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.
I’m probably older than you, started one of the first Fidonet nodes in my country (back when you edited a shared text file to list yourself) and ran a subscription BBS with banks of USR modems for porn and mail when I was a teenager. If we’re dick measuring about being an old.
I think Matrix is fine. Been using it since Skype went away (yah, I know). I started with just a matrix.org account and now I run my own federated server without a problem for friends, family and business.
Sounds like a skills issue. Might want to stick to DIscord and not bitch about a free product provided out of a wish for people to have an alternative to shit like that.