I dislike how little security and moderation it has myself. Too basic, IRC seemed to have better moderation support but granted they used bots for more advanced stuff. Not to mention how clunky it seems. That is ignoring the even higher bar required to even get started, having to find both a client and a server to get started is a pretty high bar for a lot of people.

The protocole is fine I think the real problem is the synapse implementation but I could be wrong on that take I am no expert.

I don’t use Matrix due to a permanent copy of all activity being kept on servers. It seems Matrix only has private group chats but not end-to-end direct messaging to add a contact and message them, you have to invite a user to a chat.

Overall, it’s good, but you need to know what exactly you’re signing up for. The reality is that you can run a decentralized or centralized E2EE chat server, along with voice/video calling, without much effort. There are hiccups with the key exchange that suck, and metadata isn’t really protected. It really comes down to if it meets your particular requirements.

Yes and No

I consider matrix to be somewhat equivalent to XMPP or public mailing lists. It is potentially decentralized (even though everyone uses matrix.org) and it can host group chats. And for those purposes it is ok-ish, but for privacy it is no good.

My pet peeve with matrix is that I consider most features to be half baked. And instead of fixing them we just keep pilling up more. Here is a list in no particular order

• encryption regularly breaks in weird ways, usually you see a message that you can’t read
• if you enable encryption in a chat room you cannot disable it
• we now have two official clients for Android (Element and Element X) in the first one encryption breaks in weird ways, in the later there is no way to use Spaces properly
• direct messages between people don’t work well - it is like they are a room with the two people
• privacy wise matrix is weak, leaks metadata, attachments are not encrypted, etc. Do not use if you expect privacy/anonymity. Also I think most groups run without encryption because of the other issues.
• verifying sessions between clients is painful e.g. the client annoys me to verify but then verification does not trigger on the second client

Because of this mess your quality of experience will vary depending on the client and features you use. The web clients are usable.

I don’t really use the video/audio calls so I have no comments on that front.

I wanted to participate in some Matrix groups, so hosted Conduit. Synapse was out of the question because it is too heavy for my cheap VPS. Some of the groups were encrypted, and my messages there were consistently rendered unreadable! Whether this was a Conduit vs. Synapse or matrix.org vs. everyone else I don’t know, but the result is thw group being rendered unusable.

But my biggest problem is easily the storage, as Conduit offers no way to clean it up and my disk space is really small. The mandatory “everyone stores everything” model is so weird and seemingly unneeded for a chat… Why isn’t it optional at least??

Seriously, why is Synapse - the only fully-functional implementation - so damn heavy? Even the developers admit it doesn’t scale, introducing a different commercial version for big deployments! (wonder if this was the plan all along lol)

It’s just a public discord server but half baked. Its attempts to add “privacy” just slow it down and increase resource needs, and so it’s worse off than discord.

Their solution? Don’t turn on encryption for public rooms.

At least simplex is actively trying to solve the large encrypted groups issue.

Its definetely more polished for users, but it leaks metadata. XMPP is nicer to work with, as a developer.

My wife and I use it to chat privately and I host synapse inside our LAN so im not federated. Works perfectly for that, but I’ve heard a lot of people have issues with large groups.

It’s not a private messaging platform, it’s an anti-censorship messaging platform among other things. If you’re looking for privacy, this probably isn’t the application for that. Though it is somewhat possible to make it more private, that’s not the primary use case. If you’re looking for a platform for public conversations where corporate interests of the day won’t cause your messages to be censored, then Matrix might be useful. But moderation of spam, hate content, etc., is also not going to be robust in general.

Matrix is good for private general messaging. The fact that it’s decentralised means it can also withstand things like government-ordered shutdowns or back doors, since there is no central point that controls the whole network.

Two things to be aware of:

• Some non-message bits (e.g. room topic text and membership) have not yet been moved to the encrypted channel, so those could be read by the administrator of a homeserver that participates in your chat room. Since most people care primarily about keeping the message content private, this is an acceptable trade-off to get all the things that Matrix offers.
• The upcoming Matrix 2.0 features and design choices simplify the UI and fix some occasional errors. It might be worth waiting until this stuff officially lands in the client apps before bringing your contacts to Matrix, for a better experience all around.

