Posted my thoughts on Matrix over on Bluesky in a thread:
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Posted my thoughts on Matrix over on Bluesky in a thread:
https://bsky.app/profile/lina.yt/post/3memjfjwzzs26
https://bsky.app/profile/lina.yt/post/3memmudkm3k26TL;DR no, it's not going to replace Discord. Matrix is too full of jank due to early poor design decisions to be widely usable by non-technical people.
The Fediverse and Bluesky are different takes on federated Twitter with different pros/cons, and federated Twitter is a much harder problem (because it's "global"), but Matrix is basically just all cons. It's a failed experiment, and you can simply do much better starting over rather than trying to fix it. Just because it's relatively widely used in FOSS spaces doesn't mean it's the way to go. Sunk cost fallacy etc.
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Posted my thoughts on Matrix over on Bluesky in a thread:
https://bsky.app/profile/lina.yt/post/3memjfjwzzs26
https://bsky.app/profile/lina.yt/post/3memmudkm3k26TL;DR no, it's not going to replace Discord. Matrix is too full of jank due to early poor design decisions to be widely usable by non-technical people.
The Fediverse and Bluesky are different takes on federated Twitter with different pros/cons, and federated Twitter is a much harder problem (because it's "global"), but Matrix is basically just all cons. It's a failed experiment, and you can simply do much better starting over rather than trying to fix it. Just because it's relatively widely used in FOSS spaces doesn't mean it's the way to go. Sunk cost fallacy etc.
@lina Not sure why you wouldn't want E2EE by default for text? Maybe in a 'public forum' context it doesn't make sense, but I wouldn't call many/most Discord rooms that, exactly. If anything video and audio are less information dense and more expensive/difficult to analyse, ergo less valuable and less in need of E2EE. Not to mention they are large, ephemeral, and expensive to store, so less likely to be stored for analysis in the first place.
I for one don't really want advertisers and LLMs and LEOs crawling all my private chats.
It's definitely not a Discord replacement, and has a lot of warts, though, I agree with you there.
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@lina Not sure why you wouldn't want E2EE by default for text? Maybe in a 'public forum' context it doesn't make sense, but I wouldn't call many/most Discord rooms that, exactly. If anything video and audio are less information dense and more expensive/difficult to analyse, ergo less valuable and less in need of E2EE. Not to mention they are large, ephemeral, and expensive to store, so less likely to be stored for analysis in the first place.
I for one don't really want advertisers and LLMs and LEOs crawling all my private chats.
It's definitely not a Discord replacement, and has a lot of warts, though, I agree with you there.
@ktims Of course you'd *want* E2EE. The problem is you can't have it without jank, as Matrix demonstrates.
E2EE imposes a series of tradeoffs (with history, search, multiple clients, etc.). Matrix is an attempt at solving those problems, and it's a failure. I do not believe it's practical to solve those problems without jank.
Signal is the best, cleanest implementation of E2EE widely available, and it comes with clear documented limitations that make it not a suitable competitor for Discord.
You simply can't have your E2EE cake and eat it too. Sorry.
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Posted my thoughts on Matrix over on Bluesky in a thread:
https://bsky.app/profile/lina.yt/post/3memjfjwzzs26
https://bsky.app/profile/lina.yt/post/3memmudkm3k26TL;DR no, it's not going to replace Discord. Matrix is too full of jank due to early poor design decisions to be widely usable by non-technical people.
The Fediverse and Bluesky are different takes on federated Twitter with different pros/cons, and federated Twitter is a much harder problem (because it's "global"), but Matrix is basically just all cons. It's a failed experiment, and you can simply do much better starting over rather than trying to fix it. Just because it's relatively widely used in FOSS spaces doesn't mean it's the way to go. Sunk cost fallacy etc.
