It's really like a death by a thousand cuts type of deal.<li>There are no stickers/custom emojis. There are proposals to the protocol to add them, but they haven't been approved or seen widespread adoption.</li><li>There are no image captions or photo albums, so you can't send a message with an image and include text in the body of the message, and you can't group multiple images so you end up just getting flooded with a ton of images sent out of order.</li><li>OpenGraph previews are super inconsistent. You have to enable images for each individual chat you're in, while messages forwarded with OpenGraph links won't display a preview. Meanwhile videos flat-out do not work and there doesn't appear to be a way to enable them. OpenGraph previews also don't work on any mobile client I've used.</li><li>The notification system is broken. Just, flat out broken. No matter how much I try to tell Synapse that a chat is a DM and not a group chat, Element seems to just ignore it, so trying to set group chat notifications independent of DM notifications just doesn't work. Meanwhile, any user notifications in encrypted group chats can't be silenced no matter what I do, so I'm constantly being notified that users are updating their avatars or changing their usernames, despite that setting specifically being turned off.</li><li>The clients are really haphazard. I'd argue there isn't a single good Matrix client. The apps all support a patchwork of different features and are riddled with issues, glitches, an inefficiencies. A lot of chats don't support spaces, for example. Meanwhile the app I use, SchildiChat, which is based on Element, constantly requires me to clear my app data on my phone because it'll periodically just refuse to work with my Telegram bridge and give me zero indication that it's not working.</li><li>The chat management is awful. There is no way to get rid of abandoned chatrooms without going into the admin API to remove them, so some apps end up displaying historical chats that no one has been in for months.</li><li>The media management is similarly awful. You can't independently manage group chat media from DM media, so if you're in a lot of group chats, your drive will fill up immediately. The only way to clean it is to delete <em>all</em> media you've received irrespective of what type of chat it originated from.</li>It's an open-source project so I'm sure it's a "commits welcome" kind of deal, but I'm just frustrated. Similarly, it being federated means that my experience could be entirely different from someone who's using a different software stack. That said, a lot of aspects of Matrix feel overly thought-out while also undercooked and half-baked. It just feels like there are a lot niceties that'd make the usability miles better that just languish on the issue tracker and don't get adopted into the spec.
Mastodon is smart because it isn't just "federated Twitter", it actually *has* features that add to the Twitter experience. Meanwhile Matrix just kinda feels like shittier Discord.
#Matrix #Synapse #MatrixChat #MatrixOrg #Element #SchildiChat #FOSS #FLOSS #OpenSource #Federation