About Matrix Matrix is an open protocol for decentralised, secure communications.
Matrix Manifesto We believe:
People should have full control over their own communication. People should not be locked into centralised communication silos, but instead be free to pick who they choose to host their communication without limiting who they can reach. The ability to converse securely and privately is a basic human right. Communication should be available to everyone as a free and open, unencumbered, standard and global network.
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matrix isn’t a fediverse thing, it’s its own thing. it does happen to be decentralized, like the fediverse.
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matrix isn’t an alternative to discord. it’s an alternative to whatsapp/signal/telegram/etc.
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matrix is nice (I use it with my friend group), but it’s not perfect. we’re looking for something better.
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if you’re looking for a decentralized, self-hosted, open-source, secure alternative for discord, my friends and I use Mumble. It works great for VoIP (and its noise cancellation software actually seems to work noticeably better than Discord’s), but it doesn’t really have the advanced text chat features that Discord does. We make do with Matrix.
matrix isn’t an alternative to discord. it’s an alternative to whatsapp/signal/telegram/etc
Yes and no.
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Matrix is a communication standard. More like SMTP, RSS or XMPP than those things. I don’t know why Matrix specifically has this problem because you’ll never see anyone say “I’ve joined ActivityPub”.
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Element is by far and away the most popular Matrix client (similar to how Mastodon is the most popular ActivityPub software) and it has “Spaces”, which functions similar to Discord “servers” (not actually servers). Better in some ways but mostly worse. Namely in terms of stability and the function of “spaces” specifically.
While it’s true people don’t say “I’ve joined ActivityPub”, isn’t that synonymous with “I’ve joined the Fediverse”? Besides, the organization behind it does market it that way — they themselves refer to it as “joining Matrix, using one of these clients” (Element, Fluffychat, etc). Like, that’s what their website is called, and so is the Matrix server they host.
Their centralization is, I think, a little more advanced than Mastodon’s. The organization that maintains the protocol regularly adds features to it, and then of course immediately updates their own client and server implementations to have those same, recently added features, meaning the other client and server implementations are always behind on at least a few features. It’s becoming reminiscent of how the web browser spec is so bloated, and gets new stuff added to it with such regularity, that new browsers are basically impractical.
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not a replacement for Discord
A lot of people only use it chat and never touch the voice features.
Really?
Yeah! My wife does. There are communities she chats with there.
Hi! How much a matrix and mumble server costs?
Well, if you host a server, you can either host it on the cloud (which costs $$$), or you can host it by yourself (if you have a spare computer that you can just use as a server). If you host it yourself, all you’re really paying is the same stuff you already pay — internet and electricity.
Hosting a server for something like mumble, matrix, or lemmy only has the costs I mentioned above.
Why is it an alternative to telegram but not to discord?
It allows you to have personal 1 to 1 conversations and group chats, just like WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal.
Discord isn’t exactly the same thing as Telegram, that’s why Matrix.org is usually mentioned as an alternative to WhatsApp or Telegram but not Discord
On Discord you can have 1:1 chats and rooms as well.
But I feel both Discord and Matrix are better suited to room chats than 1:1, if for nothing else because the registration is a tad more complex than just receiving an sms, and you’re not sharing your phone number with a 1000 people.
I think the general vibe is that WA or Signal is for small friends groups exactly because of reliance on phone number, while the others aren’t.
Ed: also the E2E doesn’t “just work” like on WA/Signal.
Yes, you can have 1:1 and rooms on Discord too, but the level of customization of rooms, roles and permissions Discord has is much more advanced than what you can find in WA, Telegram or Matrix.org.
On Discord when you’re in a server you can see (usually) every other user that’s on the same server, and in every room you’ll see some of those people, depending on the permissions. That’s not how the other options mentioned before work.
Also, on Discord you can have specific rooms dedicated to audio/video chats, on the rest (WA, Telegram, Matrix) it works differently.
I think it’s mainly because of those reasons that people compare Matrix to WA and/or Telegram instead of saying it’s a “Discord alternative”.
there is work in matrix for video rooms, along with native group calls in matrix which once its added to the spec more clients will likely start implementing
Does Mumble have an equivalent to PluralKit? PK is one of the biggest things keeping me and my friends on discord atm
what’s PluralKit?
tbh, Mumble pretty much just does voice chat and only voice chat, and just focuses on doing it well.
