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We really need to stop abandoning existing foss projects and thinking a whole new thing needs to be invented. Free and open-source software is not a product, it doesn’t abide by the same rules and relationships that proprietary tech does.
It’s more organic. It’s also a commons that we can continue to draw on, and reshape. If I recall correctly, there were something like three different vector graphic editors from the same codebase before Inkscape managed to be the one that gained traction.
Matrix isn’t perfect, but abandoning it just to reinvent it all over again just because some people really need a thing that works like Discord, even though Discord is absolute hot garbage; is just going to re-create all the same problems. Matrix today is better than it was two years ago. And Matrix in a year will be better from now.
Can’t agree on Discord being hot garbage, unless you’re specifically talking about how monetisation has creeped its way into it.
However, with Vencord I don’t have to see any of that shit, while also having a far more functional and feature rich client.
Of course, a FOSS, potentially federated alternative would be greatly preferred, but it must have at least the basic functions of Discord.
Often, the problem is that projects get to a point where they’re happy and the maintainer doesn’t want to add any new features. So people then are forced to build a new project to get those features.
Sometimes, but my point is you don’t have to start from scratch. It’s free software. You are allowed to make extensions or even fork it.
I agree. We should all abandon Matrix and implement any missing features into IRC or maybe XMPP
Sure, go for it. Though XMPP has so many features at this point, it might already have Matrix, irc, Discord, and email for all we know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
♻️ какой смысл пользоваться этим медленным гавном прекратите, ватсап, имхо очень хорош
I’ve used matrix for a year now and it works, but it seems slow.
Lots of people tried to self-host it and reported it uses too much RAM for what it does. (It allegedly uses 1GB or more of ram even if it only has 1-2 users)
Efficient software is a must. Software must not waste resources simply because “they are there”. That’s my biggest gripe with matrix.
Disclaimer: i’ve not tried to host matrix myself, so i could be wrong here.
Its running about 1GB for me and my server setup. It spikes a bit if there is a lot going on, but it can get low than that when its just idling. Its not terrible, but given irc and other clients which take MB for RAM…its a bit of a hog-ish.
IRC is dead simple. You cant compare something like matrix to it in terms of resource usage thats not fair. 1GB of ram usage if fine for a server application that does messaging, pictures and video.
well there’s the problem, i have a small server available but it only has 4 GB in total and i’m also hosting other things on it, including a luanti game world
Im running the equivalent to a pi 5 so yeah it can run with a slight delay. You may have some issues with the spikes, definitely if its more than a couple of people. 4GB in total, you will probably have to figure out if its worth it.
Also updates sometimes borks the server. Ive stopped updating until I have time to really sit down and understand what changed.
there should be a more efficient re-implementation but i don’t have time to even attempt that :/
Yeah thats fair.
I don’t know why people don’t use irc, I’m in it daily and it’s busier than Matrix, and even busier than some Discord servers I’m in. And there’s mobile clients. There’s even way less bots and spam
yup I went back to IRC. got tired of discord and matrix just wasn’t for me. IRC is where it’s add. still remember all the stuff from the 90s so it was just like riding a bike. plus I can have it in my Terminal which is a plus.
I think the barrier to entry is kind of high, you need to use a bouncer to see what happened while you were offline.
I don’t really worry about that. I treat it like natural conversation, or traditional chat rooms. I mean I don’t need a recap when I show up at a party. I just jump in. I’ve never heard of a bouncer, but I think it would turn it into more of a feed than a conversation, which is the opposite of what I want.
I’m tired of feeds and timelines. AOL chat rooms were my formative internet years, and I liked that. I think the old style of internet communication is better than the feed silos we have now. Besides, I hardly ever go back and look at older convos in other spaces. I usually hit mark all as read when I open the app.
Yeah this is exactly what turned me off from it when I looked into it. I kind of like that it would lend a more physical-space quality to it, but ultimately I’m hardly ever online, so it would just be me being totally out of the loop all the time without a bouncer. I know I could figure out how to do it, but it’s a lot of effort for something where I’m not even sure I’ll like what it gives me.
I’m completely afraid of logging into fedora.im now. It’s so engulfed in spam, not even normal phishing spam. Absolutely horrifying spam, like gore and killing and other deranged shit.
I had to move back to matrix.org and abandon my account.
Iv tried matrix a couple times. I wanted to like it but couldnt get on with it.
Signal and simplex are still my prefrence
Try out Session. It’s one of the best ones that are lesser known
all this stuff just made me go back to IRC and realize how much I missed it.
Self hosted matrix works great. /thread
Yeah, I finally pulled the trigger and moved to my own domain from
matrix.org. Man, it is just so much faster. Which is sad, because the performance is pretty bad. (Element Web seems to do some per-room request as part of the initial loading screen which is obviously not scalable) but getting off ofmatrix.orgis a huge performance improvement.That being said there is nothing really wrong with
matrix.org. The problem is really public rooms. People will join and spam. It is true of any protocol (have you heard about email?) but Matrix definitely needs to (and they are slowly working on) make it more expensive for spammers.I’ve been hosting a server without much problems for several years now.
