I will be upfront with this, and say that I’ve never been a huge fan. But I did reinstall a Matrix server, and some clients to see if it’d gotten better in the year or so since I’ve last used it.
This just… Kind of feels like a more centralized XMPP with group chat folders that sort of function? The spaces feature is neat, but I’ve tried 4-5 clients, and every single one of those throws all of them into the same screen as the DMs by default, and I can’t find a way to change that.
Am I missing something here? Like. I want to at least see what people like here, I just can’t.
Can someone recommend some XMPP clients for Mobile/Desktop. The internet is littered with XMPP clients that look like this:
Conversations and Dino for mobile and desktop respectively.
I use Cheogram on mobile, and on desktop I use Dino. I’ve also used Conversations on mobile, which is what Cheogram is a fork of. Cheogram has some extra features I wanted. Also Movim, but on mobile I’ve found the general consistency to be… Bad
Omg I love this thread and this post. Sometimes I feel like everyone is crazy when they suggest alternative software.
People will be like “hey the best burger place in town closed can anyone recommend an alternative?”
And then a bunch of farmers show up like “yeah dude buy this calf and then just raise it real quick and also plant some trees to get wood for your smoker, you have a smoker right? Anyways yeah it’s so easy bro I don’t even know why anyone buys corporate burgers tbh.”
And you say “hmmm okay sounds like a lot of work but I guess I can try it?”
And you try it and it’s the shittiest blandest burger and it doesn’t even have any sauce or lettuce or tomatoes because fuck you those things are for corporate burgers and if you want to complain why don’t you open up a tomato branch and start contributing tomatoes then and waaah waaah why won’t the stupid normies eat my shitty burger that takes 6 months to make and doesn’t have ketchup waaaaah it must be because everyone is dumb and lazy
Unfathomably based take. Holy shit.
I 100% agree with you and at the same time it’s important to remember that a lot of FOSS software is written by individuals as hobby projects. Implementing features, keeping everything up to date and secure, documentation and testing takes time, effort and skill.
Most people need money to survive so they have a full time job and can only dedicated very limited resources to these projects.
Too many people got used to free services that “just work” and forgot that they are the product now. If you don’t want that look for alternatives that charge (even then you might still be the product) or better yet donate to open source projects in the hopes they will one day be on-par with their closed alternatives (there’s examples where this worked). Until we have a UBI and people have the time to dedicate themselves to a cool project this is the only way.I think it would be even better if companies and governments started shifting funds back to these projects when they switch from commercial to FOSS software (which is happening more recently) but most just happily pocket the savings and this will not change until a fundamental cultural shift happens
a lot of FOSS software is written by individuals as hobby projects
Yeah that does give me a lot of patience with a lot of FOSS in general, though as far as I can tell that’s never really applied to Matrix in particular. It was initially started by Amdocs, an Israeli communications firm, and then they gave it to a UK group that formed a company, and then crowd funded it.
I think it would be even better if companies and governments started shifting funds back to these projects when they switch from commercial to FOSS software (which is happening more recently) but most just happily pocket the savings and this will not change until a fundamental cultural shift happens
Or a legal one. If it were cheaper to enforce licenses FOSS devs would actually be able to use a separate personal/commercial license in order to actually get companies/governments to pay them, while still allowing them to be free for personal use. It’s not exactly what WinRAR did (we were all breaking the TOS), but it’s practically what they did. The problem is that FOSS devs don’t have lawyer money, and you need lawyer money to do that
I don’t think (and also wouldn’t want) that this should be solved by the legal system. It would mean open source developers would have to deal with the whole legal side and implement telemetry into software which largely goes against the idea of many open source projects. How else would you be able to know that a company used your software?
