Ive been using matrix private instance for group of nontechnical users for almost a decade now. First with Synapse and now Conduit.

Imho its OK. There are issues with e2ee and well it took most of that decade for Synapse 1.0 stable release…

But if you want private Slack/Discord alternative and run your instance Matrix is still your best choice. Running Conduit with sqlite is pretty easy it. Conduit doesnt yet have all the features but i hope its gonna get there. Element and other clients are pretty good. I am not sure there is better alternative that has threads, image uploads, markdown… all the little stuff people nowdays expect.

Almost feels like they bit off more than they could chew with some features. The end to end encryption of group chats is pretty revolutionary, but it's never really felt like it worked, and none of the competitors even try as far as I know. It's just too hard. Being federated probably makes every feature 10x harder to implement.

The bridging feature that they sell also never really worked properly for me. It would go down almost weekly, messages would go missing, get delayed, get reordered, etc. I never felt confident using it and would have to check the actual app to see it come through as expected.

Notifications have gotten better, especially if you use FluffyChat. No clue about the decryption errors.

I find two things way more annoying just because they're so basic. Number one being the fact that replies still look visually wonky quite often and the fact that they're fully RED. Why would they ever use the danger colour for normal things?! The second problem is that when you make a new session it doesn't trust old messages and displays an icon that's utterly useless.

The last one is especially annoying considering how often the clients just corrupt their state and need logging in again. Things like Keybase (RIP) got these things right from the start.

I agree (as project lead for Matrix) that we've ended up going much slower than I'd have hoped. The sibling probably has it right that we bit off more than we could chew. However, we've kept doggedly chewing, and after hitting 1.0 back in 2020 we're now gearing up to 2.0 which brings both performance & stability to mainstream levels.

The problems you've described on (presumably) Element Android are precisely why Element just rebuilt the app (as Element X) on a rust SDK which solves encryption & push problems in one place, rather than being split chasing bugs in triplicate across iOS, Android and Web/Desktop. In turn, this explains why the old apps have stalled.

I had to choose a groupchat option for an event I run and the choice ended up being XMPP because the Matrix mobile apps we tried were all crashy. I wish everyone working on Matrix the very best, and will continue to run a demo for myself once a year.

Thanks for continuing to give Matrix a try! There are rough edges, for sure. I'm excited to hear what you think the next time you give it a spin – your experience is valuable feedback for us.