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.
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.
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?
It is far more productive to recommend, have a discussion and help develop alternatives, instead of pointing out that everything is just bad
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.
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 featured (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
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