@lina a lot of that seems to be focused on E2EE. but also, even ignoring E2EE, matrix is still a jank mess, honestly
I'm in a matrix community that isn't primarily about a tech project, and there has been a lot of jank. room splits (and handling those), clients needing a clear cache and initial sync, inadequate moderation tooling only made reactively against (the very bad media) spam (this impacted the whole of matrix, not just this specific community), the community's synapse homeserver falling over for the weirdest issues (I count 2 only somewhat recently), room upgrades being still a pretty meh experience, the whole thing of room v12 too (how much of matrix rooms have even upgraded to that?), and probably even more I did not remember to include here. oh, and I'm not even an admin or anything too, just been a participant who's been there for some time.
I've also ran into E2EE issues too. unable to decrypt, etc., with the worst one being sending an unencrypted message in an encrypted room, because my client for some reason got really confused about the state of room encryption (it's also a thing that's manually doable, and can also done the other way)
I also personally have 6 clients installed on my phone, and 2 per computer. just because not all clients implement wanted functionality. I could probably reduce the clients count to 3 for my phone at best while still keeping roughly all the feature sets I use.
probably a lot of this jank is how matrix kinda just does not have much communities that isn't about a tech project (not related to general tech oriented communities). the matrix.org room directory is by my rough estimation 99.9% tech projects. (compare that to stoat where I was able to instantly find a general stuff community in the discover section, and multiple of them, and many of them.)
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@ktims Of course you'd *want* E2EE. The problem is you can't have it without jank, as Matrix demonstrates.
E2EE imposes a series of tradeoffs (with history, search, multiple clients, etc.). Matrix is an attempt at solving those problems, and it's a failure. I do not believe it's practical to solve those problems without jank.
Signal is the best, cleanest implementation of E2EE widely available, and it comes with clear documented limitations that make it not a suitable competitor for Discord.
You simply can't have your E2EE cake and eat it too. Sorry.
@ktims At the end of the day, decentralization (with data portability) is more valuable than E2EE if your concern is data mining. That can be done without all the major issues of E2EE.
A decentralized Discord replacement that becomes widely accepted and used by the public is viable IMO, but not if it pushes E2EE like Matrix does.
Put another way: if Matrix didn't have E2EE, it would likely already be much closer to a Discord replacement, or even completely there, and it would've been much more valuable for users. Right now the situation is, everyone trying to use Matrix eventually learns the "turn off E2EE in any group chat or room" lesson the hard way after leaving it on once and realizing how broken it is and that you can't turn it off after the fact. It makes no sense. And even for DMs it's jank in Matrix. And the whole thing is jank even with E2EE off, partially due to design decisions driven by the E2EE requirement.
(Read my second bsky link if you haven't, I told some of my Matrix E2EE horror stories, and there's more.)
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@lina a lot of that seems to be focused on E2EE. but also, even ignoring E2EE, matrix is still a jank mess, honestly
I'm in a matrix community that isn't primarily about a tech project, and there has been a lot of jank. room splits (and handling those), clients needing a clear cache and initial sync, inadequate moderation tooling only made reactively against (the very bad media) spam (this impacted the whole of matrix, not just this specific community), the community's synapse homeserver falling over for the weirdest issues (I count 2 only somewhat recently), room upgrades being still a pretty meh experience, the whole thing of room v12 too (how much of matrix rooms have even upgraded to that?), and probably even more I did not remember to include here. oh, and I'm not even an admin or anything too, just been a participant who's been there for some time.
I've also ran into E2EE issues too. unable to decrypt, etc., with the worst one being sending an unencrypted message in an encrypted room, because my client for some reason got really confused about the state of room encryption (it's also a thing that's manually doable, and can also done the other way)
I also personally have 6 clients installed on my phone, and 2 per computer. just because not all clients implement wanted functionality. I could probably reduce the clients count to 3 for my phone at best while still keeping roughly all the feature sets I use.
probably a lot of this jank is how matrix kinda just does not have much communities that isn't about a tech project (not related to general tech oriented communities). the matrix.org room directory is by my rough estimation 99.9% tech projects. (compare that to stoat where I was able to instantly find a general stuff community in the discover section, and multiple of them, and many of them.)
