This one is probably one of the most disappointing one; Matrix had everything I wanted in terms of chat features. Programmability-wise, all it was an encrypted JSON sender/receiver, but in a good way. It basically could be extended however you want since it provides a useful primitive. But the encryption just randomly fails, and it’s hard to figure out why, causing you to miss messages. I eventually gave up on building a side project for it.

We moved our instance Matrix to Zulip. It is much better now and makes peoples talk way more than on Matrix.

Seeing lots of dislike for Matrix lately. Hosted a Synapse server for many years, never had issues with encryption keys, but have to agree that Element the company (formerly Vector, but they now control the protocol too?) rolls out more new things than they fix old ones. E.g: Element X is slower and calls are not backwards compatible (!). Synapse server keeps getting some (corporate-looking) auth stuff added while on-boarding and registration for plain accounts on self-hosted servers is still a pain. To give them credit, Element app is consistent across platforms (for purposes of convincing people and troubleshooting), and bridges work pretty well.

But it seems any self-hosted solution has its can of worms.

XMPP, being old, implements all modern-expected functionality as extensions, and servers are not guaranteed to have them (common argument). Spam was an issue as well (but simplicity of the on-device and server database allows easy message and attachment deletions). iOS clients for XMPP are meh and require integration with Apple push servers (Snikket and Monal do that, but for how long?)

Tried SimpleX years ago, loved the idea, but it was going through growing pains. In the same vein as metadata leaks for Matrix and XMPP, if you host your own SMP server with a few users, that exposes some info vs using default servers (along with thousands users)

The awful spam was the reason I left, I got mass invited to rooms with really nasty names, and there’s no way in the client to mass ignore invites, you have to go to each one and click ignore.

That wouldn’t be the end of the world, except their client seems to rely on waiting for the server to respond to an action in the foreground, so every time I click ignore it sits there processing for like 10-20 seconds before I can click the next one. There’s no select all, there’s no way to just rapidly tap ignore and have it process in the background like it should be doing.

Also they said even after banning the accounts, there’s no way on their end to remove the invites the banned account sent out.

Overall it’s just painful to use, the clients are bad, the moderation system doesn’t work (what kind of system lets 1 account send out thousands of invites?? It should have auto-banned them within the first 10 or something), their cleanup system doesn’t work, and everything just feels slow as molasses.

I have moved my communications to SimpleX for very similar reasons.

I always found Matrix to be extremely clunky because of key management for rooms and stuff like that.

I’m used to using cryptocurrencies. I know how to manage keys, and yet I was constantly getting hit with the same issues with decryption of old messages, even when I properly saved my keys and imported them.

I figure if I’m not even able to use this thing properly, knowing and understanding technology, how do I expect people I talk to to understand how to do it properly?

Then, on top of that, I found out about all the metadata leaking to your home server. Sure, your communications might be encrypted, but if the sender, receiver, reactions, timestamp, etc. is not encrypted, that’s not good.

I still have it on my device, but it very rarely gets opened anymore.

Edit: I use a combination of signal for those I know, IRL, and simplex for groups of FOSS enthusiasts, etc.