ilianai sure wish matrix was fucking usable
matrix makes me feel insane every time i think about it because the protocol is impossible to write new client code for so you get one of like five clients to choose from, of which the flagship can’t figure out how to stay in business or stop random regressions from happening release-to-release, and basic features you take for granted in discord/slack either don’t exist or have only just now passed the standards committee after a decade
i am sent a video, i cannot view it in element on my web browser, i have to open fluffychat on my phone, which does not decrypt notifications _even for unencrypted messages_ i am going to Fucking Lose It at this ecosystem
there is no fixing matrix at this point. learn lessons from it and build something new and move on. if only we had a chat ecosystem to discuss such a project on oh wait half the people with an interest in doing this won’t use anything else not even irc
if you are building a chat ecosystem here some basic deisgn rules you need to follow
1. no jank. the server needs to do all of the heavy lifting so that client applications can work smoothly. that means gnarly SQL queries and image/video transcoding for wide device support and to properly support a reduce motion setting for GIFs. you are not allowed to have a "dumb" server that simply glues clients together
1a. this means if you're doing e2e encryption it's gotta be well-designed from the start
i bring up reduce motion support under "jank" because matrix ostensibly has this at the protocol level and element ostensibly supports it, and yet about once a month at work someone posts an animated GIF that element animates despite my preferences. i don't even know how to file a bug because i don't know what's at fault.
"no jank" as a design rule also makes things more reliable on bad connections. there's a dead spot on my mobile provider through an area i walk through a lot; discord is marginally usable but no matrix client has ever succeeded in that zone. clients have to be smart about what they're fetching and not make a hundred requests that all fight each other for the tin can on a string i'm apparently holding
crab@iliana i used xmpp for a while in uni as a student org i was in used it as their main chat. i was able to consistently send and receive messages on EDGE when even websites wouldn't load and always found that pretty impressive.
of course xmpp has a lot of issues but since then i wonder why all chat apps cant do this