This one is probably one of the most disappointing one; Matrix had everything I wanted in terms of chat features. Programmability-wise, all it was an encrypted JSON sender/receiver, but in a good way. It basically could be extended however you want since it provided a useful primitive. But the encryption just randomly fails, and it's hard to figure out why, causing you to miss messages. I eventually gave up on building a side project for it.
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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Your name gave me a chuckle. Yeah its unfortunate.
Just a little bit of trolling’
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what does it mean ?
A VERY common javascript error. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4750225/what-does-object-object-mean
thx
Same here - the encryption issues killed my project too, the problem is that Matrix's OLM/Megolm protocol implementation doesn't handle device verification and key distribution robustly enugh across multiple clients.
Right. It's not like other services have implemented it better though, or is there any? I don't think we should punish them for trying to do it in a more usable way than with signal
i definitely encountered this in the past but element has constantly improved for my self hosted situation
Whoa now, author sees a censoring filter as a most basic feature of a free and open chat infrastructure? It's not a social media client, you know? It was made for closed groups like governments and companies.
I use Fluffychat to talk with family and friends and for that it's good.
Edit: ok, looks like spam really is a problem.
After seeing the screenshot they posted of the barrage of notifications they received with repulsive group names/messages I can't say I blame them.
Matrix is commonly used for public, discoverable rooms, much like IRC or Discord. Perhaps it's not good for that use case, but the author seems to wish it was.
An effective spam prevention approach is a basic feature of any public communication service that reaches a certain size. Perhaps keyword filtering as the author suggests isn't the right approach, but some rate limits would help:
- Private messages from a new contact could notify just once until approved instead of once per message.
- Servers could limit the number of outstanding message requests, with a low limit for new accounts.
Or something like a "permission to send broadcast messages" the room owner needs to grant you?
I mean, one compromised account leading to a massive influx of spam is a legitimate concern.
You can’t always assume “happy path”.
It really needs audit tools. Many organizations/communities use matrix as communication tool and suffer from spam problems.
I have moved my communications to SimpleX for very similar reasons.
I always found Matrix to be extremely clunky because of key management for rooms and stuff like that.
I'm used to using cryptocurrencies. I know how to manage keys, and yet I was constantly getting hit with the same issues with decryption of old messages, even when I properly saved my keys and imported them.
I figure if I'm not even able to use this thing properly, knowing and understanding technology, how do I expect people I talk to to understand how to do it properly?
Then, on top of that, I found out about all the metadata leaking to your home server. Sure, your communications might be encrypted, but if the sender, receiver, reactions, timestamp, etc. is not encrypted, that's not good.
I still have it on my device, but it very rarely gets opened anymore.
Edit: I use a combination of signal for those I know, IRL, and simplex for groups of FOSS enthusiasts, etc.
Do you have any tips for others looking to move their matrix/irc activity over to simplex?
Make sure to back up the simplex database and database password.
Unlike Matrix, SimpleX saves all the decryption data in the database and saves the database to your device.
As long as you have the password for it and the database file, you will be fine. Lose either and you're absolutely fucked.
How are you using Simplex as a replacement for Matrix? That's not a leading question - I'm curious about the use case.
I stopped using Matrix for 1:1 and family chat years ago because of how broken encryption has always been, but I've kept using it for public chats since
- privacy isn't solvable in public chats, so the fact Matrix's encryption is terminally screwed up isn't relevant
- there are many public rooms; not IRC-level, but it's still a large domain with large numbers of users
- Matrix is a better public chat than IRC (fight me!) with replies, comment editing, reactions, emojis (that's mostly a client thing, but it's first-class and not a sporadically supported feature), and offline history syncing (as in, see what happened while you were offline).
- I haven't yet found anything that's as good at public rooms as Matrix, that's still federated and OSS. Discord is very good, but it's SPA crap and centralized to boot.
SimpleX seems to be focused primarily on messaging, not public, large group chat... but am I missing something?
You can use SimpleX for large chats. However, at least the current architecture is not the most efficient way of doing so. Especially not once rooms hit a thousand users or more. Does it work? Yes. Does it work well? Only somewhat. I think the developers were caught off guard when people wanted to start using it for large rooms instead of one-on-one communications and had not planned for that when they made the program.
They are addressing the issue by having devices connect to super peers instead of directly peer to peer in order to make large rooms work better. That way, instead of trying to maintain a thousand individual connections, your device might maintain two or three connections to Superpiers and get messages through them. I make it even harder on myself because I demand that my SimpleX do everything over tor.
A thousand users seems like a lot; I'm not sure I've ever been in an IRC room with that many.
Is there a directory? IIRC the human naming part was still missing last time I tried it, and connecting through hashes was not very fun. The biggest blocker for me, though, was the lack of multiple device sync support. A single identity used across multiple devices concurrently is bare minimum feature, and is the reason I've always bounced off SimpleX. Has that been addressed?
There is a directory and you can find it by asking your favorite search engine for the SimpleX directory bot. As far as multiple devices goes, I'm not totally sure. I know that it's supposedly able to be used on multiple devices, but I only run it on my phone, so I haven't actually tried that functionality myself.
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Yes you're missing a lot. SimpleX even has a directory bot to find public group chats.
