this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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I would have rather seen Element but hey, it's a step in the right direction.
Why? Matrix sucks as an instant messenger app, it's better as a Slack/Discord alternative.
Only because I'm not aware of other decentralised Signal alternatives. That's on me.
XMPP
SimpleX is pretty rad.
Indeed, but funded by VC which makes me uneasy about its future.
Huh, I missed that. From the announcement:
If they stay true to that, they're probably planning on building for-profit apps on top, while keeping the foundation free.
That sounds reasonable to me. Hopefully that happens.
Fair. I'll still be on watch, since venture capitalists are scum. Hopefully donations will eventually become stable enough for a revenue stream for them.
My concern is that they'd demand not just profit, but growth. But I wonder if they'd be able to go on by charging for commercial use - hosting servers, tech support, etc
Not yet, it lacks a lot of the features Signal has and does not even have a proper ipad ui yet, nor proper profile syncing between devices.
If it ever has these it might be useable by the masses, until then it'll be only the interest of privacy nerds.
Though really the most important thing is its lack of audits and a transparency report like Signal has. How can we be sure that its encryption/other security is up to standards or they don't hand over anything to cops/courts without these two things? These are what most messengers fail at, especially open source decentralised ones to be fair.
Yeah, it's a cool toy, but when I was picking a messenger to sell my SO on, Simplex failed my basic requirements:
Signal passed, so we went with that.
Simplex is still rad though, and I want to try building something on top of the protocol. I'm working on a P2P Reddit/Lemmy, and Simplex could be rad for DMs or something.
I didn't personally have problems with reliability (same as for XMPP, Matrix however has broken for me a few times). As for multiple devices - I just use two, with identical names and profile pictures, one on laptop and one on phone.
Yeah, Simplex is reliable. My point is that if I have a conversion with my SO on one device and want to continue on another, I can't really do that. So messages will come to one or another. When I tried it, they had a CLI tool to get that working, but that's not going to be acceptable for my SO.
So I went with Signal. It's easy for my SO to use and has strong privacy protections.
It only sucks because you keep using Element. Its the worst client out there, if you account for "doneness"
What’s better? I’ve only used Element
Cinny
Try fluffychat is more user friendly and with better ui than elements. I used the "every image can be a sticker" feature to move people to matrix.
And what would be the best? Element is certainly the most popular.
I don't like it at least because it's Electron. I had better experiences with Nheko and Cinny.
Cinny is also Electron
Isn't Element based of Matrix? From what I've read, Matrix is a bit mid (not exactly mid, but I can't think of any other word).
It works as it's supposed to, though the handling of keys (strictly necessary for self-determined end-to-end encrypted chats) can be hard and annoying for people who have no experience. But once you get the hang of device confirmation you can use it seamlessly across multiple devices.
Fluffy Chat is great too!
Nice! Never heard of that one, I'll look that up!
It's got matrix multi-account support and looks really nice.