My laptop is getting old and i can’t have Element eat up half of my RAM. There are many more clients out there but which one is good? aka "the best? ;-)
My requirements: lightweight, encryption 100% supported, active development/community. runs neatly 24/7 in the background.
Should also support the latest features, let me customize when to get notifications: priorities / muted chatrooms. And ideally also look clean and run on the Pinephone. But that’s optional.
I don’t care which desktop environment or cli.
What do you use?
Better native client support for the most part, but xmpp servers also show themselves better (faster, more stable…) than matrix.org I think more matrix users should consider using smaller instances tbh
Matrix on smaller instances suck because of how bad the protocol is. It “re-plays” the entire history of the channel on first join because channels need to be consistent between all instances because Matrix isn’t just a mediocre chat protocol but a generic data protocol that’s been beaten into the shape of a mediocre chat protocol.
It tries contacting every instance in a channel for their keys. Even the dead ones. And yes it takes exactly as long as you think it does for them to time out. Dendrite solves this by asking matrix.org for everyone else’s keys by default.
But because channels are completely synchronized at least you get to easily migrate channels between instances just by assigning an alias and telling people use the alias to join instead.
Woah, didn’t know that! I remember searching for older messages in Matrix be really bad. I only use IM software for 1to1 conversations, so I probably don’t know the worst of the protocol.
Sounds a bit too centralized for me
You can turn it off however that makes join times to any channel with history (say… the dendrite release announcements channel for example) unbearably slow to join.
I look forward to the day that Synapse is deprecated in favor of Dendrite or Conduit.