this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026

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Unpopular Opinion

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Matrix is a terrible messaging system (lemmy.today)

submitted 3 months ago by somebody_to_love@lemmy.today to c/unpopularopinion@lemmy.world

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I’m probably older than many here and have used messaging systems since UNIX “talk” and “write”. Commercial IMs such as icq, msn, yahoo, google chat, WhatsApp, signal. Federated and open systems such as irc and Jabber.

I have tried to jump into Matrix, but it is terrible. The resource usage is crazy, the user experience (even for an expert like myself) is incredibly bad, I lose messages, federation breaks all the time, and it doesn’t even bring anything new to the table regarding features! I cannot recommend it to anybody, not even my nerd friends!

Curious, I dived down into its specifications, and it is clear that the people who designed it didn’t learn anything from past systems. They just wanted to create a new and shiny messenger: “theirs” — cue in XKCD 927

I understand the push for a “modern” messaging system (xmpp is from the late 90s, during the hype of xml, etc) but Matrix, while “modern” in the sense of recent, is definitely worse than the previous alternatives. It is plain unusable. I wish I was wrong. I have used it for 3 years waiting for improvements but it is simply broken by design.

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[–] tyler@programming.dev 16 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Agreed, this comes up every time anyone complains about matrix. Someone says “matrix is the protocol, you’re complaining about a client”, and my response is always “then what is a client without these problems”. No one ever names a proper client, they just say to look at a list and choose a different one.

Matrix is horrendous.

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[–] gkaklas@lemmy.zip 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

What would you propose using instead?

Matrix is horrendous

It is far more productive to recommend, have a discussion and help develop alternatives, instead of pointing out that everything is just bad

[show a client whithout these problems]

These issues are at least solveable by a client though. The fragmentation that seems to be happening around XMPP however, is not. No one can do anything e.g. if half of the public XMPP servers (instances) don't support federation, or encryption, or images

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[–] tyler@programming.dev 2 points 3 months ago

IRC while you can’t do many of the things you can in matrix, is a much better solution right out of the box.

If you want an actual alternative messaging platform then Zulip is fantastic. OSS, self-hostable, and is the forum for massive online communities like rust and redhat with no issues.

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[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 1 point 3 months ago

why is this such an issue. like some instances get defederated. servers that are not federated would be like instaces that almost every other instance has defederated. If a server does not have images the people on it should know that and if they wanted them they should change instances. encryption though is a big issue. I would hope unencrypted instaces would not federate to encrypted ones. I guess im saying if servers lack popular extensions they would just die on the vine, no?

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