I have used XMPP for some time now and I tried Matrix for a bit, but have stuck with XMPP until now.

I found it practically very easy to set up a prosody XMPP server in a raspberry pi. In XMPP you have the core standard that is kept quite minimal and then you can extended your implementation using XMPP extension protocols (XEPs) in a highly modular fashion. This approach of building on top of a light core using well-documented extensions I like very much.

With Matrix, JSON is used instead of XML. I think that JSON is a nice format when trying to look under the hood at how the message data is structured. XML is a bit of a pain to look at in my opinion. And I think JSON might be more efficient in how it moves the data around. So, that is a big positive for me. But I Matrix appears to be more focused on being feature rich than on having a flexible modular structure. While it does have extensions, successful extensions do have a chance of being eventually integrated into the core protocol. This makes the core feel bloated to me, because I have very minimal requirements.

In terms of security, in XMPP you start with the core and then you select the type of encryption that you like (OpenPGP, OMEMO, etc). OMEMO encryption has plausible deniability built into its design, and for me, plausible deniability is a property that I consider important for messaging. The modular approach to XMPP also means that these are choices that one gets to make in an active manner, and the protocols are open protocols that come from outside of XMPP. With Matrix you get their encryption protocol as part of the core - it is a protocol that they designed and that you need to accept to use their tool with encryption. It is probably a good protocol, but I don’t think it has plausible deniability built in, and that’s a choice you did not get to make.

As for moderation, I don’t know. Do they mean moderation tools, or the actual absence of moderators and unmoderated communities? Because the latter is more a property of the people using the tool that the tool itself. You can have your own private communities.

If someone asks me, I could recommend Matrix but would rather recommend XMPP, depending on what they are looking for specifically.

Along with the other bits that people like and dislike about it, I have another problem with it.

In order to deploy software in a manner that is resilient, it’s necessary to deploy it in a “High Available” manner. This usually involves duplicated the service across multiple machines, and then automatically switching from one server to the next if one machine goes down. I consider this necessary for something to be a true alternative to the big proprietary software like discord/slack/etc, for smaller groups or nonprofits who want more reliability. Someone losing internet at their house should not result in the whole service going down. A datacenter going up in flames should not result in that lemmy instance going down (forgot which one this happened to, but I’m referencing a real thing).

The most common way (and arguably, one of the easiest) to do high availability is Kubernetes. Kubernetes has a sort of package manager, called helm where you can quickly spin up services in a highly available manner. Many services offer official helm charts (Unofficial ones are not going to be maintained reliably, so I don’t like them).

The helm chart for Synapse and the rest is enterprise only meaning you have to pay. Discovering this is what finally really soured me on Matrix as using it as a discord alternative.

Of course, I never really considered Matrix a discord alternative. It lacks certain features that people want, mentioned below, like voice rooms (although voice rooms are by definition, metadata leakage, meaning people who dislike matrix for the metadata leakage would dislike voice rooms lol).

Rocketchat appeals to me because of this. Kubernetes/helm, single sign on, and interestingly, it seems to be able to federate with matrix (although I don’t know if it supports e2ee with matrix). It seems that rocketchat has it’s own e2ee, though I don’t know how it works (or if it’s any good). It also seems to support matrix clients, but doesn’t seem to actually be based on matrix.

But otherwise, rocketchat seems like a much better discord alternative.

Depends on the use case an server.

Google and facebook do not yet have public servers. You want a trudtworthy server such that noone abuses your metadata like the time of sending a message.

It’s very useful for companies like email but for real time communication. I’d prefer matrix over most other forms. In many companies and agencies matrix is getting introduced these days.

It’s not anonymuous just like signal isn’t perfectly anonymuous.

As an end user it feels bloated and slow, the apps are all over the place and it still doesn’t have voice rooms like discord does.

Also abandoned channels seem to be a huge issue, many of the channels I’m in are on like the 10th version or more and keep creating new ones for some reason, losing the history of the old ones.

The idea is really cool, and it mostly works, it just needs a ton of refinement.