You definitely have a point here. Software has to be usable if it going to have wide adoption by the people. Sometimes I see recommendations being thrown around without even thinking of it fits the needs and/or user expertise and willingness to make something work. But to be clear, just because one piece of software does not fit your needs does not mean it has to be changed to fit your needs. But if it is complex, clunkly and/or unintuitive, it is only going to be usable by a niche. And if this is the case, stop telling your grandma to spin a matrix server or xmpp and do not tell her she is an idiot because she does not have the expertise or time to make it work.
I’m not even personally opposed to getting my hands dirty (I run Arch and Emacs ffs) my bigger issue is that this just… Doesn’t feel like a Discord replacement. It feels more like a texting replacement out of the box. Someone pointed out you can make it not show all of the rooms in the DMs list, which would bring it closer to what I expect from a discord alternative.
Doesn’t feel like a Discord replacement.
I think it’s on the way there, but it’ll be a while on the order of years. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to self-host either.
It’s not a Discord replacement, full stop. Someone could make a Matrix client that was a Discord replacement, but no one has even attempted to do so as far as I know. Element (the reference client) was very clearly a Slack replacement. I know because I literally moved my small company to it from Slack. I think that Discord’s continued enshittification could lead to someone making such a client either for Matrix or XMPP. That being said, making something like this isn’t a small project and I wouldn’t expect one soon if one comes at all.
Discord hating rant here: Discord is kind of weird as far as these sorts of services go tbh. Its “weirdness” is part of why I have always has a dislike of it (the bigger part of why is the jerky users and company, just like Telegram). It focuses heavily on VoIP and video screen sharing in a way that most chat services so not, but is also a heavily emoji/sticker/whatever filled chat service. It was clearly made for the shit talking gamer crowd and it honestly excels there. If it had stayed there in that niche, I’d think nothing of it. Then many FOSS projects and small companies then decided to use it in lieu of a proper support forum, probably because they were already were, or had previously been, shit talking gamers and used it all the time.
Someone else pointed out Cinny, which is… Pretty close to a discord replacement on Matrix, actually. Also I know Stoat mentioned a few federation options that they’d use if they ever do federate (not on the roadmap), with XMPP being the one it seemed like they’d favor.
Also ngl it doesn’t even seem like Matrix would be a good slack replacement, unless the UI you’re using makes it more slack-like
Re: Discord section, yeah… I liked discord at the start. It was mostly for voice calls, with a decent chat interface (based on IRC’s). Then it started getting used wildly inappropriately, which annoyed me, and then all of the horrific privacy stuff came up and it’s just… Ah. Whelp. This ship’s sinking fast.
I should say that Element looks like it was heavily inspired by the OG Slack UI as it was at a specific point in time probably 7-8 years ago. Slack’s UI started getting tweaked and enshittified quite a bit, especially after Salesforce bought them. So I can totally get not seeing the direct resemblance, but as someone that was forced to be on Slack for a decade, Element felt like “ahh old Slack” in a good way, though obviously not exact.
Ahh, okay, we only started using Slack at work a couple of years ago, so I don’t remember the old UI
Matrix is adequate, IMO. Some people have a really low tolerance for software that isn’t very polished. I, personally, don’t care much how polished an app is, but have known a person that cared so much they left a group over how much they disliked the UX of Element/Matrix. I’m fine with TUIs, old GTK UIs, Java Swing UIs, as long as it works, lol.
I’m fine with a lot, but there comes a point where it just feels… Less good than what I’m already using, and I don’t see why switching is worth it, which is where I was with XMPP and Matrix. Cinny seems promising, though
Yeah, it is probably worse in terms of UX. I’ve been intentionally using “worse” software, developed mostly by volunteers, that’s free (gratis and libre), and doesn’t spy on its users for a long time now though. For instance, FreeCAD and GIMP is pretty bad on the UX side, and FreeCAD is even pretty buggy; but I don’t feel like I’m being exploited by using them. Cinny does look nice.
Man, the Matrix hate in this thread is real.
Yeah, it is. It’s not what I intended with this, I did actually just wanna see if I was missing something, but I did figure it’d happen.
