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
I’m so happy to see a few alternatives popping up already and I hope to see them fleshed out well.
As someone who’s pretty new to things like FOSS, self hosting, etc. I am hopeful that there will be a release that’s more “idiot proof”.
I have a few friends who aren’t going to spend time trying to learn all the small things needed to set up stuff. Hopefully I’ll be able to set up something and just invite them and they just have to make an account in an app type thing to use. Lol
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” bullshit. 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
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.
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.
How does my client know to use dark mode without the protocol knowing?!
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.