I’ve personally not had terribly good experiences with Matrix. I found it to be slow at times, but more annoyingly, it would very consistently not un-encrypt messages both for me and the people I was talking to, requiring both parties to regularly need to re-send messages until they finally unencrypted properly. This made it a real ball-ache to use, as you could send a message, and then hours later have someone else say they can’t read it. I’m also not a fan of how much Metadata it spreads around.
XMPP on the other hand has always been snappy and fast, and I much prefer the clients available for it. It’s currently the most promising federated option, IMHO, with Movim being the most promising client as a Discord replacement.
It’s still missing some essential Discord-like features, such as groups of rooms in a server and drop-in voice rooms, but both features are being actively worked on, and a funding campaign was started to accelerate development.
But what it can do already is:
Excellent text chats, including with very good optional encryption
Group voice/video calls with screensharing (must use a chromium based browser to screenshare an app’s audio)
A neat integrated blogging feature for communities & individuals
a built-in paint program to draw stuff to input into the chat
Full working and proven federation thanks to the XMPP back-end
This has been my experience with Matrix, and the message decryption problems are a dealbreaker. I hope the person who replied to you saying those have very recently been fixed is correct, but the fact that such a fundamental feature was broken for so long leaves me with little confidence in Matrix. I had this problem years ago on a Matrix community, then again maybe a year ago on a different community, and even more recently on my self-hosted instance. Don’t understand how you can push a chat platform that effectively doesn’t deliver ~1/12 messages to random users and let that issue hang around for years.
XMPP looks really interesting as an alternative. Hope that development continued at a brisk pace.
I found it to be slow at times, but more annoyingly,
Slow at what, exactly? If you mean slow at delivering messages, it suggests that you were using the world’s largest public server, which sometimes gets overloaded enough to be slow. In that case, your criticism is not of Matrix, but of a particular server. To compare apples to apples, you would have to either pick a different server or compare the largest one with a similarly loaded XMPP server.
it would very consistently not un-encrypt messages both for me and the people I was talking to,
When was that? Which clients were in use? This is relevant because unable-to-decrypt errors were fairly common until roughly mid-to-late last year. They put a lot of work into finding and addressing the causes, and I haven’t seen a single one in more than a few months. I suspect the experience you’re describing here is either out of date, or you’re using clients that haven’t applied the fixes yet.
I also notice from your recent Lemmy posts that you are evangelizing Movim pretty hard lately. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but praising XMPP without mentioning its drawbacks, while spreading outdated and vague criticism of other options, is a somewhat misleading way to do it… and a disservice to the community.
I also notice from your recent Lemmy posts that you are evangelizing Movim pretty hard lately.
I am, mainly due to the Discord situation which has resulted in much more interest in alternative platforms. After everything dies down and everyone is settled in their new platform, I’ll likely be posting about it a bit less.
but praising XMPP without mentioning its drawbacks
I am mentioning its drawbacks; it does not have two very important Discord features as of now, which I explicitly point out. I also pointed out that screen sharing audio only works with Chromium browsers, which is another downside (I only use Firefox myself).
while spreading outdated and vague criticism of other options
You yourself said that the issues I had were only fixed a few months ago. I had been using it in the period you mention the problem existing in, but stopped using it due to those issues. I think it’s a little unreasonable to expect me to regularly re-try every other platform before relating my past experiences with it (a few months is not that long ago). I’m glad to hear that problem has been finally resolved for them. As it’s not relevant anymore, I won’t mention it when relaying my experience with it in the future.
You yourself said that the issues I had were only fixed a few months ago.
No, I said I haven’t seen a single one of those errors in more than a few months. I haven’t been tracking the timeline, but I’m pretty sure the fixes were being put in place closer to a year ago.
I think it’s a little unreasonable to expect me to regularly re-try every other platform before relating my past experiences with it
When we choose to publish old experiences instead of gathering updated information first, it’s important to also state when those experiences were, so readers can take it into account. Things are constantly changing in this field. (Mostly for the better, I think.)
In any case, thanks for clarifying, and thanks in advance for adjusting your spiel now that you’ve been made aware that your information was out of date.
I’ve personally not had terribly good experiences with Matrix. I found it to be slow at times, but more annoyingly, it would very consistently not un-encrypt messages both for me and the people I was talking to, requiring both parties to regularly need to re-send messages until they finally unencrypted properly. This made it a real ball-ache to use, as you could send a message, and then hours later have someone else say they can’t read it. I’m also not a fan of how much Metadata it spreads around.
XMPP on the other hand has always been snappy and fast, and I much prefer the clients available for it. It’s currently the most promising federated option, IMHO, with Movim being the most promising client as a Discord replacement.
It’s still missing some essential Discord-like features, such as groups of rooms in a server and drop-in voice rooms, but both features are being actively worked on, and a funding campaign was started to accelerate development.
But what it can do already is:
This has been my experience with Matrix, and the message decryption problems are a dealbreaker. I hope the person who replied to you saying those have very recently been fixed is correct, but the fact that such a fundamental feature was broken for so long leaves me with little confidence in Matrix. I had this problem years ago on a Matrix community, then again maybe a year ago on a different community, and even more recently on my self-hosted instance. Don’t understand how you can push a chat platform that effectively doesn’t deliver ~1/12 messages to random users and let that issue hang around for years.
XMPP looks really interesting as an alternative. Hope that development continued at a brisk pace.
Slow at what, exactly? If you mean slow at delivering messages, it suggests that you were using the world’s largest public server, which sometimes gets overloaded enough to be slow. In that case, your criticism is not of Matrix, but of a particular server. To compare apples to apples, you would have to either pick a different server or compare the largest one with a similarly loaded XMPP server.
When was that? Which clients were in use? This is relevant because unable-to-decrypt errors were fairly common until roughly mid-to-late last year. They put a lot of work into finding and addressing the causes, and I haven’t seen a single one in more than a few months. I suspect the experience you’re describing here is either out of date, or you’re using clients that haven’t applied the fixes yet.
I also notice from your recent Lemmy posts that you are evangelizing Movim pretty hard lately. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but praising XMPP without mentioning its drawbacks, while spreading outdated and vague criticism of other options, is a somewhat misleading way to do it… and a disservice to the community.
I am, mainly due to the Discord situation which has resulted in much more interest in alternative platforms. After everything dies down and everyone is settled in their new platform, I’ll likely be posting about it a bit less.
I am mentioning its drawbacks; it does not have two very important Discord features as of now, which I explicitly point out. I also pointed out that screen sharing audio only works with Chromium browsers, which is another downside (I only use Firefox myself).
You yourself said that the issues I had were only fixed a few months ago. I had been using it in the period you mention the problem existing in, but stopped using it due to those issues. I think it’s a little unreasonable to expect me to regularly re-try every other platform before relating my past experiences with it (a few months is not that long ago). I’m glad to hear that problem has been finally resolved for them. As it’s not relevant anymore, I won’t mention it when relaying my experience with it in the future.
No, I said I haven’t seen a single one of those errors in more than a few months. I haven’t been tracking the timeline, but I’m pretty sure the fixes were being put in place closer to a year ago.
When we choose to publish old experiences instead of gathering updated information first, it’s important to also state when those experiences were, so readers can take it into account. Things are constantly changing in this field. (Mostly for the better, I think.)
In any case, thanks for clarifying, and thanks in advance for adjusting your spiel now that you’ve been made aware that your information was out of date.
stop the disinformation, thanks
https://lemmy.ca/comment/21700498
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