This app is still in early alpha but I managed to spin it up yesterday and it seemed to work pretty well during my brief testing.
The github has been pretty active since the release yesterday. Note that this isn’t my project, just found the Dev sharing it on reddit yesterday
As someone who has been advocating for the use of the federated Matrix protocol for a long, long time now, the proliferation of new, competing options actually is frustrating to me. Technically Matrix is actually already fleshed out very well, has several different clients, and even has Thunderbird support so if you’re already using Thunderbird you don’t even need a separate client.
The beginnings of Matrix go back as far as 2014 so it honest has at this point 12 years of development behind it. I know Matrix has it’s issues, but it’s by far the most secure combined with being able to communicate with large groups of people via federation. There’s definitely slightly more secure options, because they lack federation (and thus don’t leak metadata), but I personally am ambivalent about them because some of them have a kind of crypto-bro feel to the companies behind them and I’m skeptical they won’t go down a path similar to Discord while Matrix on the other hand has been slowly but surely leveraging itself into a position of secure government communications all over Europe. So, to me, Matrix already has a game plan for staying relevant and staying solvent, while things like SimpleX or Stoat I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the enshittification to begin
Open source bona-fides are great and all, but for a lot of these messengers, I absolutely think not enough discussion is made regarding their financial plans to stay afloat whereas the reality is that while Matrix doesn’t exactly have money coming out their ears, they have a slow, steady gameplan that is working out so far.
The whole reason everyone moved to Discord was because it was a centralized place and since Discord needed to pay for it’s servers, it had to find a way to finance that, and enshittification naturally happened. I think it would be foolish to pretend that can’t happen again with several of the current alternatives.
No! Stop perpetuating this “they have bills to pay” nonsense. Discord has more than enough money to run itself and be profitable.
The enshitification happens in services like Discord when shareholders gain control of the product.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-06/chat-platform-discord-is-said-to-file-confidentially-for-ipo
Edit: toned down a word.
Personal opinion, Discord was already enshittifying before they did an IPO, like at least 6 years ago or more. The IPO just gave them an excuse to speed up the process.
I fully agree.
Hello from XMPP. Now you understand how we felt.
Exactly, this isn’t even a new problem… it just keeps happening.
I don’t like Matrix because you can’t sort and categorise channels in a server. The most recently messaged in channel is always at the top. That’s not the UX I want, I want to be able to put things in places with intentionality.
That literally has to be a client option. Pick your favorite client with a receptive team and request sorting as a feature.
Exactly this, that’s a client quirk, probably Element in this case.
If it’s not supported by the protocol, how is an admin’s sorting of channels supposed to be pushed to the users in the server? It won’t work, it can’t be a client option. If it has to be a client option and it can’t, then it’s impossible.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. Matrix is the communication protocol between clients and servers. It can’t dictate how a client displays those communications. It would be like TCP demanding that webpages be laid out a certain way.
HTML and CSS are also protocols. But I think a better analogy is RSS. RSS carries information about the order of posts, which clients can use however they want. I think that’s the right way to do this feature.
How does my client know to use dark mode without the protocol knowing?!
Are you saying you want the moderators of a Discord server to decide whether users on the server use dark mode or light mode?
I’m saying you’re confused on how the technology works. There’s differences between the protocol, user account settings, user account preferences, and local client settings.
The protocol is how messages are sent and processed. User account settings are what your user is allowed to do and kept on the server. User account preferences are things that should be sent to your client when you log into it. Local client settings are things that the software you are running should know.
Your group arrangement should either be under user account preferences, or local client settings. This is not part of the messaging protocol.
I disagree. On Discord, channels are sorted and grouped by the server admins. This is good UX design because it gives every user on a server the same experience of the channels, and doesn’t require users to all replicate a bunch of the same work.
What you’re proposing as a solution is that every single user in a Matrix space is responsible for sorting and grouping all of the channels in the space that they’ve joined. That’s a ridiculous proposal because 99% of users aren’t going to go to that ridiculous effort, they’re going to be happy with the default settings. I think your idea is better than Matrix’s current setup, but it’s far worse than Discord from a usability perspective.
it’s so ridiculous that it’s what IRC clients and Slack does.
I’m sorry that I forgot to also specify that what you’re talking about could be part of the admin settings for the specific server, which is where that information should be, which again, is not going to be part of the chat protocol.
Someone just needs to make a discord clone on Matrix, can’t be that hard, right?
Already did, it’s called Commet.
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LOOOOOLOLOLOLOL
That’s really not something to be proud of.
Compelling argument.
I suppose XMPP’s 27 years of development is embarrassing as well?
Or are you just shitposting without any concrete arguments for what you’re saying? I won’t argue well thought out arguments, but this shit is just childish. You can do better, artyom.
With the limited time I have spent with XMPP it seems to work much better.
Thought it was pretty clear. Matrix sucks. I don’t have “concrete arguments”, just experience. Messages and images that fail to load, encryption failure, devices being marked as unverified randomly so I can’t chat with anyone, messages missing entirely from the feed, device verification failures, I mean the list goes on. On top of all that, it’s slow as hell. It’s a joke.
I mean I wouldn’t say the original message was clear at all that you as an individual have had bad experiences. There are also people who may have things to say from a development standpoint beyond just “I have personally had bad experiences with it.” So, sorry you had bad experiences, but to be perfectly clear “LOOOOOLOLOLOLOL” doesn’t actually tell anyone anything at all. Thanks, however, for the clarification. I haven’t had issues like that with Matrix in a long time now, but I’ve been using it off-and-on since 2018-ish.
It does.
I don’t believe you.