I’ve been on matrix for over about two years now. There is no noticeable slowness on the client, on any that I tried (and I’ve tried a lot of them), and the chats for our groups open immediately.

There have been 0 encryption errors so far. We use encryption only in private chats and chats where we exchange important data. I have only been on large encrypted rooms (100+) once, and I did have an initial loading phase which took a couple of seconds. One should be able to live with that.

I have brought 12 people including my mother on element. Three of those people are what I consider “techy”, and the rest managed to join and use it by themselves with zero teaching from me (other than giving them the home server URL).

Hating matrix because lots of people are on the flagship server is like hating email because most people use Gmail. It’s not relevant for you. They can use whatever and you can use whatever.

I have a feeling that I have this talk once a month because there are misconceptions and misinformation on matrix. Matrix does have some issues, but these are not it.

What client are you using?

extera is a fluffychat fork, which does have an iOS client fwiw