@commetchat@fosstodon.org
The one silver lining of commercial apps shitting the bed (or shitting on their users) is that it helps accelerate development of FOSS/decentralized/federated alternatives because of the sudden interest.
Looks good, I fiddled around with it for a bit. For now, I prefer FluffyChat. I‘m actually wondering how little it is mentioned in the recent pop up of discord alternatives / matrix clients given how polished and easy to use it is.
God please let matrix figure out text channels and better calling 🙏
But… They already have text channels pretty much figured out and are on better calling rn with Element Call
The messaging experience between Discord and Element is night and day. On Discord, I open the app, go to a server, and can see all the rooms and all the messages almost instantly.
On Element (at least on Android), chats from different communities intermingle with my groups. I tapped on a large and slow-moving group, and watched messages slowly lurch into view as most of the messages were “join” and “leave” ones.
The last couple updates made it better, but I wouldn’t exactly call Element a smooth experience. For example it recently began to try and access a keyring that doesn’t exist, ignoring the one that I already have readily available, and that works for everything else.
This is the latest in a long series of frustrating experiences with Matrix in general. To this day, Element isn’t stable, and Element X is somehow worse. It is, imo, a very promising option, but it is also far from perfect.
Yeah no in no world would I call it perfect. The web version had problems of decrypting encryption keys without a phone also connected and syncing for me. I used to have an account with Element directly for a subscription so that I could have certain bridges. Since they discontinued this and botchered the transition they shut down that homeserver. I wasn’t paying for a while but I expected to still be able to use the normal account matrix features on their homeserver. They just shut it down and mentioned it a few months previously in their blog posts but I didn’t ever receive a mail or anything. Their data export/transfer tool stopped working with their home server shut down. I would argue actually for smaller instances because I don’t trust the Matrix.org team as they split of from Elements but small servers also have a risk because they often depends on individual admins
Yeah I just set up a synapse + livekit server last night. Voice, video, and screen share rooms work flawlessly
Isn’t that its purpose?
Yeah, that’s the idea, but they are still not there
But they are?
Looks good actually… I think I will keep using Element for now… but for new people joining matrix coming from Discord, I would definitely recommend trying out Commet.
Ugh. Another one that doesn’t support OIDC.
I really hope they add this to F-Droid.
Seems to currently be worked on https://github.com/commetchat/commet/issues/115
You can install from GitHub via Obtainium. I prefer to just use the PWA.
This seems like the better alternative to discord than the other centralized platforms
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That’s a UX issue more than anything, IMO. Matrix is just a protocol
Yes it is, at least for real-time chat. I don’t know if Matrix has voice chat.
you can use voice and video rooms to my understanding of it, and yeah it can do calls. I haven’t really tested it much as my matrix server is just me and my wife, and neither of us are often out of eachothers sites very long.
Voice/video usually supported by a TURN server. If you check out the link in the OP you can see this app supports it.
That’s the old way to support calls. The new way is MatrixRTC/Livekit. Not all clients support it yet, but the website says commet supports that too.
The ui still kind of feels unpolished in commet. I tried it out two days ago, but ended up going with element instead. Just felt better to use
No macOS or iOS support, but looks clean.
Just install as PWA.
You’re a freaking genius, you know that?
Ill do that and give it a whirl. Thanks for the PWA tip, i had completely forgotten about that.
PWA? Fill a noob in.
progressive web app. Some browsers will let you install a page as a standalone app running minimal version of the browser, this can be a snappy alternative to installing a package.
Progressive Web App
Put website in app-shaped bucket, use like app on phone. No app stores, special permissions, etc required
PWA + Apple products that is not possible anymore…
Interesting, I’ll have to check how it compares to Cinny.
Saving this post for later when the inevitable happens.
Flutter? No thanks
