Not OP, but parent poster. I did embrace Matrix in the early days (early 2015), with open arms, when I was looking for a self-hostable instant messaging solution for family & friends, and when it advertised to be “learning from previous protocols’ mistakes” and “being modern, with web stuff, unlike XMPP” (a large part of the Matrix communication back then was dismissive of the alternatives, sometimes using flawed arguments like this one. You can check archive.org for the details and how it backfired with the incendiary or plain ignorant points being retracted over time).

Either way, one thing to note about Matrix is that it came out in a crowded world with well-established (open and commercial) players, but with the ambition to be the next venture capital-infused unicorn. In this position you must demonstrate some truly unique ability, so Matrix’ reason to exist became to tackle a very difficult problem that nobody had: that of distributing chatrooms across many homeservers (instead of adding redundancy at the server level, like every major protocol had done before, resting on decades of computer-science know-how in the area of distributed systems). This led the Matrix protocol and its implementations to be truly insane, and a wild roller-coaster of inefficient and buggy implementations hasty deployed, fuelled by bold promises and hyperbolic claims to keep the funding going on.

To this day, the Matrix protocol has seen countless reboots, the canonical server implementation is in fact 3 distinct projects each trying to shove into a faster programming language more of the inefficiencies of the computing model, and if it hadn’t broken backwards compatibility so many times, you could perhaps still find discussions in the open between myself and Matthew along the lines of: (in 2015)

• Me: this is insane
• Matthew: we can make it work. We are very close. I found a new way to fan-out the data and it will be ready in couple months. It will solve everything!
• Me: but you don’t need this. Nobody needs this. Just focus on the front-end/UX and build it on top of something that works and is lightweight. Revisit that later if you must.
• Matthew: we can make it work. Couple months!

Fast forward in 2023. You would think that few times “couple months” have elapsed, and that Matrix is stable by now. But here he is, you guessed it, Matthew, telling to a crowded audience at fosdem how he’s super very close to make it work for real this time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUPJ9zFV5IE If you read between the lines, Matrix 2 is a proxy/bouncer for Matrix, to get your client running server-side, which is an admission that the flaws and inefficiencies of the protocol that have been crippling clients won’t ever be resolved, and if you happen to be on the hosting side, good luck with your hosting bills.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against Matrix per-se. It’s an open project and they do legit cool stuff there. We should just not encourage people get burnt so much by it. Admins should expect synapse to be hell, scale like crap in any real-world usage, and cost them a lot of time, effort, money and stress. Users should expect things to be slow, awkward and subtly broken for a while, and should be made aware of the heavy toll they incur to whoever is hosting them.

I’m also saying that better alternatives and better designed/more resilient/more privacy-respecting protocols do exist. Being myself a happy XMPP user and admin, I got to read many horror stories from admins of medium/large Matrix instances who just couldn’t keep-up, had to close, and re-opened on this side. Their experience is day and night.

It was super slow to join a chat. Also, scroll back history was always buggy, it would tell me I wasn’t allowed to see chats from the day before when I’ve been logged in for days. Room search is slow. I didn’t like having to do security keys when I logged in to clients on different computers. The encryption stuff never seemed worth it when 99% of the time in in a public room. Death by a thousand cuts is how it felt.

I did find it more responsive when I used the main matrix network, but I wanted to be on am offshoot and federate on, it always felt slow and painful.