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.

  • the whole encryption thing is of dubious value. the team and leadership don't have the discipline to build a truly secure messaging app, and yet their insistence on pretending to build one hurts usability and causes issues with room states or whatever.

• 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.

  • this recently came back to bite the ceo of element when he was invited to a room named 'CHILD PORN' while giving a demo. maybe we'll finally have the option soon.

• 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.

• 🔑 Unable to decrypt message

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)

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)

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)...

I was under the impression that it wasn't out yet, I didn't even know I could use it

IRCv3 has worse adoption than relatively (in regards to other XEPs) new XMPP extensions like OMEMO tbh lol

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.

From a usability perspective, IRC has aged horribly.

/me agrees

Discord replacing IRC is bad. Discord replacing open web forums is a catastrophe for indexable information.

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

I think IRCv3 is the update to the standard, but it's been brewing for awhile.

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.

Discord has a lot of issues, but I really don't ever want to go back to IRC. From a usability perspective, IRC has aged horribly.

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.

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

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!

all this abusing his authority to air his dirty laundry in public reminds me of someone else I used to know (who will not be named) who did this exact same type of shit, just under different circumstances

it just makes them look bad to everyone, but they're too narcissistic to see it

that is his middle name

the admins should change his username to crouton if he does come here lol

its so cool how much hes trying to be like "ohh... you're playing checkers while i'm playing 5d chess, 400 moves ahead" when hes unreservedly posting shit that wp engine lawyers will use in court to score another couple million off him. i simply can't comprehend it (other than remembering that silicon valley executive types have all pickled their brains with ketamine)

it's good that matt is following the legal advice any lawyer would give you: 'keep posting'

also if we're lucky, he might sign up here and yell at us

It should be said that licensing the WordPress trademark to other companies would obviously be a massive cash opportunity. But since the Foundation and Automattic are already so inextricably intertwined, and controlled by one person, it raises some serious, potentially even IRS-level questions of where that money would be going, exactly. (I’m not a lawyer or a tax expert. It’s just that using a nonprofit to help create a monopoly that funnels money to your own for-profit company, which doesn’t have to pay the nonprofit like the other businesses do because you run both of them, just sounds like the kind of thing federal agencies might be interested in.)

Yeah this looks a lot worse and shadier than whatever Mozilla is cooking with their Foundation / Corporation split lol. At least from what I understand from Mozilla's structure, the money seem to always end up in the Foundation (so the Corporation is just another front to fundraise), while here it's the opposite

Services like invidio.us, and the ActivityPub sphere, that allow breaking through into JS tracking-laden "web applications" with simple HTML and CSS are a demonstration of a possible future of a web without the useless cruft. Much to the chagrin of its gatekeepers.

Invidious is just fantastic, and I am saddened that Google is trying to strangle it. I browse the web with JavaScript completely disabled, so Invidious and yt-dlp are the only way I am able to watch YouTube videos at all.

Rapid, calendar-based release schedule really ruined it. New versions used to feel like real milestones...

i remember firefox 3 being a huge celebrated event. we are now on firefox 130.

thank u for sharing this post