Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org
xn--gckvb8fzb.com
The Matrix.org network has great potential, but after years of dealing with glitches, slow performance, poor UX, and one too many failures, I’m done with it.

After five years of using Matrix.org/Element as my primary communication platform, and rooting for it, and promoting it, and enduring its many quirks, I’ve decided to move on (or rather back). Despite promising ideals and growing institutional adoption, the network remains slow, unreliable, and confusing for everyday users. Development feels directionless, client and server projects are fragmented, and the user experience still lags far behind my expectations. A recent incident that essentially broke my own community channel on the Matrix.org homeserver was the final straw: I’m heading back to XMPP.

    • Kissaki@programming.devEnglish
      3·
      20 days ago

      …is a protocol and doesn’t answer how or where to host your chat and how to onboard users with convenience and clarity.

      The biggest issue is a lack of chat history. Host a chat and people can post a question and come back to the answer another day. But not on IRC.

      It’s certainly simpler and more stable than Matrix though.

      • ulterno@programming.devEnglish
        0·
        20 days ago

        It’s certainly simpler and more stable than Matrix though.

        Yeah, that was my main thought.

        I say “V3”, because the new upcoming features, seem to be going in a good direction, to make it usable in the current era.
        Chat history, I think I still won’t expect from that.

        The IRC ecosystem seems to be going on well and will hopefully stay a useful way of communication in the future.

        I really like that every event has an id in Matrix though (I don’t really know the IRC protocol, maybe that has it too ¯_(ツ)_/¯)

        For the Matrix.org thing, I feel like funding just went into the wrong location.
        Perhaps Conduit or Construct might have gone better?