this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
70 points (88.0% liked)

Unpopular Opinion

9258 readers
115 users here now

Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!


How voting works:

Vote the opposite of the norm.


If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.



Guidelines:

Tag your post, if possible (not required)


  • If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
  • If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].


Rules:

1. NO POLITICS


Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.


2. Be civil.


Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...


Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.


5. No trolling.


This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.


6. Defend your opinion


This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.



Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I’m probably older than many here and have used messaging systems since UNIX “talk” and “write”. Commercial IMs such as icq, msn, yahoo, google chat, WhatsApp, signal. Federated and open systems such as irc and Jabber.

I have tried to jump into Matrix, but it is terrible. The resource usage is crazy, the user experience (even for an expert like myself) is incredibly bad, I lose messages, federation breaks all the time, and it doesn’t even bring anything new to the table regarding features! I cannot recommend it to anybody, not even my nerd friends!

Curious, I dived down into its specifications, and it is clear that the people who designed it didn’t learn anything from past systems. They just wanted to create a new and shiny messenger: “theirs” — cue in XKCD 927

I understand the push for a “modern” messaging system (xmpp is from the late 90s, during the hype of xml, etc) but Matrix, while “modern” in the sense of recent, is definitely worse than the previous alternatives. It is plain unusable. I wish I was wrong. I have used it for 3 years waiting for improvements but it is simply broken by design.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] tyler@programming.dev 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Agreed, this comes up every time anyone complains about matrix. Someone says “matrix is the protocol, you’re complaining about a client”, and my response is always “then what is a client without these problems”. No one ever names a proper client, they just say to look at a list and choose a different one.

Matrix is horrendous.

[–] gkaklas@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

What would you propose using instead?

Matrix is horrendous

It is far more productive to recommend, have a discussion and help develop alternatives, instead of pointing out that everything is just bad

[show a client whithout these problems]

These issues are at least solveable by a client though. The fragmentation that seems to be happening around XMPP however, is not. No one can do anything e.g. if half of the public XMPP servers (instances) don't support federation, or encryption, or images

[–] tyler@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago

IRC while you can’t do many of the things you can in matrix, is a much better solution right out of the box.

If you want an actual alternative messaging platform then Zulip is fantastic. OSS, self-hostable, and is the forum for massive online communities like rust and redhat with no issues.

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago

why is this such an issue. like some instances get defederated. servers that are not federated would be like instaces that almost every other instance has defederated. If a server does not have images the people on it should know that and if they wanted them they should change instances. encryption though is a big issue. I would hope unencrypted instaces would not federate to encrypted ones. I guess im saying if servers lack popular extensions they would just die on the vine, no?