I'm never going back to Matrix - Terence Eden

Comments

• Object@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

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

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  • mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Your name gave me a chuckle. Yeah its unfortunate.

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    • Object@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Just a little bit of trolling’

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    • Hadriscus@jlai.lu ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      what does it mean ?

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  • MysteriousSophon21@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Same here - the encryption issues killed my project too, the problem is that Matrix’s OLM/Megolm protocol implementation doesn’t handle device verification and key distribution robustly enugh across multiple clients.

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    • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Right. It’s not like other services have implemented it better though, or is there any? I don’t think we should punish them for trying to do it in a more usable way than with signal

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  • jimmy90@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    i definitely encountered this in the past but element has constantly improved for my self hosted situation

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• shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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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  • Sxan@piefed.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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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    • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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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    • artyom@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yes you're missing a lot. SimpleX even has a directory bot to find public group chats.

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    • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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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  • tisktisk@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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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• MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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 clients 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.

  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), their cleanup system doesn’t work, and everything just feels slow as molasses.

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  • Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Wow, this sounds like a terrible UX.

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    • LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Matrix is good in theory but its plagued by absolutely shit clients.

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  • artyom@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I was in the Cinny room at one point and it got spammed with CSAM at one point. It was traumatic.

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    • magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Same with the blahaj.zone room for 196. Got so icked I just nuked the account.

      Still paranoid some of that shit is still cached somewhere on my phone.

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    • swelter_spark@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      That happened to both my home server and the OpenSUSE rooms at different times. My home server took it seriously, and quickly made changes to prevent it from happening again, but I still had 20+ invitations with pedo images to delete one by one.

      I suggested to the dev of the nheko client that they add some way to deal with spam invites, and they didn’t see any necessity for that. Just told me to delete them one by one.

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  • Xed@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I just deleted FluffyChat client since I got random invites to horrible named rooms. I’m sticking with Discord for now since I play Splatoon

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    • Dreaming_Novaling@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yes! Another Splatoon player on the Fediverse! I’ve seen like 2. Tbh I barely play the game after the Final Fest but, still love the series.

      Also yeah wish Matrix and SimpleX didn’t suck, they have some awful groups 🤢

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• Yaky@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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)

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  • Schlemmy@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I think the corporate stuff is added because of the French, German and Dutch governments joining the crew. They are using matrix for government employees. It’s integrated in La Suite and Open Desk.

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• MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Ehoa now, author sees a censoring filter as a most basic feature of a free, deferated chat infrastructure?

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  • poesty@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It really needs audit tools. Many organizations/communities use matrix as communication tool and suffer from spam problems.

    For example: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/fedora-council-tickets-ticket-530-csam-on-matrix-request-for-council-legal-resource-support/154401

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  • Zak@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Matrix is commonly used for public, discoverable rooms, much like IRC or Discord. Perhaps it’s not good for that use case, but the author seems to wish it was.

    An effective spam prevention approach is a basic feature of any public communication service that reaches a certain size. Perhaps keyword filtering as the author suggests isn’t the right approach, but some rate limits would help:

    • Private messages from a new contact could notify just once until approved instead of once per message.
    • Servers could limit the number of outstanding message requests, with a low limit for new accounts.

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    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Or something like a “permission for broadcast messages” the room owner needs to grant?

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  • LiveLM@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    After getting a fuck ton of notifications with truly repulsive group names and messages I can’t say I blame them.

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  • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I mean, one compromised account leading to a massive influx of spam is a legitimate concern.

    You can’t always assume “happy path”.

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• lime@feddit.nu ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  it’s crazy, we’we had no issue with matrix even though i was sceptical at first and there was some teething issues, but we’ve onboarded non-technical users no problem.

  the main thing is, we don’t federate.

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• Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I became adept in IRC in early 90s when I was under 10 years old, before my BB provider was even a full ISP (so I couldn’t even look up help on what existed of the early web). Every time I hear an adult claim its too complicated/obscure/esoteric I realize how how close to the medical exam scene in Idiocracy we’ve gotten in a few short decades.

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• cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  i've used fluffychat on desktop and android with zero problems.

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• thyristor@lemmy.pt ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  No love for Threema? Guys? Guys?

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  • timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s a good app. Sadly the price of entry puts people off.

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• goatinspace@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  matrix sucks

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• lung@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I assessed Matrix a few years ago and came to the same conclusion. I went with IRC3 which is a new standard that overcomes most of IRC’s issues. I think IRC is still quite good, and actually has working clients for everything, web etc

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  • tisktisk@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    As someone whos familiar with irc, where do I start with irc3? Will I have to learn a new client?

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    • lung@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Well the old clients are backward compatible, but you should check if your client can use new features. But mostly it’s that you have to be on a server that supports it

      ircv3.net/software/clients

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• Skunk@jlai.lu ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

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

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  • rimu@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    piefed.social now has a Zulip server too although the Matrix rooms are still open. Seems like the tide is going out on Matrix though.

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    • Skunk@jlai.lu ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yep, I didn’t join as I am only there for the general shit talking and not participating in any constructive or useful conversations (it’s a way of life) but Camus, Snoopy, Anansi, THE meerkat and probably others are participating with you on the piefed zulip and codeberg.

      The jlailu matrix is still open but inactive and left to slowly wither and die, every sidebars now are now linked to the zulip server instead of matrix.

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  • ObsidianZed@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Looked this up out of curiosity and the fact that it will only somehow allow mobile notifications for “up to 10 users” even if self hosting for free, is putting me off. I get if you were using their cloud, but restricting self-hosting almost feels malicious.

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    • Skunk@jlai.lu ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Dunno I am not administrating it so I didn’t checked. We got the sponsorship tiers as a lemmy/piefed instance is an open source project zulip.com/help/self-hosted-billing#free-community…

      I believe Rimu (piefed dev) also got the sponsorship.

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  • tisktisk@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    May I ask why Zulip was selected over others like xmpp or irc? I'm just generally curious about zulip's potential advantages in the long-term

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    • Skunk@jlai.lu ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      If I remember correctly it was for the structural organization. Creating channels and topics, marking them done and stuff like that.

      A kind of open Slack, more designed for projects or companies organized comms rather than just chatting.

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