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Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

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Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#2

Post by rapnie »

For some particular areas of development there is strong incentive to be on matrix. For instance most ActivityPub / Fediverse related projects favor matrix. One example of a space that has a big collection of rooms here is "ActivityPub community" space [0], but there are plenty more. Also for the FOSS projects I'm interested in I find them mostly on matrix, and Discord, Zulip, or Slack are the exception (you could say that Discord/Slack are mostly chosen by OSS projects, and FOSS prefers Matrix, IRC, Zulip, XMPP).

[0] https://matrix.to/#/#activitypub-community:codelutin.com

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#7

Post by _lvbh »

I'm of the same stance. I've been using Matrix for 3 years now, primarily to communicate with family located where there is high censorship and most messengers are blocked. Probably due to the complexity of the system and inherent design, performance is horrible. Good enough for usage but just unpleasant. Their new Element X client is meant to solve a lot of problems but they're starting to deviate from common standards (e.g. TURN/STUN for calling) and towards "Element Call" and livekit which are a nightmare to set up. There's been more and more encryption problems lately where I'd sync the keys but still fail to decrypt messages on certain clients and lose history on others. I'm sticking with the old Element client but it's obvious the Vector people aren't putting much effort into it anymore seeing as there are very old but critical bugs (main one being the fact that it automatically reaches out to matrix.org when trying to sign in with other homeservers and freezes if the domain is blocked. This is fixed by Element X.) I can fix it myself but until IOS allows sideloading, I have no way of getting my fork onto my family's devices.

If anyone knows an alternative that has web, IOS, and Android clients, easily self hostable, and can do calling, please let me know.

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#8

Post by Takennickname »

I said most of the same things in the Matrix foundation's server. The general response from the team was: "Pay money or shut up and accept what we give you". The number of gigantic changes in direction this project has had in the past couple of years is enough to sink any project. Jitsi to Webrtc, complete change in auth system, Element to Element X. There's two clients. One that's fast, and one that's full featured. You can either skip out on features, or use something slow.

I try to be positive and supportive of project, but my experience with these guys is that they're incredibly arrogant.

It's tough finding an open-standards based IM application for corporate use.

XMPP is kinda fragmented, with no nice clients. Matrix is a clusterfuck with a BDFL who is probably too smart for his own good. Signal is open source but hostile towards self hosting.

P.S I suspect the organization is being led by Architecture Astronauts [1]. Every (including the naming) is abstracted to the point of meaninglessness.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#9

Post by mikae1 »

autumn-antlers wrote: post #6

[flagged]

From https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/faq/:

> According to Google reCAPTCHA, Hcaptcha and Cloudflare Turnstile, I’m a robot. Although I haven’t seen an engraved plate with the label T-800 on myself yet, these days I might as well just be a rogue LLM. Does it even matter anymore?

:)

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