SimpleX public rooms work smoothly, IMO, but a lot of rooms have problems with casual Nazism and general rudeness. Some are more moderated than others. I gave up on groups eventually and just use it to talk to people I know.
I don't see how that's a SimpleX problem. People like that are obviously going to gravitate to "free" platforms where they're free to be shitheads. There's no administrative oversight. That's what you want.
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Seeing lots of dislike for Matrix lately. Hosted a Synapse server for many years, never had issues with encryption keys, but have to agree that Element the company (formerly Vector, but they now control the protocol too?) rolls out more new things than they fix old ones. E.g: Element X is slower and calls are not backwards compatible (!). Synapse server keeps getting some (corporate-looking) auth stuff added while on-boarding and registration for plain accounts on self-hosted servers is still a pain. To give them credit, Element app is consistent across platforms (for purposes of convincing people and troubleshooting), and bridges work pretty well.
But it seems any self-hosted solution has its can of worms.
XMPP, being old, implements all modern-expected functionality as extensions, and servers are not guaranteed to have them (common argument). Spam was an issue as well (but simplicity of the on-device and server database allows easy message and attachment deletions). iOS clients for XMPP are meh and require integration with Apple push servers (Snikket and Monal do that, but for how long?)
Tried SimpleX years ago, loved the idea, but it was going through growing pains. In the same vein as metadata leaks for Matrix and XMPP, if you host your own SMP server with a few users, that exposes some info vs using default servers (along with thousands users)
I think the corporate stuff is added because of the French, German and Dutch governments joining the crew. They are using matrix for government employees. It's integrated in La Suite and Open Desk.
The awful spam was the reason I left, I got mass invited to rooms with really nasty names, and there's no way in the client to mass ignore invites, you have to go to each one and click ignore.
That wouldn't be the end of the world, except their client seems to rely on waiting for the server to respond to an action in the foreground, so every time I click ignore it sits there processing for like 10-20 seconds before I can click the next one. There's no select all, there's no way to just rapidly tap ignore and have it process in the background like it should be doing.
Also they said even after banning the accounts, there's no way on their end to remove the invites the banned account sent out.
Overall it's just painful to use, the clients are bad, the moderation system doesn't work (what kind of system lets 1 account send out thousands of invites?? It should have auto-banned them within the first 10 or something), their cleanup system doesn't work, and everything just feels slow as molasses.
I was in the Cinny room at one point and it got spammed with CSAM at one point. It was traumatic.
Same with the blahaj.zone room for 196. Got so icked I just nuked the account.
Still paranoid some of that shit is still cached somewhere on my phone, though I ripped out FC so I should be fine.
Never had a trolling effort make me feel that shitty, I was so excited to talk to the little gay people on my phone and it just felt like my little zone was fuckin ruined by cunts.
Between that, and neat stuff like jmp.chat, I think xmpp might be the move.
That happened to both my home server and the OpenSUSE rooms at different times. My home server took it seriously, and quickly made changes to prevent it from happening again, but I still had 20+ invitations with pedo images to delete one by one.
I suggested to the dev of the nheko client that they add some way to deal with spam invites, and they didn't see any necessity for that. Just told me to delete them one by one.
Wow, this sounds like a terrible UX.
Matrix is good in theory but its plagued by absolutely shit clients.
I just deleted FluffyChat client since I got random invites to horrible named rooms. I’m sticking with Discord for now since I play Splatoon
Yes! Another Splatoon player on the Fediverse! I've seen like 2. Tbh I barely play the game after the Final Fest but, still love the series.
Also yeah wish Matrix and SimpleX didn't suck, they have some awful groups 🤢
There's me too!!! I would only buy a switch 2 for splat 4, maybe raiders
it's crazy, we'we had no issue with matrix even though i was sceptical at first and there was some teething issues, but we've onboarded non-technical users no problem.
the main thing is, we don't federate.
i've used fluffychat on desktop and android with zero problems.
No love for Threema? Guys? Guys?
It's a good app. Sadly the price of entry puts people off.
I assessed Matrix a few years ago and came to the same conclusion. I went with IRC3 which is a new standard that overcomes most of IRC's issues. I think IRC is still quite good, and actually has working clients for everything, web etc
As someone whos familiar with irc, where do I start with irc3? Will I have to learn a new client?
We moved our instance Matrix to Zulip. It is much better now and makes peoples talk way more than on Matrix.
May I ask why Zulip was selected over others like xmpp or irc? I'm just generally curious about zulip's potential advantages in the long-term
If I remember correctly it was for the structural organization. Creating channels and topics, marking them done and stuff like that.
A kind of open Slack, more designed for projects or companies organized comms rather than just chatting.
piefed.social now has a Zulip server too although the Matrix rooms are still open. Seems like the tide is going out on Matrix though.
Yep, I didn’t join as I am only there for the general shit talking and not participating in any constructive or useful conversations (it’s a way of life) but Camus, Snoopy, Anansi, THE meerkat and probably others are participating with you on the piefed zulip and codeberg.
The jlailu matrix is still open but inactive and left to slowly wither and die, every sidebars are now linked to the zulip server instead of matrix.
Looked this up out of curiosity and the fact that it will only somehow allow mobile notifications for "up to 10 users" even if self hosting for free, is putting me off. I get if you were using their cloud, but restricting self-hosting almost feels malicious.
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