Don’t get me wrong but I just don’t get all these „why do you use messenger X and not Y?“ threads that occasionally pop up. The answer is almost always „because the people I want to talk to use X“.
I use messengers to talk to specific people. Friends, family, the people I game with. It’s not like lemmy or reddit which are more about topics than about people. I can join a community about my favorite hobby on any platform and get more or less the same experience. But with messengers that doesn’t work. Matrix can be a thousand times better than Discord or XMPP but if the people I need to reach aren’t there, it’s absolutely useless to me. And convincing them to switch over with me isn’t really an option. They rightfully ask why they should get yet another messenger just for me when everyone else they want to talk to is on one they already have.
It’s almost a miracle that so many people switched from IRC to Discord when that came out but I guess they just had a bunch of features that people wanted.
Well. I do it the other way. I would not install effing whatsapp just to reach someone. I tell then once where to find me, and, if they want to know, why this is and why i prefer it and why i wouldn't install app X. If they don't, then bad luck for me. Or not.
That's the reason I use matrix, I have bridges so that if someone messages me on ANY platform, it goes to matrix and I can respond there.
It's not the best solution, but it's worked well for me and I like having everything in one app
The internet switching from irc to discord has been a catastrophe.
This is the right answer - you go where the people are.
I keep in touch with friends and family on WhatsApp, do gaming stuff on Discord and most of the Lemmy/Fediverse chat is on Matrix (partly helped by some degree of Matrix integration to provide secure messaging). I am in XMPP but no-one else I know is, so it just sits there unloved.
The question makes more sense in the context of "our friend group is deciding to move to a new communication system" Which should we choose.
We narrowed it down to xmpp, signal and matrix. Signal looked terrible to impossible to self host because the clients might make it hard to choose another server.
Matrix looks good but slow and more like irc ? Also like signal, there's few clients.
Xmpp was just more mature, more diversity of clients. But missing new things like comment retractions, comment reaction, opengraph url previews, combine image+text messages and image albums.
Don't use either, they're unreliable services and not enough people use them. Stick to IRC.
typical "my opinion is objective reality" comment. Matrix works well, as does XMPP. Looking over my own experience as user and admin as well as other users and admins, matrix has about the same reliability as the large IMs like Whatsapp and Signal.
Matrix does definitely not have the same reliability as WhatsApp or Signal. I've used it for around 3 years now with a group of tech savvy friends.
It's still a regular occurrence that we get cannot decrypt errors, sometimes the app doesn't show new messages in the chat but they are visible in the preview, also the app can be soooo slow.
Also, I know it's not user error. If you check the Matrix development and follow their blog posts they already acknowledged the issues and are working on fixes. But for now it's just wishful thinking when one calls them reliable alternatives for mainstream use. I'm not hating and will keep using the project because I truly think they are doing amazing work.
unreliable?
A more general chat platform will really want end-to-end encryption which IRC doesn’t have. Matrix & XMPP offer decentralized rooms so you don’t have to create an account & join each server to chat, but rather your server can connect to another server.
You don't have to solve every problem in a single application. If you need privacy, use iMessage or Signal.
Public chat is by definition not secure, anyone can be sitting in the room logging, so it's not that essential as long as client-server uses TLS. Modern IRC does have SDCC chat, but not all clients will use it, so stick to secure messengers.
XMPP used to be pretty popular until google EEEd it afaik. Matrix is kind of an attempt to build on XMPPs "fall from grace" if you will. It's still very good from what I hear and some say the server is vastly more efficient but I only tried matrix and it works pretty well.
Matrix's most feature complete server is synapse, which is written in python. Hence not very efficient and scalable.
It's mostly fine, but to really go big, one of the other server implementations will need to be used, but none of them achieve feature-parity with synapse as far as I know.
I agree that matrix isnt infinitely scalable, which is a great thing imo.
The reason being that most people, especially users, are brainwashed into thinking that centralization is normal or good. It is neither.
Ideally every small group of like 10-100 people has a small server which is one out of millions at some point. Thats the idea of the fediverse.
My server federates with some 8000 servers at this point which is great and matrix.org has like 30% of all users afaik (which are over 100mil in total at this point)
And before I hear the always same argument: yes, it is hard to find peeps on matrix sometimes (it is a lot harder on whatsapp). Be the change you want to see and help with sites like joinmatrix.org
Have a good one.
Hosted my own xmpp server back when you could talk to facebook messenger and google chat users via federation. But when they closed their walled garden there were nobody to talk to so i stopped it.
Now with matrix i have again a homeserver. Bridged to messenger, google what the new thing is called, slack, and a few others.
