(Somewhat) confusing UI, delayed key exchange ("the sender hasn't sent the key to this device so the message can't be displayed yet" or something similar) and just in general a much less polished experience.

Gitter seems to have moved to being a Matrix instance (or maybe it always has? it didn't look like Matrix when I used it circa 2016), but matrix feels half-baked and is just a bunch of hacks put together. For example

- Can't "mark all as read" on a space. probably because rooms within a space are only tangentially related,

- No custom emojis or sticker packs (their proposal for this is to create rooms to house custom emojis/sticker packs[0])

Not a great bet to go to keybase with the Zoom acquisition https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28814210

0: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/195...

Didn't Matrix (or whoever owns Matrix) buy Gitter? That was my understanding...

Ah, the joys of open source: where "nobody has implemented 'mark all as read' on a space yet" is extrapolated to "half-baked and just a bunch of hacks".

Custom emojis & sticker packs exist as per MSC1951 (thanks for linking it), and implemented in various clients. The fact the data is stored in a room shouldn't exactly be a surprise, given 'rooms' (i.e. persistent decentralised pubsub topics) are the main primitive for storing data in Matrix, much as everything is a file in unix.

Sorry you feel Matrix feels half-baked; meanwhile we're busy doing a major iteration as per https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/matrix20 and https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-e.... Right now the target is more WhatsApp/Signal/iMessage style messaging than Discord/Slack/Teams, but we'll (re)address the latter eventually.

> implemented in various clients.

Are clients encourages to implement potential features before they're merged?

Guess it stands for Quality Of Life.