Matrix Chat Experiences

At least for me, Matrix has not been a very good experience. It is very bare bones compared to programs like Discord and has been pretty glitchy in my experience with things like mentions not working reliably. My friends and I have instead set up a self-hosted Mattermost instance which has everything we wanted like self hosting for privacy, a great bot API, easy channel management with the ability to reply to specific messages, and it has a simple way to self-host file uploads. Mattermost is als

I often see similar sentiments expressed, and then I wonder if they come from a different Matrix world than mine. Matrix is my primary chat, using daily. I'm in 100's of chatrooms hosted on federated servers (to be fair many on matrix.org), and using Element web UI that only has few unnecessary bells and whistles, unlike Slack and Discord. The UX is good enough and effective. There are frequent updates, mostly improvement but, yes, sometimes something breaks. But for that I have an all

Element chat (Matrix) used to be slow, but now its much better. That's what I use now. Open source, e2e encrypted, and you can even setup your own server.

Perhaps try Matrix again? Element as a client might feel a bit sterile but the content is often anything but sterile, plus there are loads of other great clients too (Cinny, FluffyChat, Nheko, Fractal, NeoChat and more).

Why not simply use Matrix chat?

Matrix? E2E isn't even enabled by default anywhere, the server uses a ridiculous amount of resources, alternative servers support half of the protocol, I cannot easily discover people I know from my contacts lists via mail/phone/address/ICQ number/etc, 70% of the bridges I would need hover between "barely functional" and "the compiler isn't complaining", guilds are not easily possible as in other chat applications and their clients draw more batt

Matrix is a solid replacement. Element isn't as easy to use but it's coming along. Quality-of-life features normal users expect like stickers, gifs, etc. are woefully lacking, but the important stuff (y'know, actual messaging) is solid.The most important thing to me is if Element screws up like Signal and starts pushing a shitcoin, I can swap clients without affecting my network.

I've been using Riot.im/Matrix and been liking it so far. Matrix is FOSS. The UI is a bit confusing but I'm sure I'll get over this soon.

Same. Some friends and I use Matrix for keeping in touch, and I've been quite happy with it. I find that it just works and gets out of our way.

I second this. Matrix is a great protocol, with lots of promising clients [0] like Fractal, Spectral, Riot(X), Pattle, etc. and bridges pretty well with Slack, Discord, Gitter, IRC...It is self-hostable, and provides a modern baseline of features (though Riot is the only fully-featured client at the moment).Burying myself in a walled garden is a no-go, so it has been working pretty well for me so far. I only regret the fact that the reference server implementation consumes a lot of resourc