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title: "My Declining Matrix usage"
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date: 2023-08-31T09:00:19+03:00
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---
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This post explains my journey with [Matrix/Element][matrix]. Here is a short
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timeline:
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* 2020 November: read [A Matrix overview][lwn] on LWN and installed on my home
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server. Added Messenger, Hangouts and WhatsApp bridges. "Bridges" meant that
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I could read and write messages from FB Messenger, Google Hangouts and
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WhatsApp using a single application --- Element (the application for the
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Matrix network). After 2 evenings of installation hurdles I conveniently
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reduced the number of browser tabs and phone applications I use for
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messaging.
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* 2021 February: convinced my brother to move to Element. Conversations between
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us (which are second-in-volume after my wife) were now hosted by me.
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* 2021 April: rest of the family to moved to Matrix. Much-reduced usage of
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WhatsApp, Messenger and Hangouts. It felt great and liberating!
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* 2023 July: switched my family to Signal.
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First year of Matrix was promising. Matrix posted good news about adoption to
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their blog. I followed them closely in conferences (you can see my name in one
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of the screenshots [here!][fosdem]).
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Then bugs started creeping in.
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The first thing I noticed is that [Element from f-droid][f-droid] would
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sometimes not deliver notifications. Reading about it on forums revealed that
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applications on f-droid use a different notification mechanism than Google Play
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apps do. Re-installed Google Play version and it worked fine. Not much to be
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grumpy about, but it would be a nice touch to explain this in the landing page
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of the Element f-droid version.
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The second, and still ongoing, annoyance was *occasionally not being able to
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see 1:1 messages from my family*, because it would fail to decrypt. [I am not
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the only one][element-encrypt-bug]. I've been waiting for a fix since the very
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beginning.
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The third was a brittle audio/video setup. Calls to my family were hit-or-miss:
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sometimes they would work well, sometimes audio would be one-way or would not
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connect at all. I followed the [manual][turn] to the letter, but it still
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couldn't make it work reliably. I was a "VoIP expert" at some point in my
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career, so troubleshooting this was not completely alien. But I still lacked
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knowledge and/or persistence to fix it "once and for all", which meant I just
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gave up on audio/video. *It should be easier.*
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Forward to mid-2023:
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- I was not able to read a few important messages from my close family due to
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above-mentioned "failed to decrypt" bug.
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- Opening some channels with long history would take minutes. [I have been
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warned][sqlite], so it's my fault. But there is a limit on how much complex I
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want my messaging stack to be.
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- My Matrix server was down for a week due to an upstream [bug][bug-sqlite].
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Same problem --- using SQLite --- but same answer as above.
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- [Libera.Chat bridge got shut down][libera-bridge], which was a big use-case
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for my Matrix use. As of writing it's been 27 days without an update, so it
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does not feel like Matrix folks are treating this shutdown like a real
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incident.
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- Audio/video calling got even worse: it would be a surprise if a call
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connected successfully, and I lost motivation to debug it further. Should
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audio/video be the only problem, I would probably muster. But this just added
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up to the pile which I wanted to touch less and less.
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At this point I started looking for a reliable alternative. By now I had added
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Signal to communicate with some of my friends. I explained to my family what
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Signal is and asked whether it would be OK to switch. Everyone agreed, we have
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done it. Now they even have a wider bubble of people to talk in that platform,
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audio/video calling works reliably, and I don't ever remember missing a
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notification.
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I still use Matrix to join channels of some open-source projects. The channels
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are not encrypted, thus not hitting the "failed to decrypt" bug. I also wiped
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the SQLite database (it was ~6 GB by the time), which made things very fast
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again. I will leave my Matrix contact details and you can still message me on
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Matrix. But honestly, due to all the reasons above, I prefer Signal by now,
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even if it's not self-hosted.
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[matrix]: https://matrix.org/
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[lwn]: https://lwn.net/Articles/835880/
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[fosdem]: https://matrix.org/blog/2021/02/15/how-we-hosted-fosdem-2021-on-matrix/
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[f-droid]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/im.vector.app/
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[element-encrypt-bug]: https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/issues/1721
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[turn]: https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/v1.48/turn-howto.html
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[libera-bridge]: https://matrix.org/blog/2023/08/libera-bridge-disabled/
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[sqlite]: https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/latest/setup/installation.html#using-postgresql
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[bug-sqlite]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/239833
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