Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org
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The Matrix.org network has great potential, but after years of dealing with glitches, slow performance, poor UX, and one too many failures, I’m done with it.

After five years of using Matrix.org/Element as my primary communication platform, and rooting for it, and promoting it, and enduring its many quirks, I’ve decided to move on (or rather back). Despite promising ideals and growing institutional adoption, the network remains slow, unreliable, and confusing for everyday users. Development feels directionless, client and server projects are fragmented, and the user experience still lags far behind my expectations. A recent incident that essentially broke my own community channel on the Matrix.org homeserver was the final straw: I’m heading back to XMPP.

  • tyler@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    11 days ago

    I don’t really think there’s any massively large scale messaging apps built on node or python that function well. Node has a decent connection limit, but there have been thousands of articles written on all the difficulties you will have with that and getting it to actually perform at that level. Yes it will run, but not well. Python just isn’t even close to node, so I’m not gonna bother with that. OTP was built for this. The matrix org might have been able to get it to work with Python or node eventually but when you’re building an application that needs to be easily maintained by the open source community with as few architectural decisions as possible, it’s just not gonna work out unless you’ve chosen the right tool for the job to start with.

    Edit: Zulip (the best oss chat app I’ve used) is written in Python and typescript but it’s not built for anything other than single org use. For single org use you’re not going to have tens of millions of messages a day.