Natanox

Absolutely not impossible for a skilled dev with lots of free time. This is still an Alpha after all.

Where do I even start…

• The verification process constantly breaks
• Sessions get randomly unverified
• Pictures aren’t being send occasionally
• Their client is a UI/UX catastrophe
• Room Events are incompatible (esp. w/ Element X)
• The “experimental” voice rooms are total trash, settings are not working (e.g. auto-gain can’t be disabled)
• The Calls via Jitsi somehow have a worse UX than Skype had in its worst days
• The verification via emojis uses different emoji styles, missing the point completely
• Due to the session mess “Can’t decrypt message” will be your best friend
• Even if you got a verified session it sometimes fails to decrypt a message
• The federation is SLOW. As in “wait many many minutes” slow.
• The whole Spaces-with-detached-rooms concept is a mess
• There’re no proper moderation tools
• There isn’t even a god damn admin panel! For the longest time you had to MANUALLY CURL THE API. Even today you have to mess with third-party admin panels that usually don’t have all options exposed
• Encryption is nice, but Matrix leaking tons of metadata isn’t.
• They effectively stopped developing the Element client in favour of Element X, which isn’t available in desktop. And also loves to break during verification.
• Third-party clients sometimes work better, but certainly don’t expect anything but text chats with pictures there.

I really tried to like it, I even attempted to move a community over, attempted to self-host, all the jazz. It’s a steaming mess for years now with no end in sight, and literally everyone who tried it eventually left disenchanted. Don’t even bother trying it.

Because Stoat is also riddled with problems and Matrix is a dysfunctional hot mess.