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I decommissioned my server 3 months ago and migrated my community back to IRC. I still had the IRC Podman containers kicking around, so that was easy. I dealt

I decommissioned my server 3 months ago and migrated my community back to IRC. I still had the IRC Podman containers kicking around, so that was easy. I dealt with ~monthly issues around my devices not being correctly verified, messages not correctly decrypting, and various other rough UX edges. There seemed to be a lot of velocity in the beginning but the last couple of years have addressed approximately nothing in terms of the UX and it's a crying shame as Matrix/Element (I no longer fully understand the difference/relationship between these entities) had a lot of potential.

colordrops 11mo ago
The rough edges are too much for even very technical users and admins, so there's no way we're going to get friends and family to adopt this.
solarkraft 11mo ago
> but the last couple of years have addressed approximately nothing in terms of the UX This sucks to hear. I thought they had made massive improvements in the last year or so (I don't know because I feel too burnt by past experience).
OberstKrueger 11mo ago
Unfortunately how I feel about it too. I gave an honest effort at getting into the ecosystem and tested it out with a few close friends. The rough edges brought the experience down compared to other stuff that “just works”, and losing community support for the IRC bridge took a huge use of my own away from it.
Sanzig 11mo ago
Let's not forget the shock image spam issue. Public Matrix channels are plagued with horrendous shock images (including CSAM). The development team seems to not care, they have a proposal for "policy servers" which is still incomplete and not supported by all server implementations.
- joecool1029 11mo ago
  It’s terrible. I had to leave most channels on the matrix.org namespace because they won’t properly moderate their own server from CSAM. I dropped to 7 day media retention to lower legal liability on my own server, since there’s no way to know when one of my users will be in a channel hit with abuse. At this point the majority use case I have for matrix is to bridge to IRC with heisenbridge and be able to use signal on my laptop through mautrix-signal and nheko. The number of native channels I’m in continues to shrink.
  - indolering 11mo ago
    Have they done anything to mitigate this? Like client side filters or message scanning for new direct messages?
    - Arathorn 11mo ago
      The main things are https://matrix.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-policy-servers/ https://matrix.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-policy-servers/ (for flexible serverside moderation) and the rest of the stuff in https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/ https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/. Clientside filters already existed, but given they only apply per client and there are a lot of different clients, we focused on serverside filtering.
      - BrenBarn 11mo ago
        What are the plans to improve the moderation experience for room admins who do not run their own server (of any kind)?
  - mystraline 11mo ago
    I know the matrix honeserver I use has taken our recommendations to NOT cache images from matrix.org due to their non-existent moderation. And the admin put out a bulletin to also recommend disable downloading images as well. There's also the split room bug (feature?) that allows banned users to still be in rooms where the honeserver doesnt ban them. And then, distributes connection shows ongoing banned content (primarily, you guessed it, CSAM) and the better-moderating admins can't do anything about it. I'm basically in a few well moderated rooms (Gnuradio, other topics). They do extraordinarily well in not getting many trolls, and for garbage collection. The only one we're seeing spammed is for some cryptocurrency site Liquid something. But its just commercial spam.
BrenBarn 11mo ago
I feel they underestimated what the MVP really is and started touting Matrix as great before it was really there, which has backfired and led to disappointment. They also went a bit too overboard on the overgeneralized idea of it being "a decentralized eventually consistent JSON database", which led to a lack of focus on its concrete usability as a chat system. I still use it and it's not bad in some respects, but it's a long, long way away from being able to attract a mass of ordinary users.
amluto 11mo ago
You did better than I did. I installed the recommended Element app, created an account on matrix.org, tried to send a message to another user, and… gave up. Every try got stuck and eventually created an empty room or whatever they call it. I have literally never succeeded in sending or receiving a single message.
- trueno 11mo ago
  There really is no winning in the org comms/chat apps space when it comes to OSS. Matrix+element, rocket, mattermost, Zulip and so on.. feels like there’s either massive gotchas on free/self hosted or it’s wildly complicated to configure and set up. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Hosting a private irc server and you lose out on rich embeds and will need your own pastebin-like service to use, video conferencing is probably a big challenge, the need for a mobile app at many workplaces. Bleh. I look at something like slack and I’m like damn that is literally irc+ and I just hate that I don’t have the skills to build up something completely free that I could host at my org. Teams literally owned everyone when they started bundling it in and rug pulling slack. Ofc the execs at my workplace were like “hell yeah this is great” but so did my IT dept. I was so pissed. Out of the box it’s just instantly compliant which was a major driver then of course at the time it was seen as a free offering (I know they’ve since had to decouple that) which completely nuked slack at our org. I can’t even believe I’m saying this but teams actually makes collaborating slower. No one on my team uses the channels we all pin chat groups and exclusively use that. It’s literally garbage. I guess I’m just venting, I really hoped I could find something in the oss world to supplant this and I think the bar for organizations is: compliance, chat, video conf and sigh the ability to schedule in outlook.
  - DANmode 11mo ago
    “Compliance” with what?
    - trueno 11mo ago
      Great question! Next question please. (I have no idea that’s the BS I was told when we left slack for teams)
nine_k 11mo ago
If IRC suffices for your purposes, then Matrix, with its encryption and all, is apparently overkill. If I were to upgrade an IRC-based community to something newer and richer, I'd go with Jabber, well-known, well-established, with a ton of various clients and several servers. Yes, it's not ideal, but it's still a massive upgrade compared to IRC, if your server supports a good list XEPs and your community members agree to use non-esoteric clients that also support them.
- ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
  > If IRC suffices for your purposes, then Matrix, with its encryption and all, is apparently overkill. IRC has encryption too. You run it over TLS.
  - immibis 11mo ago
    For E2EE there is the very old unofficial and only-partially-secure extension of using Blowfish with a static key.
    - ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
      I guess it's not end-to-end, it's decrypted on the server. Presumably if you want to send an encrypted message from one literal endpoint to another, you'd use some other technology. I'm prepared to bet there are enough people doing just that, too.
      - immibis 11mo ago
        The extension I just mentioned is E2EE.
bigfudge 11mo ago
It’s that hard even with a user in the loop to press buttons. Verifying bots is even worse and the docs are either non existent or wrong. This is such a shame because element otherwise does exactly what we want but it makes me nervous it’s so badly supported and buggy.
Timshel 11mo ago
Anecdotal but running a server with multiple bridges for multiple years. Had such issues initially but none recently.
tcfhgj 11mo ago
> There seemed to be a lot of velocity in the beginning but the last couple of years have addressed approximately nothing in terms of the UX and it's a crying shame as Matrix/Element had a lot of potential. It still has. And with Element X they have greatly improved the UX. Plus utd errors have been reduced by a lot. That said, I haven't ever had issues with devices not being correctly verified ( I use that feature since it was released - and can still recover the encrypted messages of that time).
phantasmish 11mo ago
When I looked into it the complexity of standing up and admin'ing a Matrix server was clearly either a massive "architecture smell" so bad the project was likely long-term doomed, or a deliberate choice to make it terrible to get people to pay for managed hosting. In either case, that's a no for me dawg.

