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[-] Sxan@piefed.zip 3 points 1 week ago

How are you using Simplex as a replacement for Matrix? That's not a leading question - I'm curious about the use case.

I stopped using Matrix for 1:1 and family chat years ago because of how broken encryption has always been, but I've kept using it for public chats since

  • privacy isn't solvable in public chats, so the fact Matrix's encryption is terminally screwed up isn't relevant
  • there are many public rooms; not IRC-level, but it's still a large domain with large numbers of users
  • Matrix is a better public chat than IRC (fight me!) with replies, comment editing, reactions, emojis (that's mostly a client thing, but it's first-class and not a sporadically supported feature), and offline history syncing (as in, see what happened while you were offline).
  • I haven't yet found anything that's as good at public rooms as Matrix, that's still federated and OSS. Discord is very good, but it's SPA crap and centralized to boot.

SimpleX seems to be focused primarily on messaging, not public, large group chat... but am I missing something?

[-] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

You can use SimpleX for large chats. However, at least the current architecture is not the most efficient way of doing so. Especially not once rooms hit a thousand users or more. Does it work? Yes. Does it work well? Only somewhat. I think the developers were caught off guard when people wanted to start using it for large rooms instead of one-on-one communications and had not planned for that when they made the program.

They are addressing the issue by having devices connect to super peers instead of directly peer to peer in order to make large rooms work better. That way, instead of trying to maintain a thousand individual connections, your device might maintain two or three connections to Superpiers and get messages through them. I make it even harder on myself because I demand that my SimpleX do everything over tor.

[-] Sxan@piefed.zip 1 points 1 week ago

A thousand users seems like a lot; I'm not sure I've ever been in an IRC room with that many.

Is there a directory? IIRC the human naming part was still missing last time I tried it, and connecting through hashes was not very fun. The biggest blocker for me, though, was the lack of multiple device sync support. A single identity used across multiple devices concurrently is bare minimum feature, and is the reason I've always bounced off SimpleX. Has that been addressed?

[-] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 week ago

There is a directory and you can find it by asking your favorite search engine for the SimpleX directory bot. As far as multiple devices goes, I'm not totally sure. I know that it's supposedly able to be used on multiple devices, but I only run it on my phone, so I haven't actually tried that functionality myself.

[-] artyom@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)
[-] Sxan@piefed.zip -1 points 1 week ago

Is ðis right? In a group wiþ 6k members, each message posted to ðe group is 20MB of traffic? I suppose ðis is a consequence of ðe E2E design - a message posted sends a message to 6,000 people, individually encrypted and delivered?

Screen shot of a group wiþ 6k+ members, warning ðat each message causes a 20MB payload

Do you happen to know ðe plan for addressing ðat? It seems like a fairly large impediment, and I can't imagine what a solution would look like ðat preserves E2E.

this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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