Matrix chat clients

If you’re choosing Matrix for your social needs, you are either a geek or you are tired of the flood of messages that have nothing to do with your query. You could be both, of course. In either case, switching takes something of an attitude adjustment. That attitude needs to be that every conversation is on point and does not wander from the subject matter.

With Matrix clients, you always create a room for your subject. A new room for each subject – keep it clean and stay civilised. In contrast, anything goes on Twitter and you have to filter out all the nutters.

The other difference with Matrix is creating a private room, which is fully end-to-end encrypted, and is the default option. Having your own room and encryption keys requires a different way of thinking from simply throwing your ideas out into the current cyberspace black hole of traditional social networks.

All the packages in this Roundup have their advantages and disadvantages, but they are all usable. NeoChat and Fractal follow the standards of their respective projects but lack some vital features: end-to-end encryption and the verification of devices. Mirage suffers from a similar problem but has the looks down to a tee. It does have one more issue: there is no menu for settings; you have to tweak it with configuration files.

Element has all the settings you’d expect from a highly polished application and it also has all the features you could wish for. With one exception: you can’t change its appearance very much.

You can expect future developments to offer audio and video communications. In some clients, they already exist but are in the early stages of development. Look out for fully fledged tools for doing that. Potentially, you can also look forward to different kinds of meeting rooms, which may require a central point for performance reasons. Sending lots of video feeds to everybody is a nightmare, and solutions could combine techniques around WebRTC to accomplish these things.

There are many solutions nowadays for fully private chat functions, but if you switch to Matrix, you have a standard that enables you to choose a software client without switching your identity.