A good news for the open source community.
matrix, anyone?
Matrix or XMPP, whatever people prefer !
I wish i could make at least someone from my circles to switch to xmpp but nooooooooo
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I like Movim, and the interface is slick. But the web app breaks for me sometimes and it’s pretty frustrating.
Fighting against “network effects” (I don’t know if this is the right term on English, sorry) for social tools is the hardest fight. The price to pay for the early adopters is just too high to be expected by anyone. I only managed to convince very few people around me.
This is not an individual problem but a collective, political one. Law has to make common standard mandatory. It has done it in the past, but modern capitalism/liberalism fail harder and harder, especially in new technology that emerged under it’s recent development.
Everybody takes for granted that your house power plugs are standardized and work with any electrical device sold in your country. But we could imagine a world with proprietary plugs for a “secure and coherent ecosystem for your home”. This would be bullshit and people understand. But for many modern digital standards, a major cultural fight has been lost…
Yes, i get what are you speaking of when i think after how many years, EU has only proposed a common smarthpone charging port!
I just feel like matrix will be easier than xmpp for hosts once dendrite is finished. Xmpp has so many extensions and everything else to manage, at least to me. Setting up xmpp was a bit more convoluted than matrix.
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I am by no means an expert, but for the few people I use them with, they sometimes serve different purpose. I use more XMPP for everyday 1 to 1 messenging, and Matrix for group conversation of richer interactions.
element is so buggy though and it’s really slow, also there aren’t many reliable servers besides matrix.org, it’s just inconvenient and there’s a (somewhat steep) learning curve :(
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.
- 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.
Good news for the open source community? I don’t think so. The server side is not open source only the client side is. End to end encryption is also not enabled by default for messages.
Telegram has Open Source clients, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger don’t. That’s progress.
Marginally “better”, but not progress; like the US military going carbon neutral.
The ecosystem is still a walled garden subject to government pressures upon and whims of a single corporate entity.
It’s not marginally better. It’s objectively much better.
Having an open source client has huuuuge advantages. Here is one: I can download Telegram client from F-Droid, which reduces my dependency on Google Play Store.
Telegram is used by somewhere between half to a full billion people. It’s impact on open source is massive.
Also their implementation of E2EE is weird.
Isn’t group chat also not secure?
Telegram is as bad as Whatsapp. It does not even have E2EE (or the pseudo-crap that was offers). At the end of the day I do not trust them and I think that both of them suck.
Telegram has E2EE if you use secret chat
They use a pretty questionable implementation tho. And secret chats are incrodibly limited + not by default.
Telegram has an Open Source client, WhatsApp doesn’t. That’s one huge difference there.
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At this point every company sucks. (I’m not talking about Telegram, I’m talking about the rest of bigcorps.)
Not really, the service stils centralised and is not even OS. You can not even trust the service. The client does not matter that much in comparison.
Whatsapp sucks too.
I agree, Matrix is better because it is decentralized. But Telegram is clearly better than WhatsApp and Facebook.
