From a user's perspective, as someone who has been using and trying to get others to use Matrix for close to 5 years now, I think it's time to admit to myself that it's not going to work out.

Even ignoring the cornucopia of security issues that have come to light over the last few years thanks to more people becoming involved with the project, and the tenuous ties to Israel's state security apparatus, and the apparent issues with monetization that they have had, constantly, the project has fundamental problems that prevent it from ever being useful for the vast majority of people for really any purpose.  the application itself is fundamentally not what people are looking for in a Chat App.  It tries to reinvent so many wheels and square so many circles and fails at even those that it ends up not only fundamentally alien to most users, but non-functional for those that are willing to try the entirely new organizational system they have created.  The wheels it has reinvented now have no frame to attach to.  It's a jumbled mess of parts that barely works on a good day and every "good" feature has so many asterisks attached it may as well be ASCII art of the night fucking sky.

I can only speak as an end-user here, because I'm frankly not involved in any of the project's code or any of the aforementioned security issues.  I've submitted bug reports and participated in discussions surrounding the project, but I've never contributed code - seeing how other users and their code-complete proposals have been treated really turned me off of the idea even years ago.  The whole process is really insular.  Other people's contributions with or without working code are frequently dismissed as irrelevant or simply tagged "X-No-Product" and left to rot for eternity in the issues tab.  Basically anything other than the objectives for any given "Sprint" gets ignored entirely - and "Sprints" take anywhere from months to years with little to show for the work people have put in.  It's been years and the Officially Updated "Element X" App is still missing things that the old version has had for years.  These priorities are also set by the people who manage the primary Matrix repo, who proudly claim on the front page of their website, front and center, that their application is "trusted" by such revered and respected groups as the United States Marine Corps and Navy, and NATO.

The application itself is just Not It.  I say it is "Not It" because it's not what anyone is looking for.  It's not what anyone asked for.  The development schedule is comparable to the legislature of the United States Government, and much like the United States' social programs that come about from its legisltaion, the program itself lacks even the most fundamental of features.  Matrix as a specification has existed for over a decade now, since roughly 2014.  In that time, we have only within the last hour, as of writing, gotten a textual agreement on how the specification for in-line fucking images should be implemented.  That's all emojis are.  Up until a few months ago, anyone who wanted to share their screen or do video calls had to rely on external applications or plug-ins that were obsolete years ago, like Jitsi, which had support for matrix added in 2017, with no further movement visible to users until 2025, almost an entire decade later, when the first-party video calling feature was added officially to Element as an application (not just a text-based spec proposal telling the devs how to code).

When I say "fundamental features" are missing, I do mean core, foundational features do not work as intended.  The fact that "Unable to decrypt message" has become a meme in techie circles and the issue has to date still not been resolved and still occurs regularly is a product-ruining failure that prevents people from using the communication app to communicate, and should be priority number one for anyone who is to be taken seriously.  Instead they've seemingly spent all this time with their thumbs up their asses discussing how to implement data caps because they can't pay for the 42 terabytes of daily garbage people are uploading to their servers that can't even be decrypted half the time, in some cases even by the users who themselves sent the messages.  The system for federation is still incredibly bandwidth-intensive and slow.  Even communication between users on the same server has somehow become convoluted enough to necessitate multi-second delay between a user hitting "enter" and the recipient being able to see and read the message.

Notifications don't work!  They often simply do not make noise or the icon for the application doesn't change.  Keys are not stored on the desktop application properly and you must log in again every time to be able to read your messages.  "Spaces" aren't servers and there's no way to manage multiple "rooms" in a "space" at the same time, configuration is done per-channel.  There's no way to ban or kick someone from a space without having to ban or kick them from each room individually.  Rooms within a Space cannot be ordered arbitrarily and are ordered by the user, rather than the server.  Voice calls often fail to connect or refuse to connect to homeservers entirely and require additional software separate from the main Matrix Docker Server Instance to function.  Thumbnails cannot be animated without going through the same process getting Voice Calls to work requires, using additional third-party software with no fucking documentation on how to set these things up at all, meaning profile pictures and custom emojis in their current non-mature implementations by third party client developers don't work for anyone using their own homeserver unless they are a Magician and have set these things up themselves.  Youtube doesn't embed!  Most websites don't embed at all.  Embeds are set client-side and are again a per-channel preference.  Preferences are not saved serverside and reset when you log out and in or if your cookies / LocalStorage is reset.  Key validation is clunky and poorly explained, many people lose their keys and access to their accounts because of this.  Encryption breaks the search function.  Many clients don't support key imports or validation properly so only some allow QR codes to be used and others don't even get prompts when users do the "old, stable" method of emoji validation like some other apps use.

