[kaladin-jasnah]

Not the original commenter, but Matrix is awful. I used it on and off, and self-hosted it too. It's slow, bloated (I'm pretty sure I tried other homeservers). The app UI/UX is not great either. The E2EE stuff got better by the end but adoption-wise I was able to get way more people on Signal.

[orbital-decay]

Matrix the protocol is just fine, and all features you expect are there. Their problem is with actual apps that either don't support most of good features, are unpolished to the degree of being unusable, or both.

[kaladin-jasnah]

Yeah, I would agree. To be honest, I used Beeper for a while, and I had no issues with it, despite at least the client being similar to Element.

[Imustaskforhelp]

For matrix, I don't use the original client but rather cinny. This client is so good that I wish that other clients and it looks really good in UI/UX, honestly I have had some serious thoughts of porting this UI sometimes: https://cinny.in, so I would be curious what you think about this as well.

(Side note: Fractal and the matrix element fork called schildichat are interesting as well. It is also possible to run matrix in terminal for what its worth as well, and nhekochat is good as well. Fractal runs on gtk and nheko runs on qt. I do agree though that running matrix homservers is a bit bulky sometimes from what I have heard but the client scene is probably really good so I am curious what you think about cinny :-D )

[kaladin-jasnah]

I used Cinny at some point, but the issue for me was the mobile client. I liked Cinny, but wasn't a huge fan of a web-based client. I think I tried Fractal and whatever KDE was working on and neither was polished at the time of use.

[Imustaskforhelp]

Hm yeah I understand, there were some issues in Fractal where it didn't support spaces sometime back (I am not sure about it right now), it was fun talking to the team at gnome though making fractal.

> I liked Cinny, but wasn't a huge fan of a web-based client.

I feel as if sacrifices must be made as Signal and most others are probably web based clients as well. Fractal probably comes as close to it tbh

> but the issue for me was the mobile client

Ah I see, I don't really run matrix on phone but yeah I understand what you mean, aren't there some clients like fluffychat and others for Android though? Certainly not as polished as Cinny I imagine but it should be workable (hopefully) from my time seeing some of its screenshots. another side nitpick of matrix protocol but I have heard from people that Matrix clients sometimes take battery consumption.

When I was making https://mirror.forum I had my fair share of trying various protocols and to be honest, I feel as if we have enough good open source solutions out there that the tech part just isn't the limiter anymore and FOSS solutions in general might be good enough but its the network effects which are the issues.

which is tangentially why I had built mirror.forum where you can add your discord, matrix, fluxer, stoat links all in one for a guy to join any of them by just changing the link from #discord to #fluxer among other things.

Though I do understand the overall frustration of wanting something which just works but Fluxer is an honestly good option as well and I would love to know if it fits your use case perhaps if not matrix, what do you think? IMO its a low hanging fruit to replace from discord to fluxer given how similar the overall UI/UX is. I also think that Fluxer also has a mobile client or is working on that.

[graynk]

Fluffychat works reasonably well on mobile for me. On desktop I use Fractal but it still misses some fairly major features like spaces and threads.

[sfdlkj3jk342a]

I agree that Matrix has a lot of problems, at least when used with the Element app, but I've found that voice calls are much better with Matrix compared to Signal over a flaky network. It was as good as WhatsApp in my experience.