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.

  • zewm@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    14 days ago

    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.

    • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      0·
      14 days ago

      I’m not sure this is very unpopular.

      Whenever I look into matrix, these problems (especially resource usage) always seem to come up.

      • zewm@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        14 days ago

        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.