It’s a bot that allows multiple people sharing an account to appear as though they each had their own pfp and username, using webhooks. It’s mostly used by plural systems, which are groups of people who live in the same head. You assign a proxy to each member, which might be something like prefacing your message with a certain emoji, and whenever you type a message using that proxy (prefacing with that emoji), PluralKit deletes your account’s message and gets a webhook with a name and pfp of your choice to re-send the message. The bot makes it way easier to talk to a plural system and know who’s speaking.
what’s PluralKit?
tbh, Mumble pretty much just does voice chat and only voice chat, and just focuses on doing it well.
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Matrix isn’t the alternative for discord. Others have been named.
Matrix is a chat with a high regard for encryption, more an alternative to Whatsapp and signal then discord.
Matrix is considerably more like discord than both Whatsapp or signal.
You can get a WhatsApp/signal experience out of it but overall it is very similar to discord
I don’t see anything mentioned about calls… kind’ve a big part of discord.
Is it supported?
This will be a harder sell than Lemmy because I need to convince my friends to move too
The great thing, you actually don’t have to. There are so called bridges which can simply bridge your friends into your matrix chat. I for example can talk to all my whatsapp, discord and signal contacts from the same app. Very convenient.
I need
What app is that? It’s matrix?
Matrix is the protocol.
Synapse is the server software.
Element (among others) is the client software.
Bridges (WhatsApp, Signal, Google Chat, etc) are extra servers that run next to the main server. Generally text only. Any Matrix client should be able to make use of a bridge. Bridges appear as “bots” in your Matrix contact list. Contacts from other services appear as “$name ($service)” and work as you would expect of a chat.
You should know that Bridging breaks end-to-end encryption as the Bridge has the decryption key and Bridges work by “impersonating” you on the other chat service. Don’t use a Bridge you don’t trust. Beeper is a paid/commercial hosted Matrix service with pre-configured bridges for you, including iMessage (which Apple makes painfully difficult to bridge because Apple).
Spacebar.chat is very cool, but progress is slow…
What is it missing? At least it has good UI xd
Everything. Im pretty sure it’s not installable yet.
I like Matrix but it’s far from Discord right now
That’s a good thing. Discord is chugging its way through the last half of the Web 2.0 service to social media pipeline. It’s a VC-funded multimedia enterprise extended around a novel technology core optimized for its original service offering, real-time voice/text. Nobody is immune to bloat, but because Matrix is a protocol standard, not an app, users have the option of sticking with minimal clients and servers that won’t (necessarily) get destroyed by feature creep.
If you’ve tried Element and thought “ah, slow Discord,” maybe have a scroll through https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/. I don’t want to get off topic but all my favorite software is standard/specification-based.
I loved Discord back in 2015/2016. I hate it now.
Me and my boys have been using discord for years now to chat while we game and maybe stream what we’re doing just to each other.
Discord has added features and shit I suppose but I haven’t changed how I use it at all since I first started.
Part of the reason I hate it now is they refuse to support Linux. In fact their support in general is pretty crappy.
I mean I am not a fan of discord, but it’s just an Electron app, like Spotify, isn’t it? meaning you can just open it in a browser you probably have running anyways
I wish Matrix/Element focused a bit more on their experimental P2P version, released as experimental in 2020 and then left it in the drawer :/
https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/02/introducing-p2p-matrix/
https://github.com/vector-im/element-android-p2p (… and just why the zuck are they hosting builds on a gdrive instead on the github proper ???)deleted by creator
…and not open source… thank you, but no thank you!
Also from their FAQs:
Who’s behind WireMin?
The WireMin team consists of a group of experienced technical experts and Web 3.0 advocates all over the world.
Web3 = crypto
Not a single personal name on their website.
Marked the domain as crypto-scam in uBlock and good riddance. Unironically thank you!
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all the features seams very decentralised
registering an account
Uhmmm
Are you aware that some of those terms are crypto too?
Not really, there’s no categories and it’s just not Discord
Categories? What do you mean by that?
Discord can sort channels in various categories rather than all in one list for organization.
Matrix has the “spaces” concept.
I know, but the channels can’t be separated into categories.
You just create sub-spaces.
Matrix is a security nightmare. Everyone should stay clear from it till possible solutions are found for the ongoing concerns.
Tbh, I don’t think encryption matters that much for are usually public chat channels.
The private communication should be safe since i think the users will usually pin the keys for each other.
The problem comes from federation. You never know where your messages are synced to + what will happen if instances are defederated. Matrix might become something really cool, if it spends 1-2 years solely on security. Otherwise… it’s just nothing more than an epic (and misleading) name + some IRC legacy vibes.
