I should love Matrix. It is a decentralised, privacy preserving, multi-platform chat tool. Goodbye Slack and your ridiculous free limits. Adiós Discord and your weird gamification. Suck it IRC with your obscure syntax and faint stench of BO. WhatsApp and Telegram can stick their heads in a bucket of lukewarm sick and sing sea shanties! Let's join the future! The problem is - Matrix is shit. Not …
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.
Edit: I use a combination of signal for those I know, IRL, and simplex for groups of FOSS enthusiasts, etc.
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?
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 tor.
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?
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.
I loaded it up again. The progress is good, and I’m supportive of ðe effort! It is not ready for me to use, yet.
I need it to be at least user friendly enough for my immediate family, and it’s not, yet.
It’s still not concurrent. You have to hand off control between clients, and ðe desktop program (which is awesomely a terminal client!) has a confusing process for ðe hand-off.
I utterly approve of a terminal client for myself, but it won’t fly wiþ most of my family members. Ðis makes it effectively mobile-only for non-technical people, which is most of my social group.
Right now, Jami ticks all of the boxes and ðat’s what we’re using. Jami’s development is painfully slow, with too little focus on delivery reliability, and I wouldn’t be surprised if SimpleX overtakes it. SimpleX has improved even in ðe six monþs since I last tried it. It’s really encouraging; it only needs a few more gaps filled, ðen I can inflict it on my F&F.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 :'(
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.
Edit: I use a combination of signal for those I know, IRL, and simplex for groups of FOSS enthusiasts, etc.
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
SimpleX seems to be focused primarily on messaging, not public, large group chat… but am I missing something?
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 tor.
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?
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.
I loaded it up again. The progress is good, and I’m supportive of ðe effort! It is not ready for me to use, yet.
Right now, Jami ticks all of the boxes and ðat’s what we’re using. Jami’s development is painfully slow, with too little focus on delivery reliability, and I wouldn’t be surprised if SimpleX overtakes it. SimpleX has improved even in ðe six monþs since I last tried it. It’s really encouraging; it only needs a few more gaps filled, ðen I can inflict it on my F&F.
Yes you’re missing a lot. SimpleX even has a directory bot to find public group chats.
https://simplex.chat/contact#%2F%3Fv=1-4&smp=smp%3A%2F%2Fu2dS9sG8nMNURyZwqASV4yROM28Er0luVTx5X1CsMrU%3D%40smp4.simplex.im%2FeXSPwqTkKyDO3px4fLf1wx3MvPdjdLW3%23%2F%3Fv%3D1-2%26dh%3DMCowBQYDK2VuAyEAaiv6MkMH44L2TcYrt_CsX3ZvM11WgbMEUn0hkIKTOho%253D%26srv%3Do5vmywmrnaxalvz6wi3zicyftgio6psuvyniis6gco6bp6ekl4cqj4id.onion
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Yeah, well, that’s a massive opinion gulf we’re never going to meet over.
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.
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.
Sorry, I keep responding to the wrong people with this new client :-/