Turns out that maybe it was for good reasons.
If anyone knows an alternative that has web, IOS, and Android clients, easily self hostable, and can do calling, please let me know.
So what might be a negotiation between two parties--you and the app dev team--is now complicated by a thorny third party--your os platform team. Presumably you derive some value in other areas from your walled garden that offsets the penalty it introduces in this case. But it's still crummy that you're caught in this snag created by your os platform.
That is not the way you create high-quality software in a cost-efficient manner.
While Matrix has a value as the pretty much only open-standard IM system with even moderate levels of user adoption, all this makes it hard to actually love it or even to be enthustiastic about it.
I try to be positive and supportive of project, but my experience with these guys is that they're incredibly arrogant.
It's tough finding an open-standards based IM application for corporate use.
XMPP is kinda fragmented, with no nice clients. Matrix is a clusterfuck with a BDFL who is probably too smart for his own good. Signal is open source but hostile towards self hosting.
P.S I suspect the organization is being led by Architecture Astronauts [1]. Every (including the naming) is abstracted to the point of meaninglessness.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...
This has been my experience with many FOSS projects in general. Don't even get me started on what happens when a fork emerges.
"They don't want open source, they want to be the ONLY source."
I get that you didn't say this explicitly about this particular project. I just think these folks deserve some credit.
Lists of competing clients, servers, hosts, and more.
This is more of a question of enough clarity, direction and alignment.
Either both groups have it, or they don't.
If the project is run by those who are all deep in the weeds of low level technological details, odds are that the larger product turns into a giant mess that is all over the place.
I didn't try it, but this seems interesting: https://github.com/jesse-greathouse/eIRC
"eIRC is a modern, scalable enterprise messaging architecture built on the IRC protocol. Designed for organizations that require ephemeral, real-time communication without the heavy operational overhead of pub/sub systems like Apache Kafka, eIRC delivers high-throughput, low-latency chat experiences while minimizing memory and CPU usage per user."
It does support history as well: "IRC History Bridge: Implement Redis-backed buffer for message replay".
(For a taste of just how weird and terrible IRC can be, try to answer the question "what is the maximum length of an IRC message". If your answer is a specific number, it is incorrect.)
For less geeky use I indeed have had Delta on my list for years. Haven't really tried yet myself, not to speak about convincing.
EDIT:
It really sucks that the default implementation is so bloated. But I do not equate matrix with element.
Not much a protocol/implementation can do about that. It did take over 2 weeks for it to be resolved though, which is a rather long period of time.
Also on the status page - https://status.matrix.org/incidents/8gljb3gtlv11 (shows start at Jul 2, but I noticed it on Jun 28)
After that was resolved, messages that were sent and received by/on other homeservers during that time never ended up on matrix.org, so much for federation :/
We need to write up the incident report; it’s not clear whether the root cause was a bug in postgres (potentially years ago, and only caused problems when we started using the corrupt piece of the index by coincidence) or due to potential corruption from a HW failure years ago.
The rooms affected should now work again after reconstructing the lost data. No data should have been lost over federation though; the room history should have synced up as normal. Also, only room state (not msgs) was effected. Do you have a bug report anywhere for the missing msgs?
I haven't reported the missing messages thing anywhere as I assumed that was just expected (IIRC (and this is a big IIRC) it was mentioned a long time ago (i.e. entirely unrelated to this) by TravisR on Discord bridge problems as a possible cause for missing messages).
Here is one event in an affected room, made by a t2bot.io account on July 6, to which t2bot.io accounts can reply to, but which gets an "Event not found." error when requested by me, @dzaima:matrix.org: (and for reference t2bot.io functioned properly on other rooms during that time, so overall t2bot.io↔matrix.org federation should've been fine; and for reference there's a third homeserver that federated with t2bot.io fine in that room just fine too; and to be clear the room works fine now)
https://matrix.org/_matrix/client/v3/rooms/!WpdazzauuDxyGNAiCr:matrix.org/context/$BM9s8e3vUhk_iHfdg7D_s7CsQ5COFSPdlJdygz7TKvUEvery time I use anything, from MS Teams to Whatsapp, I find myself wishing they were more like Signal.
