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.
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.