Highlights include Sliding Sync (instant login/launch/sync), Native OIDC (industry-standard authentication), Native Group VoIP (end-to-end encrypted large-scale voice & video conferencing) and Faster Joins (lazy-loading room state when your server joins a room).
I have to say “Element X” is a very unfortunate name choice …
It is just a codename, Element X is going to be just Element once it replace the old one.
Jesus just go back to calling it Riot.IM the name keeps getting stupider and more corporate.
Matrix has had a bit of trouble penetrating the enterprise market, which is where the real money is. Hence the corporate-speak rename.
I mean, they haven’t had that much trouble. Last I checked they had portions of the French and German governments using Matrix as a secure messenger. (To be fair, those both came after the rename.)
I wanted to try Element X but apparently my self hosted server is not compatible.
Ah there is a solution for it https://github.com/matrix-org/sliding-sync I guess I could try to install it.
Yeah I was able to install sliding-sync on Dendrite without issues. A bit surprising that I didn’t see any guides made for it yet.
Their native group VoIP calling looks to have a solid topology that could easily replace Jitsi in the near term, and eventually compete with larger scale conferencing services like Zoom. That’s kind of exciting for those of us who care about open systems and privacy.
I wish the whole project was a little bit more clever with its names. Matrix and Element are not unique enough names and can cause a lot of confusion.
I like the project though and still hope it continues to succeed.
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?
Does there tend to be logical groups for Matrix channels/servers? (Meaning you don’t really just join Matrix, you go to a Matrix instance for Jerjoba support, or other common interest like Hockey?)
I’m not the best person to ask as I just chat on a few channels in a single server.
There definitely are software projects that run their real-time support through Matrix in the same way others do it through IRC or Discord.
At the same time most servers seem to have a General room (or similar) for off-topic chats.
Peruse the big list of public rooms here. That might give you a sense of it.
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.
I agree in theory, but in practice my experience with Matrix has been infinitely better than with XMPP:
- There is no decent client for all major platforms on XMPP. Conversations is “good” on Android, but what is its equivalent on iOS? On the desktop, Pidgin/Adium were ok if you wanted just to chat, but audio/video required a lot of work.
- No decent web-based client for XMPP.
- Setting up e2ee is a pain.
- Setting up MUC is a pain.
- To this day I did not manage to set up video chat on my XMPP server, or at least I never found someone on a different server that managed to connect with mine.
Matrix may be technically complex, but at least it has managed to keep its ecosystem together. Whenever I’ve faced an issue with my server, all I needed to do was upgrade synapse. The “millions of users” in XMPP are mostly all on their own silos, while I am yet to have an issue where I want to chat with someone on Matrix but couldn’t because their client/server was not compatible with mine.
Yep, I’m absolutely appreciative of the good work put together by the Matrix folks on the client side, element is overall okay (although slow, quirky, unstable, …) because of fighting a misguided and unstable server and protocol.
To answer your points:
- what is its equivalent on iOS?
- No decent web-based client for XMPP.
I would argue that https://movim.eu/ is at least as good as element web. https://conversejs.org/ does the job to bridge across native clients.
- Setting up e2ee is a pain.
What is there to set up? The experience is very comparable to Signal and al. What did you find painful?
- Setting up MUC is a pain.
How so? It depends on the client, but on Conversations it’s a matter of clicking on + → “Create private group chat” or “Create public channel”. In gajim it’s + → “Create group chat”
- To this day I did not manage to set up video chat on my XMPP server, or at least I never found someone on a different server that managed to connect with mine.
For calls to work, you need to use a stun/turn server (like everything everywhere else, including Matrix, Jitsi Meet, …). If you self-host, and you have a recent ejabberd, it’s configured out of the box and you just have to open server ports.
Matrix may be technically complex, but at least it has managed to keep its ecosystem together.
Another way to put it, is that matrix is technically so complex that only a single party can afford to develop and maintain a working implementation. The documentation is lacking and alternative implementations are incompatible in effect. This isn’t a sustainable situation (that those who define the standard are the ones implementing it) and we have started to see the cascading effects of that with the bitrot of the IRC bridge with libera.chat for instance.
I am yet to have an issue where I want to chat with someone on Matrix but couldn’t because their client/server was not compatible with mine.
it’s funny because I’ve never experienced that in the XMPP world where the protocol is so stable that you can just S2S/C2S with decades-old servers seamlessly, whereas failing to update synapse for a matter of weeks guarantees compatibility issues. And I’m not even talking about 3rd party implementations like conduit for which incompatibilities is a guarantee.
@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.
It’s not like XMPP doesn’t have issues.
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
The counter points on the site you posted are either completely expected or even desired properties of distributed systems (like not being able to force a delete or room closure on another server), or just problems with specific implementation details or insufficient clarity in the specs (like interop hickups or handling of media files). As far as I can tell nothing on the list is an “unfixable” protocol bug or core design flaw.
The counter points on the site you posted are either completely expected or even desired properties of distributed systems
I agree that some are, and I think that the point being made in the article was that some of those properties might be surprising/deceiving for those who approach Matrix as another chat platform and not as a “distributed partially-replicated graph database”.
What I consider “unfixable” is the fact that we are 10 years into this now, and that nothing has improved substantially: I sent a message yesterday which took 10 hours to deliver, and an enormous amount of resources at that. Matrix isn’t ready for mass adoption, it is still not reliable, it broke on its promise to be the “protocols of all protocols” by failing to allocate the funds to maintain the bridge with the largest IRC network, and the developers don’t see the overwhelming complexity of it all as a bug, but as a feature. To me, it looks like Matrix will remain a mediocre platform for the general public, aka. those who want something fast and that just work and don’t care about “distributed partially-replicated graph database”.
XMPP - now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. I thought the woke Google chat federation and subsequent drop pretty much killed it off - but I’m glad to be wrong.
Are there XMPP based group chat/Matrix/Discord alternatives?
There is whole social network built on top of it. https://movim.eu
@pezhore @u_tamtam Your question may require a bit of specifying. Discord is a product and a platform. XMPP and Matrix are protocols. So, uh, it’s a bit like asking whether there are any SMTP or IMAP alternatives to Google Groups? There are *many* servers and clients and supporting bots and libraries that do many things. What specific things are you interested in, to narrow it down somewhat?
XMPP itself is the alternative, and the client you use shapes the user experience. If you want something that’s comfortable for large chat rooms and dealing with a handful of them on desktop, gajim is hard to beat IMO, if you want something web, movim and conversejs are good alternatives :)
Kind of a mix between Discord and IRC. Although it doesn’t have servers like Discord and is more of individuals rooms. In fact they made bridges an important feature, so an IRC room and Matrix room can be merged together without either side really noticing a difference. Same with Discord and a ton of other programs.
Although it doesn’t have servers like Discord
They’re called Spaces on Matrix
If you actually tried spaces, you’d realize they’re incredibly clunky and not even close to discord rooms. You can’t even search for them. They’re not quite there yet, they leave a lot to be desired.
I think you and those responding to you are conflating Matrix and Element and Synapse.
Spaces are a UI feature in Element for grouping rooms. Element is only one of many Matrix clients.
Element, the client, is written in typescript and kotlin.
https://github.com/vector-im
Synapse, a server implementation using the Matrix protocol, is indeed written in Python.
There are several other servers, written in Go, Rust, C, and C++.
https://matrix.org/ecosystem/servers/
Matrix is the protocol itself. Blaming it for UI problems is like blaming TCP for the toolbars in Internet Explorer: very remotely correct.
Although it doesn’t have servers like Discord
The other way around. Discord does not have servers
love to see it
