hydrogen-web

Your UI complaints apply only to Element (the flagship client) rather than to Matrix the protocol. As others have said, there are other, less-flashy clients available (and others under development). Some examples: Quaternion: https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion Hydrogen: https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web Nheko: https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko

I can relate, and agree front-end frameworks and tooling feel overly complicated. The good news is that there is another way. It's completely feasible to develop without any tooling but a static web server and a browser nowadays. Just bundle for production. I've developed [1] (a +10k LoC chat app) and [2] (a small web app) using just a 600 LoC template library [3] (which I should really extract), and I vastly prefer it over more traditional setups. Being so close to the browser makes it so easy to see what is going on. I've never spent hours or days debugging the infrastructure code because there is barely any, which is usually what ruins the fun for me. Everybody is different, but for me the accidental complexity of the commonplace front-end stack (webpack, react, typescript, ...) isn't worth what you get out of it. 1: https://github.com

> I'm rather convinced at this point that all of these people chanting "Can we just go back to traditional approaches!" have never built a web app of reasonable complexity, never used something like React, or have some sort of combination of FOMO and/or comfort in their long-held approach. I've got plenty of React & front-end experience and vastly prefer a thin library on top of the DOM than something like React, also for large applications. React is ok if all goes well, but when you have to debug or profile something, all the complexity behind the scenes occludes what you are looking for. Most of the time, people want JSX so you need a transpiler. Also keeping up with changes in new React releases seems like a lot of lost time. I've been building [1] without a transpiler and just a 600 lines template library (see [2]), and it has been s

Matrix's resource utilisation is improving very rapidly at the moment. Dendrite is still in beta, and hasn't been tuned that much yet, but every release has had a substantial improvement. In other words, if you're not using today's release (0.3.5) you're on stale data. For context, dendrite.matrix.org (running 0.3.5) has ~5K users on it, and is in ~3K rooms spanning 162K users... and its RAM usage is stable at 488MB (occasionally spiking to 2GB during traffic spikes). This doesn't seem unreasonable at all for a chat server of that size. Meanwhile, Synapse has been steadily improving too. On the client side, Hydrogen (https://hydrogen.element.io, https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web) is our next-gen client implementation, which gives you full E2EE, complete with backup (I have no idea what Durov is banging on about in the OP) - an

it’s a entirely new codebase; probably best way to visualise progress is to look at the contributor graphs at https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web