I recommend to have a look at the "Matrix 2.0" presentation that happened at FOSDEM 2023 in February: <a href="https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/matrix20/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/matrix20/</a>
Does anyone else find it funny that the flagship SDK (JS) is largely undocumented? And that the UX of all clients in existence leaves a lot to be desired (yes, Element X is the best one but it lacks features for now)?<p>Matrix is annoyingly hard to get into, IMO. It has gotten better in the last years, but it isn't exactly good yet. It hurts because I want it to be good so that everyone can switch.<p>I plan to talk about this with the Element developers at CCCamp.
One of the really nice features of Matrix is the IRC bridge to Libera Chat. Libera Chat is the current home of open source projects' community and support channels.<p>Earlier it was necessary to set up an IRC bouncer if you needed a persistent connection to the IRC server. But now you can just create an account on Matrix and join a Libera IRC channel from Matrix. The Matrix bridge functions like an IRC gateway on Matrix. It's a great way to stay logged into the IRC channels and ensure that you don't miss any messages when you are away.
All my server back-ends send me alerts and logs via matrix, which I can check easily from any device, including my phone :)<p><a href="https://github.com/aaviator42/MatrixTexter">https://github.com/aaviator42/MatrixTexter</a>
The "bridges" really work well if you can host your own and "puppeteer" your account. I only use Element on my phone now and all whatsapp messages come through without issues.<p>I am also spending some time hacking around some terminal matrix client. I don't have to worry about some corporation pulling the rug.
I used IRC for 15 years, and then was quite into Matrix (and their bridging) for a while. I used Matrix for 2 years, until I realised that almost all of the channels I used were on IRC.<p>Moving back to IRC, I realised how heavy Matrix seems to be.<p>I understand IRC is very old and lacking a few features, but Matrix seems like a completely overkill solution. It seems so complex that the only way to write a third-party client is by using the official libs, and even that seems so hard that they keep suggesting that Element is the only good alternative (while acknowledging that it still has pretty big UX issues, after all those years).<p>Also I remember reading from one of the leads that performance was not their main concern. They would rather work on academic features than make sure the protocol is very efficient. That's a problem for me.<p>At this point I am not sure if Matrix can succeed...
I got Element on my desktop, Schildichat on my phone. Bridged to all other messengers I used. IRC is handled with Heisenbridge. Before this I used weechat+bitlbee. Matrix is better, more capable, but way heavier, on both the server side and client side. I even dabbled in XMPP but in the end just bridged it into Matrix as it's not much better by itself (though it also supports extensions and can connect to many IM networks). The clients are buggy, especially on Android, they overheat the phone for no reason (when in use. Notifications are handled via push so background usage is great). But XMPP wasn't better in any other way so Matrix remains my go-to solution.
I'm beginning to doubt whether Matrix can actually succeed. It's a great idea, and there are great people involved, but there's just so many different problems/features that it's still lacking. And the progress is painstakingly slow. I really want them to succeed and I still try to get everyone on board and evangelize all my clients to join Matrix – but the truth is, I'm loosing hope.<p>Example: About a year ago, "Threads" went out of Beta and the feature is pretty much still unusable, because Notifications get stuck all the time. Even though there was a lot of progress to fix this – it's still not up to par with other Messengers.