Synapse and Riot.im (now Element) became much better around 2019 or 2020. But not too long ago, I also found out that Synapse also bloats the DB with state_groups_state table. There are a handful of commands that come with synapse, but no built-in admin tool or panel, so I wrote my own. Moving server to another host has been seamless for my (few) users. TURN/STUN for calls seems to work okay (I don’t really use it though).
I appreciate Element being uniform across platforms (which I cannot say about XMPP clients), but the sign-in is pretty tedious, and registration with a token is still impossible last time I checked (which is either a hassle for the user to use another client and then their smart device, or a security issue if you open registration to anyone). Most normal people probably don’t care and don’t want to deal with keys, cross-verification, and all that jazz.
From an outsiders perspective, element has never worked for me and never been stable enough to get anywhere close to discord. Joining servers is buggy AF and Element X is severely hobbied on mobile.
I’ve been refusing to use discord for about 6-8 months and am often invites to join various discords by IRL friends and online communities. I wish Matrix / Element was a viable alternative but I’ve never been able to get it working for anythung other than DMs, and I’m already happy with Signal for that honestly.
As a non developer I want to be sensitive to the amount of work involves, and the number of cooks in the kitchen, but the fact that we don’t have a FOSS- federated slack / discord killer app is leaving so much interaction on the table.
I’ve heard of Revolt but it doesn’t seem to be there with encryption
You got PeerSuite as a newcomer, and a pretty promising one with the concept of not having any servers tied to it at all, at that.
I always liked the concept of Matrix, and still actively use it, but there’s some serious jank. Synapse is generally bloated and not fun to run an instance, Dendrite is perpetually in Beta, and the clients themselves range from adequate to awful. The default Element client on Android is so broken for me that I’m forced to use Element X, because I can’t even log in with Element.
It’s disappointing, but there’s a ton of issues that aren’t so easy to resolve. New Vector and the Element Foundation are basically two separate entities that have some kind of hard split between them, neither of which seems to have the money necessary to support comprehensive development. The protocol is said to be bloated and overtly complex, and trying to develop a client or a server implementation is something of a nightmare.
I want to see Matrix succeed, I think a lot of people see the potential of what it could be. I’m not sure it’ll ever get there.
I always liked the concept of Matrix, and still actively use it, but there’s some serious jank.
I use Element as well as Beeper, which is at its core an Element client based on network bridging. I’m a big fan of Matrix, but it isn’t as approachable as other messaging services and requires some technical know-how to use effectively.
It seems like the Linux of messaging services.
Subjectivr experience against another. I switched an peer group from skype to matrix when matrix went offline. It was way better than i would have expected. Perhaps the timing was better. The element client seems really good, beside some minor jank(like screen share doesn’t work) that was probably waylands fault, its a very good experience.
Shit, I had such high hopes.
And that’s dashed because of some random blog?
I agree with all this. The thing which caused me to uninstall was suddenly being pushed lots of abusive message with disturbing contents.
When I complained about it, Matrix told me that my public complaints were hurting the ecosystem and I should be quiet.
Oh fuck that culty nonsense!
I had a wild ride with matrix, originally wanting to run a node on my server. That did not turn out well, because I was a bit stupid and just assumed there would be more admin/mod tools out of the box. As it turned out, I had inadvertently allowed spam/abuse accounts on my node without even noticing, because naive as I was, I assumed my admin-level account would get informed of stuff like user registrations and abuse reports in the standard Element frontend. As a bonus, when I checked what was supposedly the official matrix support channel, it was repeatedly getting spammed with CSAM and gore at the time. That was when I realised, that it definitely was not the ecosystem for me, and running a node without experience had been a pretty stupid idea on my end.
The CSAM spam is so annoying. I don’t understand who is doing this or why.
I have to wonder if there is a major commercial interest in that though.
Not impossible, although, sadly - any system where anonymity is the prime focus will also invite fucked up shit in addition to legitimate use, without any complicated motives behind it. There’s just a relevant fraction of humanity who are, sometimes essentially, sometimes temporarily, messed up fucks. Which is why I think providing ways to combat abuse has to be a high priority for the underlying development of any project like it, unless it explicitly doesn’t aim for mainstream adoption.
When I complained about it, Matrix told me that my public complaints were hurting the ecosystem and I should be quiet.
Weird. I think they did some improvement to prevent those abusive messages but it took a while and it was embarrassing. Maybe it’s hard to prevent them with a federated network but still, the abusive messages where basically a copy paste.
The protocol is bloated to hell so third-party clients stand no chance, and the foundation spends more time bikeshedding or pissing away money than they do developing. It’s a doomed project.
You can interact with Matrix server through basic curl commands… and I thought the documentation was pretty good. There are plenty of third-party clients.
Sure, E2EE, keys and cross-signing is not trivial, but I don’t know where it is.
I didn’t imply that you can’t strip the protocol down to its bare essentials and still use it, but what’s the point of a protocol if everyone is on their own personalized version of it? Version / Feature fragmentation is a massive problem and basically none of the third party clients are up to snuff. Synapse is a massive bowl of lukewarm dog water, and most alternatives to it die in a year because it’s impossible to keep up. There’s too much shit in the protocol.