It’s faster and it’s not Synapse. I could serve hundreds of people on a single Pi while I would need to order a VPS with 4GB RAM to serve the same amount of people. I know there’s better server software out there, but it’s nowhere near Synapse. XMPP simply doesn’t care, clients and servers are well built and almost every client uses OMEMO and honestly I had a lot of decryption errors on Matrix and if you used something else than matrix.org you’d be screwed. It’s simply just better, because it’s faster and has a bigger ecosystem. The only thing that’s not cool about XMPP is that the federated userbase is kinda small. The biggest non-federated XMPP server is WhatsApp and that’s kinda sad. Also the protocol is nice, because most clients keep a socket open to listen for new messages and this is especially nice in the college WiFi environment some of my friends are in where a timer is set after bedtime which would wait until all sockets are closed which doesn’t include XMPP so messaging with my friends after bedtime is still possible.
Just the other day I got downvoted for posting that it's stupid that 8GB of RAM in laptops is not enough. Software like Synapse, trying to lift the load that it does in Python, is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about.
the college WiFi environment some of my friends are in where a timer is set after bedtime which would wait until all sockets are closed which doesn’t include XMPP so messaging with my friends after bedtime is still possible.
The college tries to just shut off the WiFi at night??
Yep, it's more like assisted living for autistic people though
more popular
That’s not true at all. There are a ton of business applications for XMPP from IoT messaging, to Nintendo’s user presence, to being a 90% chance your favorite online game’s chat back-end. Behind Jitsi & Zoom & WhatsApp is an XMPP server. Matrix by design will never scale to these demands if history needs to live forever & all servers need to duplicate data.
More trendy would be a more appropriate phrase since Matrix wants to chase after proprietary Slack & Discord, where as XMPP is extensible & more generalized for all sorts of applications. Even with all of these proprietary applications, there are plenty of open communities hosted for MUCs & also blog/community thru Movim/Libervia & as an alternative back-end for UnifiedPush, etc. With the server resource usage being much lower, it’s cheaper & easier to maintain an XMPP server alongside another application in a VPS or even on a home network with dynamic DNS. If you are inclined, set one up & test it out.
I have never used matrix but why would anyone design something that won't scale by design?
I understand scalability not being a priority but designing something to be poorly scalable by design seems odd.
If you want the messaging to be resilient, this makes sense as a server can go down but anyone else connected has the whole history on their server.
But I think that is better suited for a forum where copying Slack/Discord’s lead & trying to preserve all history in a chat isn’t worth it as I see this sort of thing as better tasked for ephemeral communication. However, there is something communal & intuitive about chat apps that make folks interact pretty well so they can make decisions. This is a ‘good thing’ where forums don’t get the same engagement—but at the cost of you had to be there or worse, you need an account to see the discussion for that decision.
On a related note is anybody able to tell me why Matrix hosting is so darn expensive? It seems you need to self host to have bridges?
There are quite a few stories of communities shutting down their servers since the costs of duplicating all messages & attachments for all rooms for all DMs for all users on the server. Add to the mix that the implementation server in Python consumes a lot more resources, it’s not a big surprise. As such, everything centralizes around Matrix.org where they get an unreasonable amount of the network’s metadata.
Thanks that's interesting
I know part of what makes it expensive is the propagation of messages in complex rooms (I.e. the official matrix room). I haven't hosted matrix servers myself, but data.haus did which I was on until it sunsetted late last year due to this issue.
I think it's just more difficult to set up than most self-hosted services?
But like, if you learn to do that yourself any old VPS will work.
You don't have to self host to have bridges. Some instances provide them, I know pikaviestin.fi does, but they only accept Finnish citizens.
Im self hosting conduit and it was surprisingly easy to setup, and at this point just my mom and I are using it so ressource usage is OK. Otherwise I read that CPU can be tough in big chat rooms, and I assume a lot of things are copied on disk for federation which can also be costly. You can always de-federate to avoid these problems but at this point I don't see much reason to self host if you're only going to chat (signals does that just fine)
cant u just run a docker environment on a cheap hosting service or something ? (i am new to this)
Well sure but why would other hosts charge 50 a month? Seems a bit steep.
Damn, but are you reading them all?
Irregularly but yes.
I believe the learning curve to have an XMPP server up and running is lower than a Matrix server, and from what I can see, a Matrix server won't run as well in a potato.
This is true if you run Synapse, the matrix server written in python.
There is also Dendrite, written in Go, and Conduit, written in Rust. They run better but are behind in terms of implementing the spec.
I tried getting on Jabber/XMPP before trying to get on Matrix, never got any traction of frieds who was intrested in switching to either long term. So at the moment I just use sms/iMessage and Discord.
Because XMPP shipped with my server OS and I can't be arsed to install Matrix for no apparent additional utility.
I guess I don’t use either because no one I know does. A few friends and I have a signal group chat but other than that 🤷
That's the reason I use matrix, I have bridges so that if someone messages me on ANY platform, it goes to matrix and I can respond there.
It's not the best solution, but it's worked well for me and I like having everything in one app
You're welcome to use my hosted server for free XMPP.
It is way more secure and minimal than matrix. It has OMEMO encryption which is end to end encrypted.
Your SSL certificate expired 2 days ago
Cert updated. You're most welcome.
Because Matrix can't stick to a single thought and they completely refactor their codebase every year or two and I'm not convinced they are going to be reliable in the long run.