@jacksonchen666 Yup. Though my personal opinion is that a lot of that is E2EE's fault. E2EE forced a number of Matrix design decisions that got us here, and which apply even if you disable E2EE in any given room.
But not all, yeah, some stuff is just poorly designed in ways unrelated to E2EE.
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Posted my thoughts on Matrix over on Bluesky in a thread:
https://bsky.app/profile/lina.yt/post/3memjfjwzzs26
https://bsky.app/profile/lina.yt/post/3memmudkm3k26TL;DR no, it's not going to replace Discord. Matrix is too full of jank due to early poor design decisions to be widely usable by non-technical people.
The Fediverse and Bluesky are different takes on federated Twitter with different pros/cons, and federated Twitter is a much harder problem (because it's "global"), but Matrix is basically just all cons. It's a failed experiment, and you can simply do much better starting over rather than trying to fix it. Just because it's relatively widely used in FOSS spaces doesn't mean it's the way to go. Sunk cost fallacy etc.
@lina I do find it interesting how people suddenly care about E2E now that they're considering jumping ship when Discord STILL does everything in plain text.
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Posted my thoughts on Matrix over on Bluesky in a thread:
https://bsky.app/profile/lina.yt/post/3memjfjwzzs26
https://bsky.app/profile/lina.yt/post/3memmudkm3k26TL;DR no, it's not going to replace Discord. Matrix is too full of jank due to early poor design decisions to be widely usable by non-technical people.
The Fediverse and Bluesky are different takes on federated Twitter with different pros/cons, and federated Twitter is a much harder problem (because it's "global"), but Matrix is basically just all cons. It's a failed experiment, and you can simply do much better starting over rather than trying to fix it. Just because it's relatively widely used in FOSS spaces doesn't mean it's the way to go. Sunk cost fallacy etc.
@lina I appreciate seeing someone more technologically-capable voicing my sentiment that if Stoat had distributive features allowing for federation, it would immediately become the most viable Discord alternative.
Alas, the primary dev has expressed very explicitly (and a number of times) that this isn’t something they’re interested in implementing.
I’m curious tho, why do you say federated Twitter is actually tougher than federated Discord?
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@jacksonchen666 Yup. Though my personal opinion is that a lot of that is E2EE's fault. E2EE forced a number of Matrix design decisions that got us here, and which apply even if you disable E2EE in any given room.
But not all, yeah, some stuff is just poorly designed in ways unrelated to E2EE.
@lina
A lot of it seems inherit to a selling point that is (afaik) unique to matrix: group chats not being tied to a single server. All participating servers are equal on the protocol level.
This means that a group chat can survive the server it was created on going away just fine (unlike XMPP) which is a great feature to have.
But it comes at the cost of complex state resolution issues, since there isn't a single source of truth, and every participating server might have different ideas about basic things like "what users are currently in the room".
@jacksonchen666 -
Posted my thoughts on Matrix over on Bluesky in a thread:
https://bsky.app/profile/lina.yt/post/3memjfjwzzs26
https://bsky.app/profile/lina.yt/post/3memmudkm3k26TL;DR no, it's not going to replace Discord. Matrix is too full of jank due to early poor design decisions to be widely usable by non-technical people.
The Fediverse and Bluesky are different takes on federated Twitter with different pros/cons, and federated Twitter is a much harder problem (because it's "global"), but Matrix is basically just all cons. It's a failed experiment, and you can simply do much better starting over rather than trying to fix it. Just because it's relatively widely used in FOSS spaces doesn't mean it's the way to go. Sunk cost fallacy etc.
@lina Unable to decrypt message.
