@commetchat@fosstodon.org
God please let matrix figure out text channels and better calling 🙏
But… They already have text channels pretty much figured out and are on better calling rn with Element Call
The messaging experience between Discord and Element is night and day. On Discord, I open the app, go to a server, and can see all the rooms and all the messages almost instantly.
On Element (at least on Android), chats from different communities intermingle with my groups. I tapped on a large and slow-moving group, and watched messages slowly lurch into view as most of the messages were “join” and “leave” ones.
ETA: I tried Commet, and I’m happy to say that while it still has the loading issue and several problems typical to new apps, it does separate private group chats from ones linked to spaces!
On Discord, I open the app, go to a server, and can see all the rooms and all the messages almost instantly.
On Element (at least on Android), chats from different communities intermingle with my groups.
are you using the spaces feature in element? that’s the same thing as discord “servers”. they are on the left, unless you have none yet. the default setting in element is a bit silly, you should turn off showing rooms from all spaces when a space is not opened, it’ll be much better.
on phone the space list is at the bottom.
I tapped on a large and slow-moving group, and watched messages slowly lurch into view as most of the messages were “join” and “leave” ones.
which app are you using? element X, or the old, plain element? the old app is slow, the new one should work much better in that regard.
you can also disable showing name change and membership change events if you don’t care, but membership is good to be aware of and shouldn’t be a problem with element x
are you using the spaces feature in element? that’s the same thing as discord “servers”. they are on the left, unless you have none yet.
I wrote my comment when testing with Element X. You only get one room list, and it commingles chats from spaces with chats you made yourself.
You have to go to a separate screen to see the spaces themselves. On this screen, I clicked on a group I was in, and it took six seconds to tell me there were four available chats.
You can also disable showing name change and membership change events if you don’t care, but membership is good to be aware of and shouldn’t be a problem with element x
Even if you disable viewing the events, they’re still loaded in the background. I like to disable them, but then you see a lot more nothing and you may not be sure why the screen is empty for a longer while.
Joining a space requires you to manually join every single room in that space, which is bound to cause even more events in low traffic rooms…
Basically, Matrix isn’t fast, it doesn’t look like it’s gonna get fast anytime soon, and it is definitely not a Discord replacement.
can I ask which homeserver are you using?
The de facto default/official one, although I have tried others in the distant past.
I was asking to find out if the slowness could be because your server does not support sliding sync for some reason (the newer faster sync method that doesn’t try to load everything), but matrix.org does. I don’t use that server anymore because they are way too overloaded for years, but maybe that’s the issue here too.
The last couple updates made it better, but I wouldn’t exactly call Element a smooth experience. For example it recently began to try and access a keyring that doesn’t exist, ignoring the one that I already have readily available, and that works for everything else.
This is the latest in a long series of frustrating experiences with Matrix in general. To this day, Element isn’t stable, and Element X is somehow worse. It is, imo, a very promising option, but it is also far from perfect.
Yeah no in no world would I call it perfect. The web version had problems of decrypting encryption keys without a phone also connected and syncing for me. I used to have an account with Element directly for a subscription so that I could have certain bridges. Since they discontinued this and botchered the transition they shut down that homeserver. I wasn’t paying for a while but I expected to still be able to use the normal account matrix features on their homeserver. They just shut it down and mentioned it a few months previously in their blog posts but I didn’t ever receive a mail or anything. Their data export/transfer tool stopped working with their home server shut down. I would argue actually for smaller instances because I don’t trust the Matrix.org team as they split of from Elements but small servers also have a risk because they often depends on individual admins
Yeah I just set up a synapse + livekit server last night. Voice, video, and screen share rooms work flawlessly
Isn’t that its purpose?
Yeah, that’s the idea, but they are still not there
But they are?
I was immediately gonna comment “but does it support element-call” and to my surprise:
Supporting both, 1:1 calls over WebRTC, and voice channels with MatrixRTC + LiveKit
So to my knowledge this is the first client thats not an element fork that supports the new call system 🎉
Looks like it was added only a week ago, so maybe there will be some bugs, but still im very happy to finally see this in an independent client.
afaik both fluffychat and cinny support it, but they don’t advertise it well.
FluffyChat from my testing just now only supports the legacy 1:1 p2p calls not the new element-call system (here called MatrixRTC + LiveKit) that supports large group calls and performs much better. I dont think cinny supports it either if i look at their changelogs from the last year.
