I will be upfront with this, and say that I’ve never been a huge fan. But I did reinstall a Matrix server, and some clients to see if it’d gotten better in the year or so since I’ve last used it.
This just… Kind of feels like a more centralized XMPP with group chat folders that sort of function? The spaces feature is neat, but I’ve tried 4-5 clients, and every single one of those throws all of them into the same screen as the DMs by default, and I can’t find a way to change that.
Am I missing something here? Like. I want to at least see what people like here, I just can’t.
Man, the Matrix hate in this thread is real.
The spaces feature is neat, but I’ve tried 4-5 clients, and every single one of those throws all of them into the same screen as the DMs by default, and I can’t find a way to change that.
“show all rooms” is how you turn that off in element

Nheko also supports spaces and has a filter to only show DMs, it also allows tagging rooms to do custom grouping of chats. But at the moment only element properly embeds calls with the new element-call system.

Omg I love this thread and this post. Sometimes I feel like everyone is crazy when they suggest alternative software.
People will be like “hey the best burger place in town closed can anyone recommend an alternative?”
And then a bunch of farmers show up like “yeah dude buy this calf and then just raise it real quick and also plant some trees to get wood for your smoker, you have a smoker right? Anyways yeah it’s so easy bro I don’t even know why anyone buys corporate burgers tbh.”
And you say “hmmm okay sounds like a lot of work but I guess I can try it?”
And you try it and it’s the shittiest blandest burger and it doesn’t even have any sauce or lettuce or tomatoes because fuck you those things are for corporate burgers and if you want to complain why don’t you open up a tomato branch and start contributing tomatoes then and waaah waaah why won’t the stupid normies eat my shitty burger that takes 6 months to make and doesn’t have ketchup waaaaah it must be because everyone is dumb and lazy
No you aren’t missing anything, the UX is actually that dumb
I find Matrix to be completely unintuitive. I could probably get to a point where I understood it, but the whole point (currently more than ever) is to get off Discord. That means convincing my normie friends, and ye. There’s just no fucking way
This. I’m not judging the program based on if I can use it. I need to get my non tech savvy friends onto it as well and this is where so many alternatives fail the litmus test
Ignoring the missing features, is stoat a better experience for non-techies coming from discord?
yes, but it doesn’t have Al features
EDIT: Funny typo. Al->all
That’s a good thing
was a funny typo. I meant to write “all” not “Al”
Matrix at least has potential for the UX to improve especially with vibecoding being a thing now, Discord will always be a bloated laggy locked-down Electron mess with no public API and hostility to third party clients and automation tools
That, or governments (which have started to move to Matrix for their communications) start investing in Matrix and contribute code / PRs.
Matrix starting development under Israeli company Amdocs is enough for me to never touch it with a 10 foot pole no matter its rebranding and move to become a “UK” company.
You can self-host it and there’s even a full rewrite in Rust available, which AFAIK is independent of the company.
As far as I know you arent missing anything. It literally displays like that. I couldn’t get into it tbh.
matrix is pointless, huge bloated buggy ass server, no cheogram (phone number connection) or movim (social network accessible with any xmpp account), I can’t even be bothered to list off my issues with it I wrote out on some comment on some other account here just save yourself.
xmpp literally lets me run phone numbers in 4 different countries that stay connected wherever I am
if you don’t wanna deal with that arcanechat/deltachat is amazing tech that stays almost entirely on device. the arcanechat dev adb is cuban and YOU SHOULD GIVE HIM YOUR MONEY NOW
if you don’t wanna deal with that arcanechat/deltachat is amazing tech that stays almost entirely on device. the arcanechat dev adb is cuban and YOU SHOULD GIVE HIM YOUR MONEY NOW
❤️
Can you explain a bit about how you set up the phone numbers? Are those normal mobile numbers that people can text/call, etc? So you just need a data plan for mobile device?
the app will prompt you with the easy US/Canada options, but there are several providers. I will make a note in my planner to explain how to do it in countries that lack these services but it is really tough I had to spend tjme on the phone with telecoms to get it connected to our shit and by the time I was done it was beer o clock so I didn’t write it all down lol
Has anyone tried Mattermost? It’s modeller after Slack mostly.
I run Mattermost at home since several years, and now I am switching to Zulip.
Mattermost is also enshittifying itself and imposing limits like those that caused us to flee from Slack.
Zulip is (afaik) true FOSS without venture capital, and has no restrictions. It’s what we should habe done from the start.
Neither of those supports E2EE unfortunately.
They are going downhill recently. Everyone around me is trying to get rid of it.
mattermost is meant for big corporations or governments
And how is that a problem? Too powerful? Too scalable? Can handle more users than you need?
We use it for a corporation of 20 people just fine.
I evaluated matrix a few years ago to try to add chat to my video game. I also evaluated everything else. Sendbird (proprietary, what reddit uses) is crazy expensive. Matrix is complicated and didn’t have a good simple web frontend. XMPP is still pretty good. In the end, I ended up going with IRC v3 which fixes many of the legacy problems of IRC, and that was the best option. I am still scratching my head as to how that’s the state of the art for sending little bits of text back and forth. Don’t get me started on WebRTC, I spent a whole year trying to make a stable video chat app for another project