colordrops 11mo ago

The rough edges are too much for even very technical users and admins, so there's no way we're going to get friends and family to adopt this.

solarkraft 11mo ago

> but the last couple of years have addressed approximately nothing in terms of the UX This sucks to hear. I thought they had made massive improvements in the last year or so (I don't know because I feel too burnt by past experience).

OberstKrueger 11mo ago

Unfortunately how I feel about it too. I gave an honest effort at getting into the ecosystem and tested it out with a few close friends. The rough edges brought the experience down compared to other stuff that “just works”, and losing community support for the IRC bridge took a huge use of my own away from it.

Sanzig 11mo ago

Let's not forget the shock image spam issue. Public Matrix channels are plagued with horrendous shock images (including CSAM). The development team seems to not care, they have a proposal for "policy servers" which is still incomplete and not supported by all server implementations.

joecool1029 11mo ago
It’s terrible. I had to leave most channels on the matrix.org namespace because they won’t properly moderate their own server from CSAM. I dropped to 7 day media retention to lower legal liability on my own server, since there’s no way to know when one of my users will be in a channel hit with abuse. At this point the majority use case I have for matrix is to bridge to IRC with heisenbridge and be able to use signal on my laptop through mautrix-signal and nheko. The number of native channels I’m in continues to shrink.
- indolering 11mo ago
  Have they done anything to mitigate this? Like client side filters or message scanning for new direct messages?
  - Arathorn 11mo ago
    The main things are https://matrix.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-policy-servers/ https://matrix.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-policy-servers/ (for flexible serverside moderation) and the rest of the stuff in https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/ https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/. Clientside filters already existed, but given they only apply per client and there are a lot of different clients, we focused on serverside filtering.
    - BrenBarn 11mo ago
      What are the plans to improve the moderation experience for room admins who do not run their own server (of any kind)?
- mystraline 11mo ago
  I know the matrix honeserver I use has taken our recommendations to NOT cache images from matrix.org due to their non-existent moderation. And the admin put out a bulletin to also recommend disable downloading images as well. There's also the split room bug (feature?) that allows banned users to still be in rooms where the honeserver doesnt ban them. And then, distributes connection shows ongoing banned content (primarily, you guessed it, CSAM) and the better-moderating admins can't do anything about it. I'm basically in a few well moderated rooms (Gnuradio, other topics). They do extraordinarily well in not getting many trolls, and for garbage collection. The only one we're seeing spammed is for some cryptocurrency site Liquid something. But its just commercial spam.

