As much as I would love for matrix to be the champion of all chat protocols (I use it as my primary myself). It is undeniable that Telegram has by far the best chat client on the market. It is the only modern and fully featured non-electron chat client available, it’s lightning fast and smooth as fuck, and always ‘just works’ and without mobile/connect nonsense, which is what the enduser want. Matrix is awesome as a concept, but the only client worth your time is Element, which is clunky, slow, and buggy - of course, most of the blame is on electron. It certainly doesn’t help that the most stable server, matrix.org, also tends to bug out from time to time.
I think the biggest problems of slowness actually come from matrix.org. When I switched to my selfhosted homeserver (hosted on a Nintendo Switch in my house, no fancy costly VPS) my whole experience got faster and better.
Talking about clients, there are some promising ones out there but which are not ready yet. Element and FluffyChat are really the only unique ones (not counting forks) I would define as complete.
Personally, I have been using SchildiChat (Element fork) on Android and Element on desktop for all my chatting in the last few months, and I mean all: since I started hosting my homeserver, I also set up puppet bridges for Telegram and Discord, which means I can now chat in any room from these platforms, on my Matrix, seamlessly.
Element for both platforms is maybe overall slower than Telegram, but is onestly much more stable and better performing (speed isn’t the whole of performance). Before going full-time-Matrix, I have been a full-time Telegram user for about 4 years straight, so I think I’ve seen how things are.
Element desktop doesn’t suffer from the strange memory leak and performance drop problems (occasional freezes, or high disk usage) that Telegram desktop does. Element just sits there at ~150MB, Telegram can go up to ~1GB+ after some hours (if you have many chats at least)
SchildiChat (Android) somehow allocates ~400MB of RAM (like the stock Element for Android) (wtf?) but is stable, it doesn’t have the infinite small bugs and problems that Telegram for Android has. Also, SchildiChat doesn’t drain my battery. For about 2 hours of foreground use, it uses up ~50mAh, while Telegram (doesn’t matter if stock or a fork like Telegram FOSS or Nekogram X) wastes iirc ~300mAh.
TLDR: I’m never looking back from Matrix.
Side note: have you seen the source code for Telegram for Android? No wonders it has all these problems… Apart from being just bad, it’s also developed in a sus way. Telegram desktop is developed like you would expect any big open source project, with frequent small commits created by different people. Telegram for Android has 1 big commit every few months or so created by always the same person.
i don’t use the mobile clients, only desktop. but for comparison, nheko is lightning fast and smooth (like telegram). but has a ton of bugs and lacks a lot of features (not to mention the interface isn’t very appealing). no client for matrix except for element offers all the current features because element is the main client used for development of the service and protocol.
people always want to argue when i say electron sucks. fact of the matter is, electron do suck, the reason most developers nowdays choose to use it is simply because it takes no effort to develop software with the thousands of free frameworks and resources on the market and the ability to make a multi-platform client with zero effort through electron, it’s also very easy to maintain. but this comes at a cost, no amount of optimization will fix the inherent issues of electron no matter how much you will it. again, electron sucks.
tauri is the future, as it seeks to resolve all the inherent issues with electron. but it is not mature enough yet for the market.
edit: full disclosure, i don’t actually use telegram for anything and i don’t support telegram at all. i don’t trust it and i don’t think anyone else should either. but i’m not going to deny the masterpiece that is the desktop client from a user point of view.
As much as I would love for matrix to be the champion of all chat protocols (I use it as my primary myself). It is undeniable that Telegram has by far the best chat client on the market. It is the only modern and fully featured non-electron chat client available, it’s lightning fast and smooth as fuck, and always ‘just works’ and without mobile/connect nonsense, which is what the enduser want. Matrix is awesome as a concept, but the only client worth your time is Element, which is clunky, slow, and buggy - of course, most of the blame is on electron. It certainly doesn’t help that the most stable server, matrix.org, also tends to bug out from time to time.
Honestly I’ll disagree.
I think the biggest problems of slowness actually come from matrix.org. When I switched to my selfhosted homeserver (hosted on a Nintendo Switch in my house, no fancy costly VPS) my whole experience got faster and better.
Talking about clients, there are some promising ones out there but which are not ready yet. Element and FluffyChat are really the only unique ones (not counting forks) I would define as complete.
Personally, I have been using SchildiChat (Element fork) on Android and Element on desktop for all my chatting in the last few months, and I mean all: since I started hosting my homeserver, I also set up puppet bridges for Telegram and Discord, which means I can now chat in any room from these platforms, on my Matrix, seamlessly.
Element for both platforms is maybe overall slower than Telegram, but is onestly much more stable and better performing (speed isn’t the whole of performance). Before going full-time-Matrix, I have been a full-time Telegram user for about 4 years straight, so I think I’ve seen how things are.
TLDR: I’m never looking back from Matrix.
Side note: have you seen the source code for Telegram for Android? No wonders it has all these problems… Apart from being just bad, it’s also developed in a sus way. Telegram desktop is developed like you would expect any big open source project, with frequent small commits created by different people. Telegram for Android has 1 big commit every few months or so created by always the same person.
i don’t use the mobile clients, only desktop. but for comparison, nheko is lightning fast and smooth (like telegram). but has a ton of bugs and lacks a lot of features (not to mention the interface isn’t very appealing). no client for matrix except for element offers all the current features because element is the main client used for development of the service and protocol.
people always want to argue when i say electron sucks. fact of the matter is, electron do suck, the reason most developers nowdays choose to use it is simply because it takes no effort to develop software with the thousands of free frameworks and resources on the market and the ability to make a multi-platform client with zero effort through electron, it’s also very easy to maintain. but this comes at a cost, no amount of optimization will fix the inherent issues of electron no matter how much you will it. again, electron sucks.
tauri is the future, as it seeks to resolve all the inherent issues with electron. but it is not mature enough yet for the market.
edit: full disclosure, i don’t actually use telegram for anything and i don’t support telegram at all. i don’t trust it and i don’t think anyone else should either. but i’m not going to deny the masterpiece that is the desktop client from a user point of view.