Community and status

Use the power of community for yourself.

You want to communicate with someone about a particular subject using Matrix. Whatever topic you are looking for is probably available elsewhere, but with Matrix you can have direct conversations. For these packages, you can do what you always do: scour question sites where the answers have been waiting for a long time. This works, but some things are difficult to find; if you enter a chat interface, you can get hints where to go next.

Before choosing a specific client, you should go and see what is happening with the project. It is useful to know whether there has been any work done on the project over the past year before getting used to it. There are many ways to check this – one is to look through the last question on one of the Stack Exchange sites. The other is to check the developer’s code site, which is usually GitHub.

Looking at that, you may notice that Mirage has had no new updates for many months but the room is very active. It means that the client is popular to use but development has slowed or stopped. Hopefully, someone will take over the project, because it looks really nice and only needs the few features that are missing for full usage.

NeoChat, on the other hand, has daily code updates, so is still actively maintained, which means you can rely on it to keep working. Fractal is a quirky one – it seems way behind the competition but it has a very clear new goal with a lot of developers. Cinny has major updates coming and a large following, while Element is in very deep development mode, promising a brand new version.