BrenBarn 11mo ago

I feel they underestimated what the MVP really is and started touting Matrix as great before it was really there, which has backfired and led to disappointment. They also went a bit too overboard on the overgeneralized idea of it being "a decentralized eventually consistent JSON database", which led to a lack of focus on its concrete usability as a chat system. I still use it and it's not bad in some respects, but it's a long, long way away from being able to attract a mass of ordinary users.

amluto 11mo ago

You did better than I did. I installed the recommended Element app, created an account on matrix.org, tried to send a message to another user, and… gave up. Every try got stuck and eventually created an empty room or whatever they call it. I have literally never succeeded in sending or receiving a single message.

trueno 11mo ago
There really is no winning in the org comms/chat apps space when it comes to OSS. Matrix+element, rocket, mattermost, Zulip and so on.. feels like there’s either massive gotchas on free/self hosted or it’s wildly complicated to configure and set up. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Hosting a private irc server and you lose out on rich embeds and will need your own pastebin-like service to use, video conferencing is probably a big challenge, the need for a mobile app at many workplaces. Bleh. I look at something like slack and I’m like damn that is literally irc+ and I just hate that I don’t have the skills to build up something completely free that I could host at my org. Teams literally owned everyone when they started bundling it in and rug pulling slack. Ofc the execs at my workplace were like “hell yeah this is great” but so did my IT dept. I was so pissed. Out of the box it’s just instantly compliant which was a major driver then of course at the time it was seen as a free offering (I know they’ve since had to decouple that) which completely nuked slack at our org. I can’t even believe I’m saying this but teams actually makes collaborating slower. No one on my team uses the channels we all pin chat groups and exclusively use that. It’s literally garbage. I guess I’m just venting, I really hoped I could find something in the oss world to supplant this and I think the bar for organizations is: compliance, chat, video conf and sigh the ability to schedule in outlook.
- DANmode 11mo ago
  “Compliance” with what?
  - trueno 11mo ago
    Great question! Next question please. (I have no idea that’s the BS I was told when we left slack for teams)

nine_k 11mo ago

If IRC suffices for your purposes, then Matrix, with its encryption and all, is apparently overkill. If I were to upgrade an IRC-based community to something newer and richer, I'd go with Jabber, well-known, well-established, with a ton of various clients and several servers. Yes, it's not ideal, but it's still a massive upgrade compared to IRC, if your server supports a good list XEPs and your community members agree to use non-esoteric clients that also support them.

ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
> If IRC suffices for your purposes, then Matrix, with its encryption and all, is apparently overkill. IRC has encryption too. You run it over TLS.
- immibis 11mo ago
  For E2EE there is the very old unofficial and only-partially-secure extension of using Blowfish with a static key.
  - ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
    I guess it's not end-to-end, it's decrypted on the server. Presumably if you want to send an encrypted message from one literal endpoint to another, you'd use some other technology. I'm prepared to bet there are enough people doing just that, too.
    - immibis 11mo ago
      The extension I just mentioned is E2EE.

bigfudge 11mo ago

It’s that hard even with a user in the loop to press buttons. Verifying bots is even worse and the docs are either non existent or wrong. This is such a shame because element otherwise does exactly what we want but it makes me nervous it’s so badly supported and buggy.

Timshel 11mo ago

Anecdotal but running a server with multiple bridges for multiple years. Had such issues initially but none recently.

tcfhgj 11mo ago

> There seemed to be a lot of velocity in the beginning but the last couple of years have addressed approximately nothing in terms of the UX and it's a crying shame as Matrix/Element had a lot of potential. It still has. And with Element X they have greatly improved the UX. Plus utd errors have been reduced by a lot. That said, I haven't ever had issues with devices not being correctly verified ( I use that feature since it was released - and can still recover the encrypted messages of that time).

phantasmish 11mo ago

When I looked into it the complexity of standing up and admin'ing a Matrix server was clearly either a massive "architecture smell" so bad the project was likely long-term doomed, or a deliberate choice to make it terrible to get people to pay for managed hosting. In either case, that's a no for me dawg.