Telegram, one of my least favorite messaging apps, has finally done a revamp of web.telegram.org and it no longer has abysmally awful UX, but rather similar UX to things like Discord, Zulip, Matrix, Slack, etc...
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The native app has Telegram Folders, which are similar to Element Spaces, but still inferior to Discord/Slack/Zulip-style orgs.
Telegram Web still doesn't appear to have support for them? But maybe coming soon?
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Spaces in Element are also only a very incomplete version of what they're ultimately meant to become. It's supposed to become a lot more like a Discord server with the ability to require membership in it to use the rooms and handle permissions/roles across them there, etc.
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Yup, exactly my point. Element Spaces and Telegram Folders feel like half-measures as these tools pivot to a more org-based chat.
At least Element (Matrix) is trying to build that on reasonable well-designed E2EE. Telegram gave up on that long ago but still blusters.
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Matrix E2EE protocol is quite good but a few things like reactions are quite strangely not part of what's encrypted. Also, no attempt at protecting metadata. It's still far better than anything available for IRC, XMPP or Email which it's quite ready to replace completely already.
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Quite good despite that and a lot it is simply tied to having federation. The server software is horrifying though. It's a massive Python monolith requiring 3.5GB of memory to sync a huge room like #matrix:matrix.org.
Scales great horizontally but... it's a monster.
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I really think the main thing they need to do is put resources into Dendrite and try to create a healthy ecosystem of servers instead of nearly everyone using matrix.org. Not sure if there's even a single other open registration server that has actually scaled up.
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It's mostly just matrix.org, 1/500 people self-hosting perhaps with some other users on their server, some tiny public servers which would fall over if people started using them and a few multi-thousand user servers which get overloaded then close registration.