What specific version/feature fragmentation and clients are you referring to? As is common now, newer Synapse drops support for older Postgres (for example). Voice and video calls is the only feature that I can think of that is half-assed in Element/ElementX or not implemented in some clients.
Otherwise, Element, Element X, FluffyChat, Fractal, freaking Cinny on Ubuntu Touch (!), and terminal-based gomuks all support basic functionality, DMs, rooms, encryption, and attachments.
So what’s left? Jabber?
Slrpnk hosts an XMPP/Jabber for our users, mods and admins to communicate. Its worked pretty darn well for the past couple years, with very low resource needs.
The clients are pretty slick now too, such as Cheogram or Monocles for mobile, and movim is an excellent web app with support for group calls.
I’d certainly recommend it over Matrix/element.
The clients are pretty slick now too, such as Cheogram or Monocles
I wouldn’t call either of those, or any other XMPP clients “slick” and it’s my biggest complaint about the protocol.
Not to mention you can run a server on anything pretty much and for surprisingly big amount of users. Toaster or potatoes will do just fine.
What’s the protection in the clients assuming compromised infrastructure, like e.g. in https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/ ?
Significant improvements to certificate pinning and validation have been added to all major XMPP clients as a result of this incident, but it should also be clear that hosting a server on infrastructure under control by an antagonist government (see also Signal) is a very bad idea and hard to mitigate against.
Signal is under control by the government? 🤔
Their server infrastructure is (run by Pentagon and NSA best buddies AWS).
And that means the government controls it?
Signal doesn’t suffer anything worse than DoS if a hostile party controls the central service. That’s its point and role. It’s based on the assumption that such hostile parties as governments don’t like DoS’ing central services, they prefer to be invisible.
For other points and roles other solutions exist. One can’t make an application covering them all, that never happens.
Briar again (I’ve finally read on it and installed it, and I love how it works and also the authors’ plans on the future possibilities based on the same protocols, but not for IM, say, there’s an article discussing possibility of RPC over those, which, for example, can give us something like the Web ; I mean, those plans are ambitious and if I want them to succeed so much, I should look for ways to defeat my executive dysfunction and distractions and learn Java). Except it would be cool if it allowed to toss data over untrusted parties, say, now if two Briar users in the same group are not in each other’s range, but there’s a third Briar user not in that group between them, their group won’t synchronize (provided they don’t have Internet connectivity). If one could allow allocating some space for such piggybacked data, or create some mesh routing functionality, then it would become a bit cooler.
You are very naive if you think that is all the US government can do in regards to Signal, but suit yourself 🤷
Anything that’s been proven/confirmed?
OK, so what else in your opinion can it do?
End to end encryption between clients (also for groups) seems to partly address the issue of a bad server. As for self-hosting, any rented or cloud sevices are very vulnerable to an evil maid. So either in-house hosting or locked cages with tamper-proof hardware remain an option.
I’m afraid that’s quite outside my field of expertise. I can only report how my experience on XMPP has been as a user, though perhaps @poVoq@slrpnk.net, who hosts it, may be able to weigh in on that. Edit: ah, I see you already have 😄
Though from my untrained eye, it seems that Jabber.ru was compromised due to not enabling a particular feature on their server
“Channel binding” is a feature in XMPP which can detect a MiTM even if the interceptor present a valid certificate. Both the client and the server must support SCRAM PLUS authentication mechanisms for this to work. Unfortunately this was not active on jabber.ru at the time of the attack.
And it seems that hosting it externally on paid hosting service (hetzner and linode) left them particularly vulnerable to this attack, and tgat it could’ve been mitigated by self hosting the XMPP locally, as well as activating that feature.
Back to IRC we go…
It is entirely insecure.
The argument has always been, if when chat rooms are public, anyone can join and start logging the chats, encryption does nothing.
It has the ability to connect over TLS, but that’s about it.
I loved using it for its simplicity, except when using all the different flavours of nick registration (Q, NickServ, …).
Not when the entirety of your conversations are jargon and in-jokes!
/s
Define secure. You can run your own network.
xmpp isn’t.
(Ok I get xmpp alone is but every modern client supports the same two encryption methods so judge for yourself)
Depends what your goal is. Revolt seems pretty cool, but I don’t think it has any kind of encryption. It is based in Europe, though, so it gets GDPR protection, and it’s open source, so it could be forked to fit other needs and uses.
No, Revolt checks neither of my boxes unfortunately.
What about delta?
I just want a self-hostable open-source alternative to the shitty closed-source IM systems I’m forced to use
I’m sticking with Matrix for now, hopefully some of the issues I’ve had will get ironed out
Snikket is the rebranded-dockerized XMPP environment (uses prosody for server, Conversations clone for Android, and Monal clone for iOS).
Worked pretty well for me in the past.
If you want 1:1 chat, Simplex should work well.
Revolt is a self hosted discord clone
Nextcloud talk?
I’m not sure how much it would make sense for me as I don’t use Nextcloud for anything else
