc is wonderful.”

“If you want a fair comparison for reasoning about security related challenges and tradeoffs you should probably go with matrix.”

“The protocol is too complex/ambitious and the company behind it doesn't have the resources to actually produce a good server nor client implementation.”

“People who don’t need all the features of Slack could just use something free like Signal, WhatsApp, Matrix, Discord, etc”

“Matrix is the next best, because they do avoid the tie-in to phone numbers and such, but their cryptographic design is not so great”

“has encryption being an enforced default for one-to-one mesasges (instead of XMPP's bolted-on after-the-fact extension)”

“technical (not PEBKAK) E2EE issues are rather common and can mean losing all of your messages at unpredictable and uncontrollable times”

“We've been happy Matrix users. Apart from less technical folks losing their encryption keys every now and then”

“Simply fixes some of the many ways that rooms can explode or be bricked. Zero confidence that room brickings are totally fixed once and for all.”

“Matrix team is doing a solid job of running - Keep it up and keep eating the Slack/Teams marketshare up with competitive features and pricing.”

“personally I sort of prefer matrix because all these other protocols require apps whereas matrix can work on top of a browser”

“I gave up after I upgraded my server from a SQLite backend to a PostgreSQL one with their conversion script which introduced errors into my DB.”

“everything constantly being rewritten or replaced with something new that only implements half the features before the original thing is ever finished”

“That's not a fair criticism. Of course you need to expose the server to the network clients are going to be connecting from.”

“we fixed almost all known encryption in ~Sept 2024, and the new generation of clients fixes the slow sync issues”

“if all of the complex architecture and issues are in the support of being decentralized, then this seems like an early planning failure”

“no coupling to any other client - I can just put my recovery key in and be verified without having to deal with other apps.”

“It doesn't happen on any of my accounts or clients. Verification takes a moment if you're in a lot of rooms, but it exchanges all keys.”

“In the real world friends and family aren't running their own matrix servers. At most they are signed up for whatever random one came up first in the search results.”

“The Matrix already has quite an info dump when he joins the real world that halts most of the momentum (on a re-watch, at least).”

“Matrix gives a similar experience with e2ee though, but you have to save a recovery key for the case you lose access to all your sessions”