this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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Pro@programming.dev
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Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org: The Matrix.org network has great potential, but after years of dealing with glitches, slow performance, poor UX, and one too many failures, I’m done with it. (xn--gckvb8fzb.com)
submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by Pro@programming.dev to c/Technology@programming.dev
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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.

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[–] HoopyFrood@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 days ago

I don't like choice was made to try to create a centralized matrix.org service to try and be a discord, Matrix makes sense when self hosted for an organization or peer group that needs messaging while owning the platform it is distributed on. Admittedly a bit niche, which is probably why a centralized big main instance was produced on what should have been a fully federated platform.

Marrying the protocol to its most well funded client was also a huge mistake, a lot of what element does is propriatary to element making alternative frontends functionally unsupported. Matrix is very confused about what it wants to be.

That being said, i use it as a self hosted alternative to discord for me and my friends; anyone who gets added to the platform receives a light education about how the encryption key management works. Just about every discussion channel created is deliberately made an unencrypted room. I desperately wish they made the high stakes encryption an optional thing that you only enable when needed. Encryption by default can be configured per server, but the reputational damage is done and the settings are at a sysadmin level, so matrix.org is just fucked