I'm having mixed feeling about Matrix lately.
It's awesome that we have an open chat protocol that works and supports most features of other messaging services like Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram or Facebook.
But the only complete server implementation is Synapse, which is slow, clunky to administer, and complicated. Conduit was a great start, but people keep forking it like Pleroma.
1/3
#Matrix #Discord #WhatsApp #Telegram #Facebook #Synapse #Conduit #Pleroma
Dendrite seems the most promising, but it feels like even Element themselves have given up on it in favour of Synapse.
Synapse is written in Python 
and entirely single threaded. 
There are ways around it's slowness like workers and sliding sync, but that makes it so many components that you almost have no choice than running a container which brings its own set of potential failure points.
2/3
The protocol is complex, but I think it needs to be in order to support all the features of modern messaging. However, this makes creating a server implementation insanely difficult. Imagine writing a HTTP server and then compare it to writing a Matrix server. 
Matrix is the best thing we have and it's kind of awesome, and I'm glad Element - as a company - decided to make an open source project for everyone instead of yet another "product". But yeah.
3/3
@fell Synapse also could use a lot more admin API, along with easier ways of extending it. It works, scaling is clunky, and call integration with Livekit is quite the PITA. There seems to be quite the disconnect between Synapse and what larger installations run, as in it's just secret.
