this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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Okay, help an old-timer out.
Lemmy :: Reddit
Mastodon :: Twitter (I refuse to call it "X")
Matrix :: ???
Is it like discord? The olden days of AIM/ICQ/IRC?
I will get shit for writing that, but Matrix in its current form shouldn't have seen the light of the day, nor should have been let to spread with close to no technical scrutiny and based on empty promises/hype like it did.
Just to be clear, I'm absolutely encouraging, in fact, actively promoting federated alternatives to things like WhatsApp, Messenger, Signal, Telegram, …
But I don't believe for a second that the foundations on which Matrix is built make sense, can be made to work well in practice, nor represent a problem worth spending so much time and effort solving. This article does a good job at introducing the "behind the scenes" of the protocol: https://telegra.ph/why-not-matrix-08-07
The whole history of Matrix can be summarized as:
"let's do this because it's cool"
"shit, it's hard/slow, but we will figure it out"
"I have a breakthrough, here comes a new version of the protocol/client/…" (the ecosystem reboots)
(rinse and repeat)
Matrix has seen more incompatible reincarnations of itself in the last 5 years than XMPP in the last 20. Arathorn, its lead contributor and evangelist will keep apologizing, promising that this time they have their stuff in order, that whatever buzzword will solve this or that aspect of the problem, while the elephant still is in the room. You practically can't tell apart arathorn's messages of 2015 from those of 2022 and that would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
IMO Matrix is broken beyond repair, while XMPP is quietly used by millions of users. I wish Matrix could carry its own weight and be so unambiguously better that we wouldn't need competing alternatives there. To me, the better XMPP is XMPP itself, and I'd be happy to elaborate on that.
XMPP - now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time. I thought the woke Google chat federation and subsequent drop pretty much killed it off - but I'm glad to be wrong.
Are there XMPP based group chat/Matrix/Discord alternatives?
@pezhore @u_tamtam Your question may require a bit of specifying. Discord is a product and a platform. XMPP and Matrix are protocols. So, uh, it's a bit like asking whether there are any SMTP or IMAP alternatives to Google Groups? There are *many* servers and clients and supporting bots and libraries that do many things. What specific things are you interested in, to narrow it down somewhat?
Well, I'm slight embarrassed. I think that was part of my confusion about Matrix - it seemed to me that it was both a protocol and a platform. That colored my memory of XMPP too. IIRC, Jabber was the client and protocol before the protocol was renamed to XMPP.
As for what I'm interested in - I'm not sure. I don't really use discord save for a few Patreon follows; my friends use a group Signal chat. I think maybe I'm interested in recapturing the old IRC feeling of finding a chat room and just "hanging out"? I suppose I could always dig out my Irssi client config and just join Freenode again.
(Ye gods, wtf happened here to Freenode/Librachat?)
@pezhore The confusion is somewhat warranted, since matrix.org is the main/largest instance of Matrix the protocol, using Synapse the server, and having web access via Element the client.
For just text chat, anything will do. Matrix has the bonus of having a liberachat gateway, though it's had issues recently.
But, the experience is somewhat different. [1/n]
@pezhore XMPP and IRC (to my knowledge, which very well may be outdated) are quite similar - you join a room from a client, you get a nickname, maybe a few lines of history, you chat, you close your client or lose connectivity, you don't know anymore what's happening there. You want to join from another client, that's a separate session, with a different presence and name on the channel. Your clients don't share history etc. [2/n]
@pezhore With Matrix, depending a bit on channel settings, your account joins the room and gets either all history or starting from the point of joining. And your account is in the channel. Regardless of what clients you use, and how many of them you use, and whether they're online at the time or not, it's your server keeping track of what's going on in the channel, and keeping history of it, so you have one presence and same view regardless of type and count and connectivity of clients. [3/3]
That's not true in the case of XMPP: upon reconnecting, any modern client will request from the server enough messages to recreate the missing history (of course it's up to you/the client to put a limit to that if you want).
I think even IRC(v3) is taking that route.