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Comment on I'm never going back to Matrix - Terence Eden

shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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.

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tisktisk@piefed.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Do you have any tips for others looking to move their matrix/irc activity over to simplex?

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- shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Make sure to back up the simplex database and database password.
  
  Unlike Matrix, SimpleX saves all the decryption data in the database and saves the database to your device.
  
  As long as you have the password for it and the database file, you will be fine. Lose either and you’re absolutely fucked.
  
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Sxan@piefed.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
How are you using Simplex as a replacement for Matrix? That's not a leading question - I'm curious about the use case.

I stopped using Matrix for 1:1 and family chat years ago because of how broken encryption has always been, but I've kept using it for public chats since

privacy isn't solvable in public chats, so the fact Matrix's encryption is terminally screwed up isn't relevant

there are many public rooms; not IRC-level, but it's still a large domain with large numbers of users

Matrix is a better public chat than IRC (fight me!) with replies, comment editing, reactions, emojis (that's mostly a client thing, but it's first-class and not a sporadically supported feature), and offline history syncing (as in, see what happened while you were offline).

I haven't yet found anything that's as good at public rooms as Matrix, that's still federated and OSS. Discord is very good, but it's SPA crap and centralized to boot.

SimpleX seems to be focused primarily on messaging, not public, large group chat... but am I missing something?
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- sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’ll fight.
  
  I haven’t seen replies be useful at all, in fact they actively clutter the UI.
  
  Editing and reactions are nice, but they’re not that important.
  
  IRC already has emoji support 😀 and offline history sync, and is way smaller and faster.
  
  The one feature I like better on Matrix vs IRC clients is it is way easier to actually connect to the server. Just type in matrix.org or whatever it autofills for you, and you’re in. No dealing with port numbers and proper syntax. This is an improvement.
  
  I wanted to like matrix but it was too clunky for me. I wish more people used libera chat though, it is less active than it was 10 years ago or whatever.
  
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  - Sxan@piefed.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    I haven't seen replies be useful at all, in fact they actively clutter the UI.
    
    Editing and reactions are nice, but they're not that important.
    
    Yeah, well, that's a massive opinion gulf we're never going to meet over.
    
    IRC already has emoji support 😀 and offline history sync, and is way smaller and faster.
    
    You can enter emojis into anything that supports UTF-8, and so can claim everything supports emojis. I haven't seen an IRC client with either an easy, integrated way to enter them, and I've also never seen an IRC client that will pull history from before I joined the room. Weechat certainly doesn't.
    
    Matrix is super clunky, and the fact that the reference platform is a shitty Electron application sucks. Even if you use something sane like gomuks, your client is perpetually lagging in Matrix features, often by more than just months.
    
    Matrix angers me. It's been such a mismanaged project. But I don't see IRC having changed much over the past 20 years that I've been using it.
    
    Discord, on the other hand, is an active pestilence. I only open that stupid web page on the direst of need.
    
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    sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That makes sense – different features are important to different folks.
    
    For emojis on IRC I just use the system keyboard. So it’s easy on my phone, but hard on a computer. I didn’t know that matrix had an emoji button – I guess I haven’t missed it :p
    
    It’s true that IRC doesn’t pull scrollback the first time you join a room in any implementation I’m aware of. I’m ok with this limitation though because I tend to stay joined to the rooms I want to read. I like hexchat, although I’m aware that it’s a dead project :'(
    
    We agree on Matrix angering us lol.
    
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  - Sxan@piefed.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    A thousand users seems like a lot; I'm not sure I've ever been in an IRC room with that many.
    
    Is there a directory? IIRC the human naming part was still missing last time I tried it, and connecting through hashes was not very fun. The biggest blocker for me, though, was the lack of multiple device sync support. A single identity used across multiple devices concurrently is bare minimum feature, and is the reason I've always bounced off SimpleX. Has that been addressed?
    
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- artyom@piefed.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yes you're missing a lot. SimpleX even has a directory bot to find public group chats.
  
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  - swelter_spark@reddthat.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    SimpleX public rooms work smoothly, IMO, but a lot of rooms have problems with casual Nazism and general rudeness. Some are more moderated than others. I gave up on groups eventually and just use it to talk to people I know.
    
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    artyom@piefed.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I don't see how that's a SimpleX problem. People like that are obviously going to gravitate to "free" platforms where they're free to be shitheads. There's no administrative oversight. That's what you want.
    
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  - Sxan@piefed.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Is ðis right? In a group wiþ 6k members, each message posted to ðe group is 20MB of traffic? I suppose ðis is a consequence of ðe E2E design - a message posted sends a message to 6,000 people, individually encrypted and delivered?
    
    Screen shot of a group wiþ 6k+ members, warning ðat each message causes a 20MB payload
    
    Do you happen to know ðe plan for addressing ðat? It seems like a fairly large impediment, and I can't imagine what a solution would look like ðat preserves E2E.
    
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- shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  You can use SimpleX for large chats. However, at least the current architecture is not the most efficient way of doing so. Especially not once rooms hit a thousand users or more. Does it work? Yes. Does it work well? Only somewhat. I think the developers were caught off guard when people wanted to start using it for large rooms instead of one-on-one communications and had not planned for that when they made the program.
  
  They are addressing the issue by having devices connect to super peers instead of directly peer to peer in order to make large rooms work better. That way, instead of trying to maintain a thousand individual connections, your device might maintain two or three connections to Superpiers and get messages through them. I make it even harder on myself because I demand that my SimpleX do everything over a tor.
  
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  - Sxan@piefed.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    A thousand users seems like a lot; I'm not sure I've ever been in an IRC room with that many.
    
    Is there a directory? IIRC the human naming part was still missing last time I tried it, and connecting through hashes was not very fun. The biggest blocker for me, though, was the lack of multiple device sync support. A single identity used across multiple devices concurrently is bare minimum feature, and is the reason I've always bounced off SimpleX. Has that been addressed?
    
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    shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    There is a directory and you can find it by asking your favorite search engine for the SimpleX directory bot. As far as multiple devices goes, I’m not totally sure. I know that it’s supposedly able to be used on multiple devices, but I only run it on my phone, so I haven’t actually tried that functionality myself.
    
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