Submitted by cowloom in technology
we went from a decentralized, self-hostable, open standard, to a proprietary web app controlled by one corporation that spies on its users. matrix is the modernized successor to IRC, but now it suffers from the network effect, because everyone's using discord.
What don't you like about Matrix? I've only used it a little, but I didn't have any issues with it.
I'll take the clunkiness of IRC over having my data sold any day
yes, but irc was really not easy to use for people who weren't the most tech literate, and the alternative those people used before discord was skype (bleeugh).
ideally there would be an easy-to-use, not-for-profit option but we don't really live in a system where projects like that can get enough development resources to solve the usability issues irc and matrix face.
perhaps even an update to the irc standard or something would have been cool.
so like yeah, discord sucks but it does enable more people to connect in an irc-like fashion than irc did. it's a mixed bag.
The onboarding is confusing and alienating to me, and while I'm someone with a high tolerance for that, it makes it hard to recommend it to other folks.
Then there's the performance of the element client. It drains battery and uses a lot of CPU on every device I use it on.
And despite being "e2ee", I only use it for public channels, which make the hurdles of e2ee meaningless (even if channels I were on didn't all have bridges to discords and/or ircs).
I still don't have a mental model for how to do identity/key management with it. Every time I use it, I just make a new account. I understand why keys can't be tied to a username/password, but I would want to at least be able to maintain a consistent identity without having to think about it.
I think IRCv3 is the update to the standard, but it's been brewing for awhile.
I want to add that I don't mean to be a hater-- A Discord alternative is a LOT of work, especially adding E2EE, which is an important thing. They made a modular ecosystem that is working pretty well. There's a lot I like about it! But this comment was only to address the negatives haha
From a usability perspective, IRC has aged horribly.
/me agrees
I think discord is good usability wise i just wish the replacement to IRC was something you could self host.
I'm worried about what happens when discord stops being free or if it goes away.
IRCv3 has worse adoption than relatively (in regards to other XEPs) new XMPP extensions like OMEMO tbh lol
I was under the impression that it wasn't out yet, I didn't even know I could use it
libera.chat's ircd has implemented some of the IRCv3 standard, but funnily despite being the dominant IRC network it's still lacking compared to say tildeverse's IRC which has chat history for example (also from IRCv3)...
Servers should be servers!
This tbh, which is why I call them "guilds" instead (which is the original term anyway before Discord expanded out of its gaming niche)
For me, Matrix (or I guess Element) really takes a long time to sync all my chatrooms when I login from a new browser. Not sure if it's just because the server I'm in is shit, and I'm leaning with that because I've been unable to use my Matrix for several days now due to the server itself being down even though the Element client is up (I guess u/emma is wondering now what happened with my testing of her new commits to an experimental branch of Postmill lol)
since we're sharing gripes we have with matrix and/or element, i'll share mine:
editing messages is completely unreliable. i'll send a message on my computer, realise i did a oopsie and edit it out of the message, then later log in with my phone and see the oopsie is still there. i have no idea if the person i messaged sees the edited message or not.
messages become stuck. i'll infodump on someone, then one of the messages just randomly becomes attached at the end of the log. i have to close element and reopen it, and ultimately i'm left wondering if the message got sent correctly in the first place.
you have to be a rocket scientist to figure out how to log out. it'll pester you about key backups, and even when you've done that, it'll still warn you that you're about to lose all your messages.
they added a colourblind mode, which is theoretically good, but there is no non-colourblind mode, and it looks fuckugly. this primarily affects name colours (and not things where colours are used to convey meaning, like red for dangerous actions, etc.), so all they've done is make it look jarring for the rest of us. this feels like it was done to tick off a point on a compliance checklist, rather than to actually improve the user experience for colourblind people. (i'm open to the possibility i'm wrong on this one)
search is completely broken in encrypted rooms.
synchronising takes anywhere from a microsecond to several minutes where it just spins and does nothing.
you cannot ignore invites. i sometimes get messaged by people i don't know, and don't wish to signal that i rejected their invite to, and the invite will just be stuck there, with a notification badge, for all eternity, until i relent and reject it. i wish for the ability to prevent invites on the server-side, which i'm told there is no reason it can't be done.
rooms get stuck in the 'has unread messages' state for seemingly no reason. i'm in such a room right now, and it still persists in that state even when i click the 'mark all messages as read' button. for some reason it's only stuck like this in the iOS app.
the IRC bridges only go one way, where you can use matrix to join IRC channels. i want to allow IRC users to join my matrix channel, so they can pester me about postmill without having to sign up for yet another service.
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twovests wrote
I am angry about it constantly, but to be fair, IRC is pretty awful. You need to selfhost a bouncer to get a halfway-usable experience. And Matrix is really really bad to use.
Discord should be a public utility! Servers should be servers!