We need to talk about Matrix (the protocol thingy)

It's a pretty neat system, to be able to communicate to eachother with whatever you want (through whatever other service you want).

What are your experiences so far with it (+ Clients)? Can you give some tips on what to use and to avoid? I heard that depending on the home server it might behave rather slow

In theory its cool but self hosting it is just 🤡

If you join a large room on another server, your server firsts syncs a local copy of all events (who joined, who left, messages, profile picture changes,...) from the room and then displays it to you. Thats so fucking inefficient and slow it's mindboggling. So every differrent server that participates in the room has basically a copy of the room...

Join the devrant matrix. All dem cool people are there https://matrix.to//...

As @retoor mentioned, there is a fresh Matrix room for devRanters. For those who wonder, here's an announcement: https://devrant.com/rants/8266215

Element X will be the new mobile client for Matrix with full sliding sync support, hence go brrrr. We're still waiting for its release on Android.

As for PWA/desktop app, I would just recommend Cinny. It has a pretty lightweight interface, only the most important settings, personal and global emoji/sticker packs. On that department, Element really has a lot of catching up to do. CLI users - gomuks. Doesn't hurt to login via Thunderbird, too. Then, if your use case goes beyond Cinny/gomuks/Thunderbird, the only sensible solution I've found is just get back to Element Web - because it's the most advanced of the bunch, albeit not multi-account.

@vintprox currently using element X and it is still lacking good UX, it is a bit faster than other mobile clients but not really worth it at that stage and hosting a sliding sync proxy is even more 🤡

Now when I join a room my server syncs a local copy of the history to its DB and then I open element X which contacts the sliding sync proxy, and it will now also download parts of the chat to its DB.

@j0n4s Daaam, man, I need someone like you to chew this sliding-shmiding witchery to me. On the surface all these upgrades seem exciting and all, but what you say makes me think of a downgrade...

@vintprox you can try the nightly builds from their firebase app test thingy (needs google account)
https://appdistribution.firebase.dev/...

@vintprox I really want to like matrix, but I've used XMPP before and it just worked, the server didn't use loads of ram, I didn't have a multiple GB large database when joining multiple larger rooms and it was quick, notifications were sometimes janky, but I experience this also on matrix 🤷🏼‍♂️

@j0n4s What are our thoughts on Conduit Matrix server?

@vintprox haven't tried it personally as I didn't want to lose my message history but IIRC someone I know used it and found the lower memory/cpu usage pretty attractive but it had some rough edges.

oh these are some interesting ideas, i actually might check out cinny, thanks 😊

the self hosting thing is honestly the most intriguing part. Kinda throws me back to the times where groups of friends, clans etc. had their own teamspeak servers.