this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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Okay, help an old-timer out.
Lemmy :: Reddit
Mastodon :: Twitter (I refuse to call it "X")
Matrix :: ???
Is it like discord? The olden days of AIM/ICQ/IRC?
I will get shit for writing that, but Matrix in its current form shouldn't have seen the light of the day, nor should have been let to spread with close to no technical scrutiny and based on empty promises/hype like it did.
Just to be clear, I'm absolutely encouraging, in fact, actively promoting federated alternatives to things like WhatsApp, Messenger, Signal, Telegram, …
But I don't believe for a second that the foundations on which Matrix is built make sense, can be made to work well in practice, nor represent a problem worth spending so much time and effort solving. This article does a good job at introducing the "behind the scenes" of the protocol: https://telegra.ph/why-not-matrix-08-07
The whole history of Matrix can be summarized as:
"let's do this because it's cool"
"shit, it's hard/slow, but we will figure it out"
"I have a breakthrough, here comes a new version of the protocol/client/…" (the ecosystem reboots)
(rinse and repeat)
Matrix has seen more incompatible reincarnations of itself in the last 5 years than XMPP in the last 20. Arathorn, its lead contributor and evangelist will keep apologizing, promising that this time they have their stuff in order, that whatever buzzword will solve this or that aspect of the problem, while the elephant still is in the room. You practically can't tell apart arathorn's messages of 2015 from those of 2022 and that would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
IMO Matrix is broken beyond repair, while XMPP is quietly used by millions of users. I wish Matrix could carry its own weight and be so unambiguously better that we wouldn't need competing alternatives there. To me, the better XMPP is XMPP itself, and I'd be happy to elaborate on that.
@u_tamtam @pezhore It's not like XMPP doesn't have issues. Finding a combination of clients and servers to get a coverage of the XEPs you want is quite an exercise. MUCs are painful, especially if you want to join from multiple clients. Cross-device trust between accounts for E2EE AFAIK still requires each device to trust all the other devices manually. Matrix has many more multimedia features.
True, but the problems you mention really are a thing of the past (I'd like to get your feedback after using latest versions of maintained clients), and message delivery across multiple devices and networks does, in my experience, work much more seamlessly and reliably than on Matrix (I mean, there must be a reason why google is using XMPP behind the hood to push every single notification on every single Android device on earth, right?).
And those are client/polish issues anyway, delivering messages at enormous scale has been a solved problem in XMPP for two decades, the protocol hasn't changed, essentially, but Matrix still hasn't found a solution to their self-inflicted problem: https://telegra.ph/why-not-matrix-08-07