Give other matrix clients a try: FluffyChat has separators for DMs, Groups, and Spaces.
Cinny has a Discord look. Mainly a desktop application so it doesn’t have an app, but works fairly well as a PWA.
If you’re on Android, Schildi Chat Next also has a lot of UI/UX tweaks that people enjoy.
Fluffy does have a separator for groups, but from what I can tell it does show all of the space group chats in there. Not a huge deal for me (I don’t use a lot of group DMs on discord), but will be for some friends
Schildi I’d need to redownload to check, but it had the same look as ElementX
Cinny, though… That’s promising. Thank you!
schildi has mostly the same look, but has extra settings.
I think there’s a setting in element web/desktop to hide rooms in the main list when they are in a space, did you try that?
The spaces feature is neat, but I’ve tried 4-5 clients, and every single one of those throws all of them into the same screen as the DMs by default, and I can’t find a way to change that.
“show all rooms” is how you turn that off in element
Nheko also supports spaces and has a filter to only show DMs, it also allows tagging rooms to do custom grouping of chats. But at the moment only element properly embeds calls with the new element-call system.
Element/Element X on mobile both seem to be missing that, and I’m predominantly on mobile for… Most chat apps now. Only exception is I do usually do discord voice calls on desktop because of push to talk. Do you know of any mobile clients that’ll do that?
SchildiChat Next is a close fork of element x with some great added features, like custom color and layout options.
It has a “pseudo space” feature which allows grouping by a set of predefined filters and the filter “chats not added to spaces” would give you this. This pseudo space will then show up under the name “space orphans” :D
This settings page can be found under Settings > Turtle Tweaks > Spaces > Pseudo spaces
I find Matrix to be completely unintuitive. I could probably get to a point where I understood it, but the whole point (currently more than ever) is to get off Discord. That means convincing my normie friends, and ye. There’s just no fucking way
This. I’m not judging the program based on if I can use it. I need to get my non tech savvy friends onto it as well and this is where so many alternatives fail the litmus test
Ignoring the missing features, is stoat a better experience for non-techies coming from discord?
yes, but it doesn’t have Al features
EDIT: Funny typo. Al->all
That’s a good thing
was a funny typo. I meant to write “all” not “Al”
Yeah, that seems to be the big issue nowadays. Doesn’t matter if your friends use Google Calendar, they can send a link and I can subscribe to it with something else. Doesn’t matter if my friends use GDrive, I have Nextcloud. But discord? I can’t talk to my friends on XMPP unless they’re also on XMPP. There are bridges, but that still requires feeding every message to discord, which defeats the purpose. Also my friends would need to be the ones to set those up, and they are not.
Matrix at least has potential for the UX to improve especially with vibecoding being a thing now, Discord will always be a bloated laggy locked-down Electron mess with no public API and hostility to third party clients and automation tools
Matrix at least has potential for the UX to improve especially with vibecoding being a thing now
A: It does! Given how long it’s been around, and this just being… A default experience thing that makes it kinda bad out of the box if you consider that someone might join more than 5 spaces (I know people who’re in 40 discord “servers”)
B: I have personally experienced the user experience of vibe coding. I would not recommend anyone else personally experience the user experience of vibe coding. The company I work for has seen production outages like never before since they started doing it. Security issues out the wazoo, like what’s going on on the social medias for whatever they’re calling ClawdBot this week
I use it a lot for my own projects, and even with the open weight models it usually gets 90-95% there for more trivial things if you know what you’re doing, which GUI development is in the category of, and it has sped up my development. Is also helpful for debugging.
That, or governments (which have started to move to Matrix for their communications) start investing in Matrix and contribute code / PRs.
