Also, revolt self hosting is broken. The web call functionality (WebRTC) is being rewritten but that effort is stale and out of the box it simply does not work. There is no real documentation about this either. It just won’t work and you need to invest a lot of effort to figure out why. The moment self hosting properly works, I’ll give it another shot. Not being able to connect without a fat client is a show stopper for me. There’s no way I can get enough traction for my groups if the barrier to switch is higher than a sheet of paper.
Comment on Reminder if you're leaving Discord for this Revolt server ( Linux + Steam Deck devs / creators)
tyrant@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Revolt isn’t federated, encrypted, has no video chat, claims privacy but that claim seems to be simply because they are based in Europe. The layout is nice and ui is better than element but that’s the only upside i see. I hate the matrix client ui’s and chat sorting options.
Lichtblitz@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz 23 hours ago
Revolt hasn’t added federation because it can be a major complexity increase in the codebase, but apparently they might be allowing instance owners to integrate polyproto support (polyproto is a work-in-progress federated chat system). If you want a discord like interface for Matrix, Cinny exists. I personally prefer revolt in some ways as Matrix feels like it doesn’t fit the use case for discord as well.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 1 day ago
Exactly. I wish they would have just built a great UI on top of Matrix or even XMPP, but they insisted on doing it this way. None of my friends want to switch to something that they’re boxed-in with, they don’t want an app just for one server. Matrix is the only option we have, but all of the UIs are… meh.
dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Yeah, they kinda screwed up Element with combining mobile and desktop features into one app. The first time I tried creating a call on desktop, it was suddenly apparent how confusing they had made it, because you can do it in multiple ways (normal calls & conference calls).
There are other UIs that look very nice, but sadly don’t support voice chat. Hopefully these other clients can catch up, but it’ll likely take a while.
XM34@feddit.org 1 day ago
So, I briefly tried out Matrix some four years ago and left because it was utter trash and from waht I gather from your comment it is still pretty much trash now. But despite there not being ansingle usable cluent, people still try to convince everyone that Matrix, by some obscrure metric, is superior to all other chat programs.
Sorry to say, but a chat protocol on its own is a tech demo at best and as long as there isn’t a single feature complete and usable client, it’s an alternative for no one except hardcore tech enthusiasts.
When I last used Matrix/Elements I had to deal with “lost keys” issues multiple times in just two months. This issue is a dealbreaker if it happens just once in a year and apparently, it’s still a semi regular problem for some of my friends.
Just accept it, Matrix will never be a replacement for Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram or even just Microsoft Teams.
poke@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Never is a strong word. Element has made a lot of progress and I can see the potential in it to compete with some of these platforms.
But no, it’s not there yet.
dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I didn’t mean to say that it’s (still) trash, I think it’s useable, but there are still a lot of improvements to come.
Element as a client seems to want to do everything, which is probably great for a lot of people, but it (in my experience) has led to a poor user experience (which with more time, will likely improve, they seem to have a lot of backing).
With Element completing voice/video implementation, I imagine it’ll be easier for other clients to reference their work when implementing their own support.
Once the other clients get voice support, I will definitely be trying them out again, I’m sure they will make a much simpler experience that works out the box.
The lost keys problem has luckily never happened to me, it usually boils down the user error I believe, but yeah, if it is a user error that happens often, they should figure out some way to fix that (probably a hard problem, which is sort of fixed (i believe) if you use the client on multiple devices, so if you get logged out of your account you can easily authorize your access from another logged in device, eg desktop/mobile).