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Posted my thoughts on Matrix over on Bluesky in a thread:
https://bsky.app/profile/lina.yt/post/3memjfjwzzs26
https://bsky.app/profile/lina.yt/post/3memmudkm3k26TL;DR no, it's not going to replace Discord. Matrix is too full of jank due to early poor design decisions to be widely usable by non-technical people.
The Fediverse and Bluesky are different takes on federated Twitter with different pros/cons, and federated Twitter is a much harder problem (because it's "global"), but Matrix is basically just all cons. It's a failed experiment, and you can simply do much better starting over rather than trying to fix it. Just because it's relatively widely used in FOSS spaces doesn't mean it's the way to go. Sunk cost fallacy etc.
@lina as someone who used matrix almost exclusively for over a year and then still went back to discord, matrix is very much not there yet
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@lina a lot of that seems to be focused on E2EE. but also, even ignoring E2EE, matrix is still a jank mess, honestly
I'm in a matrix community that isn't primarily about a tech project, and there has been a lot of jank. room splits (and handling those), clients needing a clear cache and initial sync, inadequate moderation tooling only made reactively against (the very bad media) spam (this impacted the whole of matrix, not just this specific community), the community's synapse homeserver falling over for the weirdest issues (I count 2 only somewhat recently), room upgrades being still a pretty meh experience, the whole thing of room v12 too (how much of matrix rooms have even upgraded to that?), and probably even more I did not remember to include here. oh, and I'm not even an admin or anything too, just been a participant who's been there for some time.
I've also ran into E2EE issues too. unable to decrypt, etc., with the worst one being sending an unencrypted message in an encrypted room, because my client for some reason got really confused about the state of room encryption (it's also a thing that's manually doable, and can also done the other way)
I also personally have 6 clients installed on my phone, and 2 per computer. just because not all clients implement wanted functionality. I could probably reduce the clients count to 3 for my phone at best while still keeping roughly all the feature sets I use.
probably a lot of this jank is how matrix kinda just does not have much communities that isn't about a tech project (not related to general tech oriented communities). the matrix.org room directory is by my rough estimation 99.9% tech projects. (compare that to stoat where I was able to instantly find a general stuff community in the discover section, and multiple of them, and many of them.)
@jacksonchen666 @lina so much this. I actively avoid participating in project spaces that require the use of matrix. If I cannot avoid it, I have matrix installed on literally one device praying that it will keep connection and working, and therefore, I am relatively inactive in the space because unless I’m looking at that one device I don’t see this chat. It’s not that I owe people being on chat 24/7 but it’s ridiculous about how bad this experience is.
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@lina Not sure why you wouldn't want E2EE by default for text? Maybe in a 'public forum' context it doesn't make sense, but I wouldn't call many/most Discord rooms that, exactly. If anything video and audio are less information dense and more expensive/difficult to analyse, ergo less valuable and less in need of E2EE. Not to mention they are large, ephemeral, and expensive to store, so less likely to be stored for analysis in the first place.
I for one don't really want advertisers and LLMs and LEOs crawling all my private chats.
It's definitely not a Discord replacement, and has a lot of warts, though, I agree with you there.
@ktims @lina "I wouldn't call many/most Discord rooms [a public forum] exactly"
what a wild take. I mean, its not a public forum in the "theres only one space" way some other social media is, but i dont think you can look at 100k+ user discord guilds and say "this doesn't have the qualities of a public forum". I'd say any time a guild has a published invite link it has the same issues as a public forum, in regards to E2EE being undesireable at least.
Are there some people that only use private guilds and DMs, who could probably switch to Signal group chats quite easily? probably. But thats not the part that needs some alternative. Large community guilds with thousands to hundreds of thousands of users are.
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@ktims At the end of the day, decentralization (with data portability) is more valuable than E2EE if your concern is data mining. That can be done without all the major issues of E2EE.
A decentralized Discord replacement that becomes widely accepted and used by the public is viable IMO, but not if it pushes E2EE like Matrix does.
