It’s been over six months since I changed our family messenger from Telegram to Matrix. It was a great decision, and I’m happy about the result.
You might want to read the previous stories in this series:
Global Server#
First, I intended to self-host the matrix server at home, that’s why I’ve been postponing the migration.
Yet, there was this series of events that made me realise I don’t ought to self-host to migrate. So, I decided to move right away. After all, I wasn’t self-hosting Telegram either. (It’s not possible.)
I decided we’d test waters with the official matrix.org server, and if things would go fine, I’d go with self-hosting option later and migrate our rooms there.
Today, we’re still on the official server, and I think I’d migrate us much later, maybe end of the year, or even the next one. It’s of a lowest priority, it just works as it is.
Clients#
We use two type of devices: our iPhones and laptops.
Desktop#
My wife has company-issued laptop, Lenovo ThinkPad with Windows 11, she logged into a web-version of Element X with Chrome.
- That’s how Element Desktop looks like on my Arch Linux Laptop running Sway WM.
My laptops and desktops are on Linux, I use Fractal. I like it for its minimalism. Element Dekstop is much prettier, but it’s Electron, and I’m not a fan of Electron apps.
- That’s how Fractal looks like on my Arch Linux Laptop running Sway WM.
Mobile#
On iOS, we have Element X installed. It works very well, and synchronisation is truly instant, especially if you compre it to Telegram.
Try to turn off background activity for Telegram. You’ll see how slow it is. My guess it has background updates very often. That’s why it appears to be fast.
With background activity being turned off, it may take minutes for me to load new messages in Telegram, even when I have just one new message there. Loading new messages on Element X, even when I haven’t opened the app for months, is instant.
That’s how the interface looks like on iOS, on an iPhone.
I’m not sure about old non-X Element, I have it installed on my iPhone SE with iOS 15, and I use it maybe once a month or two. When I open it, it seems to load new messages within seconds too. Nothing too noticeable, in contrast to Telegram.
Also, I checked Element X on my — obsolete now — Nexus 6P running Android 8 (2017). It works fine.
- In contrast to iOS 15 (2021), where it’s getting very difficult to find any modern apps, Android 8 is very usable, and it has all of the apps updated, including its browser.
- I mostly don’t use my Nexus these days, apart from some testing scenarios, so I cannot say much here. I expect it should be tested thoroughly and should work not worse.
Missing Features#
There’s not much to say about desktop versions. They work, and we use them infrequently, mostly to write a message longer than one sentence. The smartphone versions, we use all the time. So the rest of this story I’m going to talk about smartphone versions.
Our communication is organisational, so I’m not sure Matrix is the best chat for that. It’s better than Telegram, for sure. But I might want to explore other options at some point in time.
- E.g. I’m thinking of trying self-hosted Mattermost. It appears to be much more bloated. However, I expect it to be not different on any server, considering there are just two users now.
Media#
In Telegram, it punishes you with these attention grabbing icons when you don’t allow something, be it microphone, access to photos, location, etc.
Or their premium subscription.
- With not having access to photos, it constantly distracts me with these pop-ups when I want to send someone a photo or two. I need to manually add new photos to the ones the app has access to.
- In Matrix, there’s no such thing. I have no photos access too, and I can easily send a photo or two, no issues.
It looks like this, YouTube video:
Most other chats, including the medicore ones, Meta’s WhatsApp and Facebook, plus the king of mediocrity, Viber, all of them behave the same way. They want access to everything and will punish you for not giving it.
Apart from security issues, Telegram is much fancier when it comes to media. Especially video.
Location#
We used Sharing Location feature of Telegram very often. Facebook messenger should have similar feature too, I remember using it with someone about a decade ago.
There’s no such feature in Element X, and I’m not sure matrix protocol has it. Maybe it has.
It was a nice impulse to simplify our tech stack. We started using integrated Apple’s FindMy app.
Since we use mostly iPhones, it’s even better than before. We could use it from the very start, avoiding Telegram, yet I never paid my attention to that.
In FindMy you can share location with others, on a permanent basis. That allows us to check where one of us is, without asking. That’s super useful in a family setup! You can even setup a notification for various scenarios:
- a person leaving their current location,
- a person arriving to your location,
- and some more sophisticated options too, but we mostly use the first two,
- as a bonus, you can spy on your parents locations without them knowing. It’s useful too.
It works well, is precise and reliable. I love it!
Now, I’m considering buying a set of AirTags for some cases too.