No you aren’t missing anything, the UX is actually that dumb
As far as I know you arent missing anything. It literally displays like that. I couldn’t get into it tbh.
matrix is pointless, huge bloated buggy ass server, no cheogram (phone number connection) or movim (social network accessible with any xmpp account), I can’t even be bothered to list off my issues with it I wrote out on some comment on some other account here just save yourself.
xmpp literally lets me run phone numbers in 4 different countries that stay connected wherever I am
if you don’t wanna deal with that arcanechat/deltachat is amazing tech that stays almost entirely on device. the arcanechat dev adb is cuban and YOU SHOULD GIVE HIM YOUR MONEY NOW
if you don’t wanna deal with that arcanechat/deltachat is amazing tech that stays almost entirely on device. the arcanechat dev adb is cuban and YOU SHOULD GIVE HIM YOUR MONEY NOW
❤️
I’d heard of DeltaChat, and I use Cheogram as my main XMPP app, but I’ll have to look into arcanechat!
Can you explain a bit about how you set up the phone numbers? Are those normal mobile numbers that people can text/call, etc? So you just need a data plan for mobile device?
the app will prompt you with the easy US/Canada options, but there are several providers. I will make a note in my planner to explain how to do it in countries that lack these services but it is really tough I had to spend tjme on the phone with telecoms to get it connected to our shit and by the time I was done it was beer o clock so I didn’t write it all down lol
Which app? Which implementation?
I’m assuming they’re talking about Cheogram, since they mentioned it in their comment, and Cheogram does prompt you to set up a phone number at the end of the login process. I don’t know how well they work, because I don’t use it
I evaluated matrix a few years ago to try to add chat to my video game. I also evaluated everything else. Sendbird (proprietary, what reddit uses) is crazy expensive. Matrix is complicated and didn’t have a good simple web frontend. XMPP is still pretty good. In the end, I ended up going with IRC v3 which fixes many of the legacy problems of IRC, and that was the best option. I am still scratching my head as to how that’s the state of the art for sending little bits of text back and forth. Don’t get me started on WebRTC, I spent a whole year trying to make a stable video chat app for another project
Matrix starting development under Israeli company Amdocs is enough for me to never touch it with a 10 foot pole no matter its rebranding and move to become a “UK” company.
You can self-host it and there’s even a full rewrite in Rust available, which AFAIK is independent of the company.
Element is still a main client and it’s the same people who worked for Amdocs in the past.
Everything about it screams “backdoor” to me including a supposed dev of it showing up and talking about how ethical and super duper cool the Israeli company actually is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36020947
User: “…Furthermore, 6 Israelis working for Amdocs were deported in 2002 for spying on the US. That’s not just a conspiracy theory. Its a seriously concerning fact.”
Alleged dev: “I saw absolutely zero evidence or interest in malicious activity while working at Amdoc…”
And
“They didn’t pay big money - they funded a ~15 person team for a few years”.
Because we all know bankrolling 15 devs for years is super cheap.
Their history is shady enough for me to not even consider it.
What’s Amdoc? Some association of American doctors?
Forgive me, I’m a citizen of an EU country no one gives a shit about and that has successfully “exported” a prime minister to a neighboring country.
An Israeli software company which has been caught making spyware multiple times
Yeah… I’d seen some stuff with that, just didn’t mention it because I hadn’t looked into it too hard. The one I’m trying is a fork of a rewrite of the original server software by unrelated devs. I did try Element, but there’s nothing on the server that I actually care about.
Has anyone tried Mattermost? It’s modeller after Slack mostly.
I run Mattermost at home since several years, and now I am switching to Zulip.
Mattermost is also enshittifying itself and imposing limits like those that caused us to flee from Slack.
Zulip is (afaik) true FOSS without venture capital, and has no restrictions. It’s what we should habe done from the start.
Neither of those supports E2EE unfortunately.
TIL about Zulip, thank you.
They are going downhill recently. Everyone around me is trying to get rid of it.
mattermost is meant for big corporations or governments
And how is that a problem? Too powerful? Too scalable? Can handle more users than you need?
We use it for a corporation of 20 people just fine.
Matrix too.
