After five years of using Matrix.org/Element as my primary communication platform, and rooting for it, and promoting it, and enduring its many quirks, I’ve decided to move on (or rather back). Despite promising ideals and growing institutional adoption, the network remains slow, unreliable, and confusing for everyday users. Development feels directionless, client and server projects are fragmented, and the user experience still lags far behind my expectations. A recent incident that essentially broke my own community channel on the Matrix.org homeserver was the final straw: I’m heading back to XMPP.
Every year or so I try Element again and the experience is just bad. As an IRC alternative for quickly joining some random chat to ask a question, it’s fine. As a day-to-day chat app it’s miserable, I also don’t understand why it’s forcing encryption woes on the user by constantly nagging about it.
The mobile app used to force me to re-enter my password every now and then so I don’t forget it, and since I deleted the app I’m now unable to access encryption settings on the web version because I’m forced to verify this device by using another device I was logged in at, but that’s fine because I didn’t have anything worth saving. I did a reset of my account, except that doesn’t work: I got an error “Failed to allow crypto identity reset”.
It’s such a hassle. I also hate that you can be in a server but most rooms will be hidden and you have to join them manually which is so counter-intuitive!
Good to see more people come to this conclusion, using matrix for online public chat seems strange when irc exists.
And for IM, matrix is a non starter.
The difficulties of curtailing known csam rooms, as admins have described, is another nail in the coffin for matrix.
