How complicated is a federated messenger? Because it feels like matrix is the only one but there's always an issue
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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It feels like there could/should be a good modern chat protocol and voice protocol and you just pick which interface you want to use, much like email currently does, except for chatrooms.
There is: XMPP 🤷
Add voice to IRC. 🤷🏻♂️
SimpleX Chat – Many suggested this and I will explicitly recommend against it due to the founder's positions on various topics. This includes being anti-vaxx, believing COVID-19 was a hoax, trans- and homophobia, climate denial; In the SimpleX Groupchat he's also been seen basically bootlicking trump a couple times, but I've lost receipts to that.
I did not know this. I've seen people recommend SimpleX on lemmy too, but probably they didn't know.
This should be an awareness post on some tech communities
Thank you so, so, so, so much for saying this!
Me neither, this is actually disgusting, immediately uninstalled, a founder that has these views most likely shouldn’t be trusted with your data, anyway.
Fuck... Is there an alternative? Can't use telegram cus banned, won't use signal because usa and for a while they got very buddy-buddy with the zucc, matrix requires me hosting and it isn't exactly private... So what's left?
XMPP? The clients not supporting things can suck, but it's worked well for me.
It is forkable if necessary. I do think SimpleX is a great piece of software that shouldn't be reinvented because of the founder.
The write-up I'm referencing has some at the end. Maybe Delta chat?
why does matrix require you self hosting? There’s a bunch of free open-signup servers available
So happy the article linked to the Fediverse post, immediately liked and boosted it.
Never used SimpleX much really but will be immediately uninstalling it. Saw the guy's tweets, he's fucking insane, and retweets RFK Jr 🤢. Will do my best to inform others.
I think it’d help them a lot to disable new signups on the m.org home server for a while and direct people to some of the other popular options, they spend too much on their own example server imo
It is a bit counter-intuitive but restricting new signups will not help them much. The way the matrix protocol is designed, i.e. replicating everything on every server, means that clients connecting to their server have only a minor impact. As long as most rooms of the entire matrix network are replicated on the matrix.org homeserver their costs will stay high and there isn't really much they can do about that other than shutting it down entirely.
As long as most rooms of the entire matrix network are replicated on the matrix.org homeserver
Is this a dealbreaker for people though?
There is not much they can do about it short of shutting down the entire server. Due to how matrix functions internally any sufficiently large federated homeserver replicates most of the entire network.
Personally have been hosting my own server for me and friends. Cheaper and easier than I expected it to be 🤠
cheap and easy? I tried running it myself and ran into several hurdles, and gave up. How did you host it? VPS? Docker? Bare-metal?
I'm not who you replied to, but there is a big stack of ansible playbooks for it that make it pretty pushbutton. They primarily use docker. This is what I used and I got it setup in like an hour.
This article is nonsense. The Foundation was always a front for New Vector and their board is largely made up by New Vector employees. So of course they knew what was going on.
New Vector simply decided that the strategy to make Matrix appear as an open standard was against their business interests and thus left the foundation to fend for itself with obvious consequences.
Knowing it or not, the result is the same, isn't it?
Man, that's depressing, thanks for sharing, that was well worth the read
I like the concept of delta.chat the most. Anyone here use it? Any reason why it hasn't caught on?
Could it support technical FOSS channels with thousands of participants, like what IRC was awesome for and Matrix seems to be pretty ok at?
For me, the reason why Delta Chat hadn't caught up on me is stickers. There's a sticker picker on desktop, but not on mobile, and its behind more settings. Weird that it doesnt do it like WhatsApp where stickers are added to personal collections (favorites) that only sync between accounts and can be added manually; it's not necessary to make it like Telegram or Signal where you can add a collection from a repository.
For chatting it is really enough. Like email.
Deltachat works ok for 1:1 chats and small groups. It is totally unsuitable for large public channels as it doesn't really have a concept of group chats and just pretends so by (in email parlance) adds every one in 'CC'. This only works ok for small private groups.
IRC just needs to get it's shit together and start adopting IRCv3 features on the larger servers. The problem is really only that networks like libera.chat run a feature set that is at least 15 years behind what IRC can actually do.
Ah, too bad. That was perhaps too much to ask.