Well, there’s Fluffychat written in Flutter already. I recently ditched that because it didn’t load my messages properly. Element has a similar problem now. The whole Matrix ecosystem currently is a huge UX mess…
You may be experiencing a server issue; I do use FluffyChat on my phone, and have rare issues with it, but they have always resolved on restart. It’s not perfect. The biggest issue with non-Element clients is that the core Matrix team seems to be more interested in new features than usability and stability, and there are always new things you simply can’t do outside of Element because 3rd-party clients always lag in features. I use gomuks on the desktop, but sometimes have to fire up Element to manage some things.
I 100% agree on the state of Matrix. The worst aspect IMHO is that the main feature - the one that convinced me to invest time and “switch over” - puppeting other protocols simply hasn’t worked out. You have to run your own Matrix serve if you want to link in any more than a small set of external protocols; IRC is really the only well-supported on on any public server. And running synapse is neither easy not cheap, requiring fairly large amounts of CPU, disk, and memory. Other servers do better, but (again) usually lag in feature sets and can be hard to integrate with bridges.
If I were in control of the project, I’d be focusing on making running matrix servers and hooking in bridges as easy (and cheap) as it is to run an ActivityPub server. As it is, realizing the bridging potential of Matrix requires a heavy investment by users, and so isn’t widely used. It’d be a far more valuable project if it were easier.
Well, there’s Fluffychat written in Flutter already. I recently ditched that because it didn’t load my messages properly. Element has a similar problem now. The whole Matrix ecosystem currently is a huge UX mess…
You may be experiencing a server issue; I do use FluffyChat on my phone, and have rare issues with it, but they have always resolved on restart. It’s not perfect. The biggest issue with non-Element clients is that the core Matrix team seems to be more interested in new features than usability and stability, and there are always new things you simply can’t do outside of Element because 3rd-party clients always lag in features. I use gomuks on the desktop, but sometimes have to fire up Element to manage some things.
I 100% agree on the state of Matrix. The worst aspect IMHO is that the main feature - the one that convinced me to invest time and “switch over” - puppeting other protocols simply hasn’t worked out. You have to run your own Matrix serve if you want to link in any more than a small set of external protocols; IRC is really the only well-supported on on any public server. And running synapse is neither easy not cheap, requiring fairly large amounts of CPU, disk, and memory. Other servers do better, but (again) usually lag in feature sets and can be hard to integrate with bridges.
If I were in control of the project, I’d be focusing on making running matrix servers and hooking in bridges as easy (and cheap) as it is to run an ActivityPub server. As it is, realizing the bridging potential of Matrix requires a heavy investment by users, and so isn’t widely used. It’d be a far more valuable project if it were easier.