Every client looks bad, works slow and most of them have only subset of features.
At 2025 year I still can't see online status when I use most popular server and client.
When I use SDK as a developer, *I can't use encryption* for bots. I've created issue about it over year ago https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk/issues/363 and maintainer just closed it as not planned to fix.
Matrix Protocol is overcomplicated and ridiculous. As I understood, the reason of mentioned problem with lack of "online status" feature is a high network load that yields by presence status feature, so server owners just disable this feature.
It is ridiculous that messenger who state it is "privacy focused" - can't handle encryption for bots and sell us idea that it's fine to log-in in my account on random site on internet. Because any site where i enter my password and secret key, may steal my password.
The same thing with applications. "Reference implementation" of app is an Electron app that loads javascript from internet and may inject malware anytime.
My impression is that Matrix is a scam to spy over people who blindly believe in security, like a Telegram does.
I would be interested in learning more context around this issue once you are able to share, so hopefully there will be a report/post/etc after the embargo lifts.
"The reason for Slack's success is probably because it's a "turn key solution": you register your company, invite your employees, enter your CC, and you're good to go."
"With a lot of these open solutions things are more complex. I think we should really focus on providing a good UX here if we want more adoption."
This seems unchanged, or even worse. Arathorn recommended modular.im in a reply, which now redirects to https://element.io/pricing, and "set up a server" just redirects to GitHub, and the only other option is "Talk to an expert" – yeah, no.
Self-hosting is great but realistically, lots of people are just not interested, and that's fine too. And even if they are: having a simple option to quickly evaluate $the_thing is probably a good idea.
This is of course in addition to all the technical problems outlined in this post, which I also reported in 2019: "opening https://riot.im/app/ makes Firefox use 100% CPU and my laptops fan spin; I closed it after 10 seconds of just a loading animation"
- The web client doesn't load any images/media anymore for me in new sessions. I log in, I cross authenticate with another client, no images load. At work I've a very old browser session going and everything works.
- We host synapse at work to explore feasibility. Been going on for about 9 months now. Public profile lookup is disabled. This breaks inviting anyone from our company from another server, when the inviting user is using element. Because element tries to query the user info first, and if that fails with an unexpected error code, it will not allow you to continue sending the invitation. There's obviously an issue open for months now, where multiple people suggested they just add a warning that it couldn't check if the user exists, with a "continue anyways" button, but the devs prefer to come up with idiotic excuses why that would be a bad idea.
I did some quick research myself then, and it looks like the profile lookup is relayed through the server of the inviting user to the server of the user to be invited. The inviter's server converts any http error code from the invitee's server that is "not valid" to a generic error, that element then chokes on, here: https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/blob/1920dfff40ad10780...
i.e. Only 404 is valid, according to code and comment there.
But IN THE SAME FUCKING SOURCE FILE, they return a 403 if profile lookup is disabled: https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/blob/1920dfff40ad10780...
Can't get any better than this I guess. Cobbled together bullshit. I hope my company will consider this experiment failed soon and switch to slack or something. Anything.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44591820
I discussed that their primary server had a child porn/child sex assault imagery problem. Others who had similar concerns were completely dismissed and attacked by the Element/Matrix admins.
I have to agree with this article. Matrix is basically dead, and not worth keeping around. And it starves the open source ecosystem from better things taking hold.
what do those platforms do to combat child stuff? i don't like to dismiss anything but it is something all platforms and even multi billion dollar ones struggle with
eu tries to decrypt e2e chats while you can see this stuff everywhere without encryption and nothing is being done to combat this on these major platforms
as discord and whatsapp are getting shittier, i still keep it around for talking with friends, having my own server is not that hard and there are zero issues compared to main matrix.org server, just couple dollars for vle2 on ovh is sufficient
Eventually I noticed some issue with the database, it having grown many hundreds of GB (something about my users being stuck in matrix.org rooms that they're blacklisted from, I guess) so I rm -rf'd it and that's that. :\
If you think volunteer dev is so easy then get stuck in and be the change you want to see.
Is Ycombinator (or one of the intermediary investment funds) invested in New Vector?
rapnie•4h ago
[0] https://matrix.to/#/#activitypub-community:codelutin.com