Matrix is not ready for all of the discord Exodus. Needs more decentralization from the primary server and better moderation tools, and easier setup for admins. #matrix #Discord #exodus #tech #linux

“And that's...it. Element promises more, like native video conferencing, but heaven help you if you're trying to self-host it. It is technically possible, but by no means simple.

"Technically possible, but by no means simple" aptly describes up the entire Matrix experience, actually.

I ran a private Matrix server for about a year and a half. Why private? In two public Matrix rooms I had joined—including the room for Synapse admins—I experienced a common attack in which troll accounts spam the room with CSAM material. Horrible, but not just for the participants and admins in the room. Through the magic of federation, every server who has a user participating in the room now has a copy of the CSAM material, and has to take action to remove it. This requires a manual curl request on the server itself, because Synapse has an appalling lack of moderation tools. It's so bad that, without third-party tooling, you can't even ban a user outright from a server; you have to manually ban them from every single room.

Then came September 2, 2025. The outageof matrix.org caused by drive failures was not an indictment of Matrix's database management or recovery process—in fact, I was quite impressed with their response. But it did put the lie to Matrix's decentralization for me. Almost none of my friends could use Matrix, even though I was hosting my own server. The onboarding pipeline (especially via Element) is so focused on the flagship server, I daresay it comprises the plurality of Matrix accounts. It's not easy to get any statistics for all Matrix users, but that is my guess. How "decentralized" is that, really? Just because something can be decentralized doesn't make it so.

Isn't that right, ATProto?

I'm probably a little too close to this one. I so badly wanted Matrix to work, and I tried to make it work for my purposes for a long time. Ultimately, the pain points overcame the benefits. But if you care most about an intersection of message encryption, federation, and decentralization, and you're willing to put in quite a lot of admin time, Matrix can be a viable community chat platform.”

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