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.
The counter points on the site you posted are either completely expected or even desired properties of distributed systems (like not being able to force a delete or room closure on another server), or just problems with specific implementation details or insufficient clarity in the specs (like interop hickups or handling of media files). As far as I can tell nothing on the list is an "unfixable" protocol bug or core design flaw.
I agree that some are, and I think that the point being made in the article was that some of those properties might be surprising/deceiving for those who approach Matrix as another chat platform and not as a "distributed partially-replicated graph database".
What I consider "unfixable" is the fact that we are 10 years into this now, and that nothing has improved substantially: I sent a message yesterday which took 10 hours to deliver, and an enormous amount of resources at that. Matrix isn't ready for mass adoption, it is still not reliable, it broke on its promise to be the "protocols of all protocols" by failing to allocate the funds to maintain the bridge with the largest IRC network, and the developers don't see the overwhelming complexity of it all as a bug, but as a feature. To me, it looks like Matrix will remain a mediocre platform for the general public, aka. those who want something fast and that just work and don't care about "distributed partially-replicated graph database".