Voice Memos#
I use voice memos heavily, it’s the primary way of communicating via Telegram with some people. I record them with built-in Voice Memos app from my iPhones, and I can share it to Telegram. It becomes a native voice message there, as if you were recording withing this unreliable Telegram’s interface.
We don’t use the feature, however there are some scenarios in which it’s very useful.
- E.g. me visiting some government or medical entity, and sharing the result with my wife. If I just call her, it’s fine, but I won’t have the record of it, unless I record it explicitly. Voice Memos app allows me to record the message, it’s mostly monologue anyway, and share it with her. That way she can listen to the recording at 2x in her own time, and we can discuss it later at home.
I like asynchronous communication.
I’d love this feature to be as smooth as in Telegram, but it’s a minor inconvenience in my use-case, a family messenger.
It’s possible to record voice memos in Element X.
So it’s mostly my issue, when I want to share a long monologue, which is the way of my communication with some people.
Stickers#
Telegram’s stickers are much more superior to anything else. It’s a minor feature, someone likes them, someone does not. I’m somewhere in the middle, I don’t miss them too much, but I miss them. I’d rather have them than not.
Message Reactions#
Same goes with message reactions.
- In Telegram, there’s only one smile reaction to a message, and it generates a notification.
- For Element, there’s many reactions to a message, and it has no notification.
I have no opinion on many reactions. I use mostly one reaction anyway. Maybe, this limitation is not necessary, but I think this thing is mostly a preference.
With notifications, however, I’d prefer to have them for reactions.
- In some scenarios it could be just spam, but I’d mute those conversations anyway.
- However, in some cases, it’s very useful. This thumbs up reaction can is useful for some type of messages. For both parties, it’s a low-effort way to communicate that the message was read and accepted, eliminating the unnecessary extra words.
When there’s no notification for that, those reactions are mostly useless in our use-case. They force me to write something like ‘Ok’, which is not long to type, obviously, but still much longer than just double-tapping the message.
URL Previews#
I think, there’s no previews for URLs in Element. Maybe that’s some security reasons for that, maybe that’s because I chose encrypted chats upon creating them. That’s not necessary, but since there’s no way to change that in the future, I thought that maybe encrypted chats are better. There’s clearly a lack of clear communication from Matrix for a user to understand what’s the difference.
It’s a low-priority bonus-feature for me.
Search#
Telegram has advanced search, and it’s very useful for organisational chats.
Element, on the other hand, has no search at all. I can search the global server for some rooms, but I cannot search some useful information in our previous communication, I can only scroll. That could be the encryption thing, but that’s the thing that makes me think of other self-hosted solutions.
It’s a high-priority feature for us. However, I’m thinking of offloading all the necessary things into a separate entity, a local web-site. That way, we could even use the self-burning messages, if that’s the case in Matrix.
Calls#
We have never called each other via both Telegram and Matrix. We use FaceTime Audio for that, it has the best audio-quality of all voice communication solution I ever tested.
I think having this functionality is a great way, especially when one wants to self-host everything. But I see no issues with FaceTime while it works.
I use it for over a decade, and I don’t use cellular networks for calls. A habit from Belarus and Russia, when all the calls are monitored in real-time by KGB.
Public#
Matrix is for public communication too. Maybe it’s for public communication in the first place. I have never tested it. So I cannot say anything about that.
- Telegram has its whole eco-system of groups and channels.
- Matrix have many popular groups on various topics. I have no idea about channels.
- Both allow messanging by providing just a URL.
Premium#
Telegram pushes its Premium service on you. Also, it has advertisements, stories from random users that happened to be in your contacts, birthday notifications (with the offering to gift premium), crypto-everything (a plus or minus, depeneding on your attitude to crypto). It’s super fancy. Also, both plus and minus, depending on your perception.
Matrix won’t push you to any premium, and won’t even humbly ask for a donation. So you’re welcome to donate to Matrix on your own. It’s less fancy, because it’s not about fanciness in the first place.
Conclusion#
I’m happy we moved off Telegram for our primary family communication.
I’m not sure it’s the best option, but it’s much better than using Telegram and relying on a Russian oligarch. Russians are not to be trusted.
Even all the ideology things aside, it’s just more useful to have a very separate chat for just the family. Nobody will spam you there. You may even leave your notifications on!
- We have some rooms with notifications disabled, just to log some information for later.
I still a Telegram user, but that’s mostly for communication with the outside world. Unfortunately, I have no idea which other option would be more useful. Viber is very popular here in Ukraine, but that’s just the worst chat app I ever used. It’s pathetic, and I have it only for the Rostymo farm purposes.
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