Put another way: if Matrix didn't have E2EE, it would likely already be much closer to a Discord replacement, or even completely there, and it would've been much more valuable for users. Right now the situation is, everyone trying to use Matrix eventually learns the "turn off E2EE in any group chat or room" lesson the hard way after leaving it on once and realizing how broken it is and that you can't turn it off after the fact. It makes no sense. And even for DMs it's jank in Matrix. And the whole thing is jank even with E2EE off, partially due to design decisions driven by the E2EE requirement.
(Read my second bsky link if you haven't, I told some of my Matrix E2EE horror stories, and there's more.)
@lina I was wondering specifically about your perspective on this line of thinking: "I really, really don't care about E2EE for text 90% of the time <snip> For video/voice you do want E2EE"
This seems a bit of a weird view on it to me. Why do you want E2EE on video and voice but not text?
I agree E2EE is hard, maybe too hard, to be mainstream, and certainly not Matrix as it stands, but that wasn't really what I was curious about.
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Posted my thoughts on Matrix over on Bluesky in a thread:
https://bsky.app/profile/lina.yt/post/3memjfjwzzs26
https://bsky.app/profile/lina.yt/post/3memmudkm3k26TL;DR no, it's not going to replace Discord. Matrix is too full of jank due to early poor design decisions to be widely usable by non-technical people.
The Fediverse and Bluesky are different takes on federated Twitter with different pros/cons, and federated Twitter is a much harder problem (because it's "global"), but Matrix is basically just all cons. It's a failed experiment, and you can simply do much better starting over rather than trying to fix it. Just because it's relatively widely used in FOSS spaces doesn't mean it's the way to go. Sunk cost fallacy etc.
@lina I think people tell themselves that sunk cost fallacies are valid in social media because of "network effects" ie. that we *have* to push the solution that has the most users because it's the only thing that stands a chance.
But something badly designed that makes new users recoil will never grow. It will not attract the *next* million, or thousand, or hundred users and has already peaked.
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@lina Not sure why you wouldn't want E2EE by default for text? Maybe in a 'public forum' context it doesn't make sense, but I wouldn't call many/most Discord rooms that, exactly. If anything video and audio are less information dense and more expensive/difficult to analyse, ergo less valuable and less in need of E2EE. Not to mention they are large, ephemeral, and expensive to store, so less likely to be stored for analysis in the first place.
I for one don't really want advertisers and LLMs and LEOs crawling all my private chats.
It's definitely not a Discord replacement, and has a lot of warts, though, I agree with you there.
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@lina
A lot of it seems inherit to a selling point that is (afaik) unique to matrix: group chats not being tied to a single server. All participating servers are equal on the protocol level.
This means that a group chat can survive the server it was created on going away just fine (unlike XMPP) which is a great feature to have.
But it comes at the cost of complex state resolution issues, since there isn't a single source of truth, and every participating server might have different ideas about basic things like "what users are currently in the room".
@jacksonchen666@robin @lina @jacksonchen666 That's the conclusion I've come to as well. Yeah, it's technically a neat feature to have but it introduces so much overhead that it makes me question whether it's really worth it over just recreating an XMPP channel in the event that its home server goes down.
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Posted my thoughts on Matrix over on Bluesky in a thread:
https://bsky.app/profile/lina.yt/post/3memjfjwzzs26
https://bsky.app/profile/lina.yt/post/3memmudkm3k26TL;DR no, it's not going to replace Discord. Matrix is too full of jank due to early poor design decisions to be widely usable by non-technical people.
The Fediverse and Bluesky are different takes on federated Twitter with different pros/cons, and federated Twitter is a much harder problem (because it's "global"), but Matrix is basically just all cons. It's a failed experiment, and you can simply do much better starting over rather than trying to fix it. Just because it's relatively widely used in FOSS spaces doesn't mean it's the way to go. Sunk cost fallacy etc.
@lina What makes E2EE so hard to get right?
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