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.
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.