I find matrix incredibly frustrating. From random messages never loading, to missing messages, to random permission issues between clients. I'd love an alternative. I'm curious about some of these suggestions though, I'll check them out tomorrow. Id love to get off Google chat for my personal comms.
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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as long as youre not uber paranoid/dont need public moderated groups ala a conferencing program like discord, i strongly strongly recommend deltachat, i deleted the account that wrote it but i love this app so much i wrote like a 1k+ word review/advertisement on it a month or 2 ago lol
Better to use SimpleX than Deltachat tbh
According to the article:
Anti-recommendations:
SimpleX Chat – Many suggested this and I will explicitly recommend against it due to the founder's positions on various topics. This includes being anti-vaxx, believing COVID-19 was a hoax, trans- and homophobia, climate denial; In the SimpleX Groupchat he's also been seen basically bootlicking trump a couple times, but I've lost receipts to that.
I don't see how that reflects on the project, even more so since you are nor supporting them i any way by using SimpleX, since it's not paid, free/libre and decentralised
It's objectively one of the best secure messengers out there (eight next to Signal and Briar) with Matrix trailing by a bit but still faaaar ahead of most other stuff
One thing I never liked about Element is the devs' refusal to put effort into supporting multiple accounts. Now I'm starting to wonder if that was a deliberate choice and not a fundamental technical limitation. Discouraging multiple accounts and effectively forcing people to use one identity for everything is exactly the sort of requirement I'd expect from VCs looking to sell out to advertisers.
Also, I'll be honest, I miss irc and xmpp and jabber. I know they're alive and well, but sometimes I wish irc was what everyone was using still.
DELTA CHAT MENTIONED RAAHHH 
delta chat advertisement
I unironically really love Deltachat, incredibly easy to set up and use to the point i got my 70+ yo grandma to use it and the encyption never breaks like matrix seems to constantly (at least in my experience anyways. it's not perfect if you're a paranoid bastard because it doesnt have PFS but like i said it's so easy to set up and use that i think it's a worthy tradeoff with how easy it is to make throw away accounts, and if you really need PFS there are web apps that you can use to get that
Something I always find exhausting with apps like this, Matrix, and federation in general is where the heck do I make my 'email' or account or whatever? Which host isn't going to share my info with the FBI but also doesn't abide bigots?
like i said if you are uber paranoid deltachat is probably not for you yet unless you're willing to use the peer to peer messaging web app available by default inside of deltachat. deltachat is really striving to be an app that you can get your friends and family off of dogshit apps like whatsapp because of how easy it is to set up and use while remaining fairly secure.
another thing i will say is that it's so easy to make user accounts (that you can immediately discard without care) because it's not really email, for instance i just made a throw away account, all i did was enter the name "test" and it instantly made the account and gave me this email address 2i17gx1w1@nine.testrun.org however it doesnt really matter because it's made on a chatmail server any unencrypted emails sent to this account get automatically rejected by the chatmail server, the only way to send encrypted mail through a chatmail server is if you have their public key, so the way you add contacts is thru a qr code or a link like this https://i.delta.chat/#XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX=2i17gx1w1%40nine.testrun.org&n=test&i=XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
https://delta.chat/en/help#device-seizure this is their recommendation to protect against a potentially malicious email server and/or you or your contacts devices being seized.
This is why I wish China would do more coopting of western FOSS tech instead of building their own tech stacks from scratch. Like I get why they are doing it, but one way to deslopify Matrix would be a number of Western articles claiming Matrix (or any other federated FOSS communication platform) was a CCP op.
How does this effect the hexbear matrix channels?
Not really, to my understanding. Hexbear runs everything off chapo.chat which is mostly unaffected by the matrix.org issue. Obviously, don't use Element and there might be a hard fork in the future but it shouldn't be insurmountable. Matrix still remains a decent protocol despite having an uncertain future and the replacements aren't very promising. (I know polyproto was mentioned but I've seen dozens of Discord-esque chat protocols come and go, and it being a de facto personal project doesn't help.) Defederation with matrix.org might happen as well.
Anyone here familiar with this?: https://polyproto.org/docs/intro/ was mentioned in the article and seems pretty neat, though still in the very early stages.
Federation is a bad model.