Technology

Can't agree on Discord being hot garbage, unless you're specifically talking about how monetisation has creeped its way into it.

However, with Vencord I don't have to see any of that shit, while also having a far more functional and feature rich client.

Of course, a FOSS, potentially federated alternative would be greatly preferred, but it must have at least the basic functions of Discord.

I agree with you, my main issue with Matrix is that it is a pain to self-host at the moment.

Often, the problem is that projects get to a point where they're happy and the maintainer doesn't want to add any new features. So people then are forced to build a new project to get those features.

I've been hosting a server without much problems for several years now.

Synapse and Riot.im (now Element) became much better around 2019 or 2020. But not too long ago, I also found out that Synapse also bloats the DB with state_groups_state table. There are a handful of commands that come with synapse, but no built-in admin tool or panel, so I wrote my own. Moving server to another host has been seamless for my (few) users. TURN/STUN for calls seems to work okay (I don't really use it though).

I appreciate Element being uniform across platforms (which I cannot say about XMPP clients), but the sign-in is pretty tedious, and registration with a token is still impossible last time I checked (which is either a hassle for the user to use another client and then their smart device, or a security issue if you open registration to anyone). Most normal people probably don't care and don't want to deal with keys, cross-verification, and all that jazz.

Yeah, I finally pulled the trigger and moved to my own domain from matrix.org. Man, it is just so much faster. Which is sad, because the performance is pretty bad. (Element Web seems to do some per-room request as part of the initial loading screen which is obviously not scalable) but getting off of matrix.org is a huge performance improvement.

That being said there is nothing really wrong with matrix.org. The problem is really public rooms. People will join and spam. It is true of any protocol (have you heard about email?) but Matrix definitely needs to (and they are slowly working on) make it more expensive for spammers.

I think the barrier to entry is kind of high, you need to use a bouncer to see what happened while you were offline.

yup I went back to IRC. got tired of discord and matrix just wasn't for me. IRC is where it's add. still remember all the stuff from the 90s so it was just like riding a bike. plus I can have it in my Terminal which is a plus.

Its running about 1GB for me and my server setup. It spikes a bit if there is a lot going on, but it can get low than that when its just idling. Its not terrible, but given irc and other clients which take MB for RAM...its a bit of a hog-ish.

It's マリウス.com but the "internationalized domain name" system pynycodes it to gibberish to prevent spoofing urls using lookalike characters.

Like https://xn--mzon-43db.com/ is аmаzon.com. Those are cyrillic lowercase 'а', not 'a'.

[EDIT] The blog itself actually has a great article explaining it.