But you do know where your messages are synced don’t you? You can check your chat partner’s homeserver. Or am I mistaken?
yeah, messages are only sent to servers that are in a room, so its very easy to see and know what servers are storing the messages/metadata
And even IF a server is storing your messages — doesn’t E2EE make that irrelevant? It doesn’t matter if they store it as long as they cannot decrypt it. I don’t quite understand @SevereLow’s concerns.
yeah thats another point as well, not all rooms on matrix are encrypted, it for example makes it pointless to encrypt public rooms that anyone can join
What are the ongoing concerns ?
Here’s a great and beginner-friendly article on the topic of secure (and private) messaging and why Matrix currently doesn’t fit there: https://proton.me/blog/whatsapp-alternatives
That link says nothing of the sort! It actually says that Matrix is a strong choice for privacy and the underlying protocol follows best practices for security.
What are these security concerns you’re talking about?
Removed by mod
the orgs that prioritized it were shady as hell
You literally have no idea who’s behind Discord.
I feel like Rocket.chat would be the best Fediverse alterantive to Discord
Since when does Matrix support ActivityPub, thus being part of Fediverse?
Anyway, XMPP is better.
Why is XMPP better? not that I dont believe you I just want to learn. From what I heard the XMPP server implementation is a lot faster, but the Matrix one is being rewritten in Rust I believe.
synapse is the first and most used server implementation written in python, conduit is a HS imp written in rust not by the matrix.org team so synapse isnt being rewritten in rust, some bits are being rustified but not much it seems, there is dendrite which was originally meant to replace synapse as the HS imp to scale really well, but they they changed the priorities for that to p2p and small instances
Thanks for clarifying
I would say it’s a lot more than discord. Putting it that way doesn’t give it as much credit as it deserves. My favorite out of the laundry list of features and benefits is that you can synchronize your messaging across all platforms into a single interoperable client if your choosing. You can use a better standard while not having to bug others to switch.
I just had to go and look this up to get more details
https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/
Looks like you need to be hosting your own server, then you can install plugins for separate services. Very cool…
I’d love to tie together a few different systems I’m using but I worry that the bridges will break every time a platform does an update
Have long have you been using it? How’s your experience been? What bridges are you using?
You don’t have to host your own, just join an instance with bridges. That being said, running your own is easy and nice with docker, including the bridges.
Where would be a good starting point to check out a list of instances with these bridges? And how safe are they?
Beeper is a paid Matrix server that neatly integrates with many other chat services using a custom GUI specifically designed for integration with third party apps.
this is why I never got into matrix. I don’t actually know how lol, the page doesn’t list servers available and i don’t really want to just spin up my own just for myself
If you want to use a paid service from the developers, there’s Element One: https://element.io/element-one
hmm, I wonder if there’s a way for me to host my own matrix server and do the bridging myself, like a docker container or something.
They actually link to a guide right on their website: https://github.com/beeper/self-host
The beeper client only works with the official beeper services, but you can use other apps like Element and FluffyChat with your own server.
It is unfortunately such a PITA to self host. Spent hours a few weeks ago trying to set it up and failed.
Its requirements are insane… My little minipc which easily hosts my lemmy (multiple channels) and mastodon server (follow about 100 people plus retoots) without breaking a sweat couldn’t manage it. Installed matrix and subscribed to one channel and it simply buried the machine… I had trouble getting control back to shut it down.
sheeet… just switched it back on for a test… 2 minutes in and the load average is >60 & it’s already consumed 14 gigabytes. Idle.
I don’t think that’s normal. I run Synapse and Postgres, and they only take about 200mb of ram together. Load is less than 2% on a 2-core vm.
I still don’t see why we can’t just use IRC anymore. The protocol itself is old but reliable, and just needs a good client or two to help people compare it to Discord a bit more favourably. Though I suppose the need for a BNC to fully match it is probably a bit much of an ask for most.
IRC not allowing users to receive messages while offline, not having multiple synced clients, not natively supporting media, not supporting voice or video calls makes it a complete non-starter.
And there is XMPP
Trued xmpp, but all the good features are extensions and not all client support them.
Psi+ supports almost everything, but there is no good mobile client
Right. Its about finding clients with a feature intersection that supports everything.
I dont have time…
Hey you discovered why it never took off in the first place once Google and co got their mitts into it.
Matrix is slow, unreliable & weirdly centralized shit; i won’t say it’s bad but it’s… Weird. There’s revolt.chat which is a discord clone but has nothing fedi-verse.
I remember there was a reason on me calling Matrix “Weirdly Centralized” yet i can’t remember it rn lol, the key thing is that it’s not fully centralized but i wouldn’t call it 100% decentralised.
You can easily host your own so how is it centralised?
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