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This is great but I’m more excited for the custom emojis it looks like they’re finally getting to for 1.10. It’s incredible to me that such a core feature for chat has been moving so glacially for years but maybe they’re now taking it seriously?
As crazy as it sounds, custom emoji/stickers are table stakes for a chat client and the fact that Matrix hasn’t standardized it and Element has kicked PRs on it for over half a decade is really harming adoption. I’ve been running my own Marrix server and it’s already tough trying to get my friends and family adopted. Not supporting the most common fun feature OOTB has made it way more difficult.
Crazy to say this, but what got me into free and open source software was Telegram ecosystem. And what got me into Telegram was stickers, animations and other eye candy.
I’ve read about Matrix alot here on Lemmy, but I still can’t figure out how to get it.
How do I get Matrix, how do I create rooms and how do I bridge other chats into it (I’ve read you could do that)?
I’m probably stupid, but how do you do this?
tl;dr download Element (or just visit their website on a desktop) and try it out. Unless you have a particular use case, even the default server should be fine. Element is to Discord* what Lemmy is to Reddit.
* it’s the best analogy I could come up with; other comparisons include IRC, Slack, etc.
You just need a client like Element.io or other clients. If you don’t want to connect to the main server
matrix.orgwhich is quite slow, you choose one from the federation.People who own a server and know how to do administration tasks can install their own instance and attach it to the federation. You can use one of the Matrix server applications for self-hosting.
Think of it like email. You need a client (like Gmail or Outlook), which for Matrix is usually Element, Schildichat (a fork of Element), or Fluffychat. You also need a server (like gmail.com). The most popular one is matrix.org, though it doesn’t have any bridges. To get bridges, you either need to run your own server (much easier than it sounds with this) or use a server with bridges built in. Bridges are tied to the server. You also get an address, of the form @name:example.com, where example.com is the homeserver.
If you want to do it the easy (but slightly proprietary) way, Beeper is basically commercialized Matrix with preinstalled bridges and a slightly better UI. Some of their stuff is proprietary, but they contribute a lot to FOSS (several bridges I use are by them), and most of the internals are FOSS.
Check this out: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
Makes setting up a Matrix server super simple. However, I’m not totally sold on Matrix. It has been pretty unreliable for me with messages not triggering alerts in the app, messages just not being delivered or delayed by multiple hours.
I am unfamiliar with Matrix and just read their website, but I’m still kind of confused as to the importance of a new release sub-version to this general technology community. This may be a stupid question, but does matrix provide infrastructure for the fediverse or something?
Edit: thanks for all the informative replies. I understand perfectly now, but I’m still confused as to why this was posted here. I’ve never seen software release notes posted before, so i don’t get why this is important enough to be here with such a high upvote percentage. Anyone have any insights on that to help my stupid brain make sense of this?
Among other features it can be a good discord alternative
Notably missing from the comparison list is any mention of video or screen sharing, or anything to do specifically with games. These are Discord’s unique strengths at the moment and they have been for a long time. With that in mind, Matrix is a “good alternative” to Discord in the sense that most other desktop VoIP or chat apps are since Discord users aren’t using it for the privacy and openness aspects and want the Discord specific features and ease of use.
Don’t get me wrong, I wish I could fully replace Discord with the Matrix instance I currently self-host, but there are things Discord just does better than every other app including having a bunch of features that range from meh to pretty good all in one package.
Matrix has screensharing
Why are they booing you? You’re right! Unless the stuff the Element app does natively somehow doesn’t count.
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No it doesn’t. It’s basically a bloated and more advertised version of XMPP by some venture capital funded startup. Sadly, it doesn’t build on existing internet standards like XMPP at all, so there’s no real compatibility.
XMPP needs a connected network socket which is pretty bad in a time of mobile services. The 90s are over.
Clients can tell the server to only send important traffic (=when new notifying messages are incoming) before going to sleep so it doesn’t use any radio now. Fast reconnects are also possible now, so we can wake up only when a push notification arrives. The only thing stuck in the 90s is your knowledge about XMPP.
I know enough about XMPP or earlier called Jabber to not to run it anymore, after years of self-hosting Prosody.
Well, apparently you don’t since you’re spreading outdated myths.
Matrix aims to be a protocol for mostly real-time things like chat and voice/video calls.
It has a data structure called rooms (think: chat rooms) that are spread out across multiple servers and the servers synchronize the content between each other. While ActivityPub (what most of Fediverse uses) is much simpler and just list posts adding API for interactions. Matrix aim to be a fabric to build decentralized alternatives of Discord, Zoom, WhatsApp, Google Classroom, Jamboard, Google Docs, etc.
You know that email analogy? Matrix is like email:
- It’s federated between servers
- It has nothing to do with the Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, et al).
It’s more like a self-hosted and encrypted Google Chat alternative.
I wish it was as reliable as Google chat…
Yeah I have to agree. There are much better, more private, and more reliable solutions.
Any off the top of your head that are more private and more reliable, and can be self-hosted?
The biggest one that comes to mind is SimpleX, though it has issues with sending messages to large rooms.
I’m waiting on those reactions :D
I’m starting to wonder if they will ever fix the issue of dropped/delayed messages. I just want to replace Hangouts as my wife’s and my default form of communication and I would love it if Matrix worked well enough for that. As it stands, regular old SMS is even more reliable for me.