The systems of "spaces" and "rooms" don't integrate with each other basically at all and only serve to confuse new users into thinking they have some kind of "server-channel" setup like Discord, without offering anything that allows them to be used as such.  The concept of a "DM" has been abstracted into yet another "room."  Any DM is just a group chat with two people in it.  Rooms cannot be deleted!  You have to kick every person individually from the room and then leave it in order to stop it from being accessed.  Then only after 7 days of no users being in the room is the data wiped from the server.  You can't kick other users who are admins!  And you can't revoke privileges from someone who is an admin!  There is no "Room Owner" role.  I could keep going with all of the foundational issues this piece of shit application has but I would run out of space on my disk by the time I was done.

Custom emojis have finally been Officially Added To the Matrix Specification!  It only took 6 years, endless bickering, hundreds of thousands of dollars siphoned from actually productive, dutiful open-source projects and soulless corporate sponsors, 41 reviewers, several users being banned from discussing at all, countless comments from users stating that the lack of this simple feature made using the program untenable, existing implementations that fail to agree on a spec due to the pending proposals, etc etc etc.  And it's still not officially implemented!  That'll probably take a further number of years to get added officially to the Element App and all of its incarnations.  All for a plaintext proposal with no actual implementation, that offers such insightful patch notes as "fix naming thingy" and "add more stuffs."  Did I mention this took 6 years?  and has 9 co-authors?

The application is free to use.  There is a homeserver you can join Right Now and start using Today with nothing but an email address.  Every second you spend using that application from creating an account to connecting it to your phone and actually using it to talk to someone else will be utter hell on earth.  When you finally feel you've learned how to use the application, you will find out something that was never told to you or shown to you through the interface, that completely invalidates any other possible upside the application had due to the utter braindeadness of the implementation.  Who's going to use an app to share photos and videos with a data cap of 500mb every 30 days and only 10mb per attachment with no exceptions?  And no Youtube embeds (or Peertube or LBRY or Twitter or Instagram or Odnoklassniki) to get around this issue?  Good idea guys.  Real great work.  Truly, the Matrix Foundation is the Vanguard of the Open Source Chat Application Development Sphere.  This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.

It sucks.  It's an application which was built without love and makes nothing but excuses for all of our collective wasted time.  The application which has pushed away every single user I have shown it to save for those who simply have no other option due to being banned from the major platforms.  It sucks so bad.  Hosting a server sucks so bad.  Using it sucks so bad.  Even Discord's age verification debacle was not enough to justify using it.  I can't trust it worth a damn even with backups of my keys because it feels like some bit is going to get flipped somewhere and the entire castle is going to come crumbling down.  It's not even useful as an emergency comms platform, because of how unreliable it is.  Every other message Can't Be Decrypted and there's no way to know whether the other person actually got it or not.  It's not useful for literally any Market Segment because it fundamentally doesn't exist to serve any particular group of people, not even the ones who created it.  It's another stupid fucking Art Piece in the form of a chat application that aims to create something for a society which does not and I am confident will never exist.  It just.  Sucks.

I'm not putting any eggs in any baskets, but I'm hoping something actually comes of Fluxer.  It's open source, will remain open source, is not taking any VC money, and will have all the experimental features like self-hosting and federation that all the Linux People rave about so much, in the near future.  It's not done yet, and still suffers downtime often due to its early state but it's on track specifically to compete with Discord, which is exactly what people need right now.  That, and they have an actual pathway to monetization, rather than simply relying on Donations and Billionaire Philanthropy or whatever.

If you want an encrypted chat application, use Signal.  The phone number requirement sucks, but we have vanishingly few good options.  If you want secure comms, don't put aything on your smartphone, do not take your smartphone with you wherever you are going, use Linux at home, Use VPNs, etc etc.  OPSEC is not an App.  Encryption alone will not save you, and encryption alone is not worth the chance that your message will simply not be sent, or having to deal with all of the above.

Matrix has no use case.  Matrix is not The Move.