Do you prefer XMPP or Matrix, or are you using something else entirely?

  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net
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    1 month ago

    I’ve personally not had terribly good experiences with Matrix. I found it to be slow at times, but more annoyingly, it would very consistently not un-encrypt messages both for me and the people I was talking to, requiring both parties to regularly need to re-send messages until they finally unencrypted properly. This made it a real ball-ache to use, as you could send a message, and then hours later have someone else say they can’t read it. I’m also not a fan of how much Metadata it spreads around.

    XMPP on the other hand has always been snappy and fast, and I much prefer the clients available for it. It’s currently the most promising federated option, IMHO, with Movim being the most promising client as a Discord replacement.

    It’s still missing some essential Discord-like features, such as groups of rooms in a server and drop-in voice rooms, but both features are being actively worked on, and a funding campaign was started to accelerate development.

    But what it can do already is:

    • Excellent text chats, including with very good optional encryption
    • Group voice/video calls with screensharing (must use a chromium based browser to screenshare an app’s audio)
    • A neat integrated blogging feature for communities & individuals
    • a built-in paint program to draw stuff to input into the chat
    • Full working and proven federation thanks to the XMPP back-end
    • RadDevon@lemmy.zip
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      1 month ago

      This has been my experience with Matrix, and the message decryption problems are a dealbreaker. I hope the person who replied to you saying those have very recently been fixed is correct, but the fact that such a fundamental feature was broken for so long leaves me with little confidence in Matrix. I had this problem years ago on a Matrix community, then again maybe a year ago on a different community, and even more recently on my self-hosted instance. Don’t understand how you can push a chat platform that effectively doesn’t deliver ~1/12 messages to random users and let that issue hang around for years.

      XMPP looks really interesting as an alternative. Hope that development continued at a brisk pace.