MatrixRTC + LiveKit
That’s emberrassing, I misread people talking in an issue about an open pr (https://github.com/cinnyapp/cinny/pull/2599) with them talking about an existing feature. That pr does seem reasonably close to landing though.
Ooh nice to see, thanks for the link. Once all the major matrix clients support livekit, matrix will be much more recommendable imo. Element works okay on a modern computer, but it really is insanely bloated when you look at what other clients achieve with less than 1/10th of the application size.
Agree, not a big fan of element’s interface either. Imo the point where matrix will be widely recommendable is when matrix 2.0 is done and widely adopted. Stuff like sliding sync is really important too
To me a major issue (besides the client feature parity) right now is history sharing in encrypted rooms being non functional. At the moment when you invite someone new to an encrypted room, they wont be able to read the historic messages in it, even if you specifically toggled that on, because the toggle currently doesnt do anything after the old insecure implementation was removed. They are working on it and its probably not super far away, but currently you basically have to use unencrypted rooms if you want new people to be able to see old messages.
This seems like the better alternative to discord than the other centralized platforms
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That’s a UX issue more than anything, IMO. Matrix is just a protocol
UX is so important though
Yes it is, at least for real-time chat. I don’t know if Matrix has voice chat.
you can use voice and video rooms to my understanding of it, and yeah it can do calls. I haven’t really tested it much as my matrix server is just me and my wife, and neither of us are often out of eachothers sites very long.
Voice/video usually supported by a TURN server. If you check out the link in the OP you can see this app supports it.
That’s the old way to support calls. The new way is MatrixRTC/Livekit. Not all clients support it yet, but the website says commet supports that too.
Looks good, I fiddled around with it for a bit. For now, I prefer FluffyChat. I‘m actually wondering how little it is mentioned in the recent pop up of discord alternatives / matrix clients given how polished and easy to use it is.
Good on mobile but on desktop the UI is way too big i find
It is insane how big it is, there’s a slider for text size but that only affects the text inside of chats. The difference in the UI between Fluffy and Element on desktop means I’ll probably end up with Fluffy on mobile and Element on Desktop
Seconding, also prefer FluffyChat, I just don’t really like discord UI, but it’s always good to have more options
You’re just never going to convince me to use an app called “FluffyChat”. Same for “Contunuwuity” or other baby-speak “cute” names. Sorry.
the UI of discord is not why I’ve been using it.
It’s certainly part of it, for many people. Try to sell your friends on using that old IRC client and tell me they don’t take one look at it and turn their nose up at you.
Looks good actually… I think I will keep using Element for now… but for new people joining matrix coming from Discord, I would definitely recommend trying out Commet.
It’s cool that it “supports threads”, but - as so many other clients - it forgets to actually expose threads! As in: once the initial comment starting a thread slides up in the chat, the only way to access the thread is to scroll all the way up there again.
Fake edit: OK, Commet shows all threads if you type “thread” in search. Still, having a button to do just that would be infinitely better.
Also: no support for polls? :(
The age old matrix problem, every client is uniquely shitty and poorly put together.
I swear the day a feature rich and actually competent matrix client is released is the same day gnome devs will stop having stupid takes and Wayland devs will stop arguing.
And KDE devs will stop assuming they know better than their users…
What kills me is that even the “official” clients (Element, and Element X) are not full-featured. What kills me even more is that Element X (the official “new” app and the “replacement” for Element) supports some additional features over Element, but not all - as in, some things are not possible in it, but are possible in Element.
It’s like it’s run by an insane asylum…
Thank you so much! Always down to try a new matrix client. So much potential.
Saving this post for later when the inevitable happens.
Is there a reason for not being centrally distributed like on flathub and fdroid?
No idea.
Someone has to maintain that.
But no friends list :(
No macOS or iOS support, but looks clean.
Just install as PWA.
You’re a freaking genius, you know that?
Ill do that and give it a whirl. Thanks for the PWA tip, i had completely forgotten about that.
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God bless you
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PWA + Apple products that is not possible anymore…
Is there a reason the room icons have to be humongous, at least in the web version on PC?
Other than that, looks great.
My best friend used to go by @comet on Discord. He’s the one who made my friend group’s server, and he’s essentially the only reason I ever got it in the first place (now, he’s one of the first to join my Matrix instance). The fact that this project is named Commet is NOT good for my “main character syndrome”!
The ui still kind of feels unpolished in commet. I tried it out two days ago, but ended up going with element instead. Just felt better to use
