I should love Matrix. It is a decentralised, privacy preserving, multi-platform chat tool. Goodbye Slack and your ridiculous free limits. Adiós Discord and your weird gamification. Suck it IRC with your obscure syntax and faint stench of BO. WhatsApp and Telegram can stick their heads in a bucket of lukewarm sick and sing sea shanties! Let's join the future! The problem is - Matrix is shit. Not …
How are you using Simplex as a replacement for Matrix? That’s not a leading question - I’m curious about the use case.
I stopped using Matrix for 1:1 and family chat years ago because of how broken encryption has always been, but I’ve kept using it for public chats since
privacy isn’t solvable in public chats, so the fact Matrix’s encryption is terminally screwed up isn’t relevant
there are many public rooms; not IRC-level, but it’s still a large domain with large numbers of users
Matrix is a better public chat than IRC (fight me!) with replies, comment editing, reactions, emojis (that’s mostly a client thing, but it’s first-class and not a sporadically supported feature), and offline history syncing (as in, see what happened while you were offline).
I haven’t yet found anything that’s as good at public rooms as Matrix, that’s still federated and OSS. Discord is very good, but it’s SPA crap and centralized to boot.
SimpleX seems to be focused primarily on messaging, not public, large group chat… but am I missing something?
You can use SimpleX for large chats. However, at least the current architecture is not the most efficient way of doing so. Especially not once rooms hit a thousand users or more. Does it work? Yes. Does it work well? Only somewhat. I think the developers were caught off guard when people wanted to start using it for large rooms instead of one-on-one communications and had not planned for that when they made the program.
They are addressing the issue by having devices connect to super peers instead of directly peer to peer in order to make large rooms work better. That way, instead of trying to maintain a thousand individual connections, your device might maintain two or three connections to Superpiers and get messages through them. I make it even harder on myself because I demand that my SimpleX do everything over tor.
A thousand users seems like a lot; I’m not sure I’ve ever been in an IRC room with that many.
Is there a directory? IIRC the human naming part was still missing last time I tried it, and connecting through hashes was not very fun. The biggest blocker for me, though, was the lack of multiple device sync support. A single identity used across multiple devices concurrently is bare minimum feature, and is the reason I’ve always bounced off SimpleX. Has that been addressed?
There is a directory and you can find it by asking your favorite search engine for the SimpleX directory bot. As far as multiple devices goes, I’m not totally sure. I know that it’s supposedly able to be used on multiple devices, but I only run it on my phone, so I haven’t actually tried that functionality myself.
I haven’t seen replies be useful at all, in fact they actively clutter the UI.
Editing and reactions are nice, but they’re not that important.
IRC already has emoji support 😀 and offline history sync, and is way smaller and faster.
The one feature I like better on Matrix vs IRC clients is it is way easier to actually connect to the server. Just type in matrix.org or whatever it autofills for you, and you’re in. No dealing with port numbers and proper syntax. This is an improvement.
I wanted to like matrix but it was too clunky for me. I wish more people used libera chat though, it is less active than it was 10 years ago or whatever.
I haven’t seen replies be useful at all, in fact they actively clutter the UI.
Editing and reactions are nice, but they’re not that important.
Yeah, well, that’s a massive opinion gulf we’re never going to meet over.
IRC already has emoji support 😀 and offline history sync, and is way smaller and faster.
You can enter emojis into anything that supports UTF-8, and so can claim everything supports emojis. I haven’t seen an IRC client with either an easy, integrated way to enter them, and I’ve also never seen an IRC client that will pull history from before I joined the room. Weechat certainly doesn’t.
Matrix is super clunky, and the fact that the reference platform is a shitty Electron application sucks. Even if you use something sane like gomuks, your client is perpetually lagging in Matrix features, often by more than just months.
Matrix angers me. It’s been such a mismanaged project. But I don’t see IRC having changed much over the past 20 years that I’ve been using it.
Discord, on the other hand, is an active pestilence. I only open that stupid web page on the direst of need.
How are you using Simplex as a replacement for Matrix? That’s not a leading question - I’m curious about the use case.
I stopped using Matrix for 1:1 and family chat years ago because of how broken encryption has always been, but I’ve kept using it for public chats since
SimpleX seems to be focused primarily on messaging, not public, large group chat… but am I missing something?
You can use SimpleX for large chats. However, at least the current architecture is not the most efficient way of doing so. Especially not once rooms hit a thousand users or more. Does it work? Yes. Does it work well? Only somewhat. I think the developers were caught off guard when people wanted to start using it for large rooms instead of one-on-one communications and had not planned for that when they made the program.
They are addressing the issue by having devices connect to super peers instead of directly peer to peer in order to make large rooms work better. That way, instead of trying to maintain a thousand individual connections, your device might maintain two or three connections to Superpiers and get messages through them. I make it even harder on myself because I demand that my SimpleX do everything over tor.
A thousand users seems like a lot; I’m not sure I’ve ever been in an IRC room with that many.
Is there a directory? IIRC the human naming part was still missing last time I tried it, and connecting through hashes was not very fun. The biggest blocker for me, though, was the lack of multiple device sync support. A single identity used across multiple devices concurrently is bare minimum feature, and is the reason I’ve always bounced off SimpleX. Has that been addressed?
There is a directory and you can find it by asking your favorite search engine for the SimpleX directory bot. As far as multiple devices goes, I’m not totally sure. I know that it’s supposedly able to be used on multiple devices, but I only run it on my phone, so I haven’t actually tried that functionality myself.
Yes you’re missing a lot. SimpleX even has a directory bot to find public group chats.
https://simplex.chat/contact#%2F%3Fv=1-4&smp=smp%3A%2F%2Fu2dS9sG8nMNURyZwqASV4yROM28Er0luVTx5X1CsMrU%3D%40smp4.simplex.im%2FeXSPwqTkKyDO3px4fLf1wx3MvPdjdLW3%23%2F%3Fv%3D1-2%26dh%3DMCowBQYDK2VuAyEAaiv6MkMH44L2TcYrt_CsX3ZvM11WgbMEUn0hkIKTOho%253D%26srv%3Do5vmywmrnaxalvz6wi3zicyftgio6psuvyniis6gco6bp6ekl4cqj4id.onion
I’ll fight.
I haven’t seen replies be useful at all, in fact they actively clutter the UI.
Editing and reactions are nice, but they’re not that important.
IRC already has emoji support 😀 and offline history sync, and is way smaller and faster.
The one feature I like better on Matrix vs IRC clients is it is way easier to actually connect to the server. Just type in matrix.org or whatever it autofills for you, and you’re in. No dealing with port numbers and proper syntax. This is an improvement.
I wanted to like matrix but it was too clunky for me. I wish more people used libera chat though, it is less active than it was 10 years ago or whatever.
Yeah, well, that’s a massive opinion gulf we’re never going to meet over.
You can enter emojis into anything that supports UTF-8, and so can claim everything supports emojis. I haven’t seen an IRC client with either an easy, integrated way to enter them, and I’ve also never seen an IRC client that will pull history from before I joined the room. Weechat certainly doesn’t.
Matrix is super clunky, and the fact that the reference platform is a shitty Electron application sucks. Even if you use something sane like gomuks, your client is perpetually lagging in Matrix features, often by more than just months.
Matrix angers me. It’s been such a mismanaged project. But I don’t see IRC having changed much over the past 20 years that I’ve been using it.
Discord, on the other hand, is an active pestilence. I only open that stupid web page on the direst of need.