I decommissioned my server 3 months ago and migrated my community back to IRC. I still had the IRC Podman containers kicking around, so that was easy.

I dealt with ~monthly issues around my devices not being correctly verified, messages not correctly decrypting, and various other rough UX edges. There seemed to be a lot of velocity in the beginning but the last couple of years have addressed approximately nothing in terms of the UX and it's a crying shame as Matrix/Element (I no longer fully understand the difference/relationship between these entities) had a lot of potential.

You did better than I did. I installed the recommended Element app, created an account on matrix.org, tried to send a message to another user, and… gave up. Every try got stuck and eventually created an empty room or whatever they call it. I have literally never succeeded in sending or receiving a single message.

If IRC suffices for your purposes, then Matrix, with its encryption and all, is apparently overkill.

If I were to upgrade an IRC-based community to something newer and richer, I'd go with Jabber, well-known, well-established, with a ton of various clients and several servers. Yes, it's not ideal, but it's still a massive upgrade compared to IRC, if your server supports a good list XEPs and your community members agree to use non-esoteric clients that also support them.

Let's not forget the shock image spam issue. Public Matrix channels are plagued with horrendous shock images (including CSAM). The development team seems to not care, they have a proposal for "policy servers" which is still incomplete and not supported by all server implementations.

I feel they underestimated what the MVP really is and started touting Matrix as great before it was really there, which has backfired and led to disappointment. They also went a bit too overboard on the overgeneralized idea of it being "a decentralized eventually consistent JSON database", which led to a lack of focus on its concrete usability as a chat system. I still use it and it's not bad in some respects, but it's a long, long way away from being able to attract a mass of ordinary users.

Unfortunately how I feel about it too. I gave an honest effort at getting into the ecosystem and tested it out with a few close friends. The rough edges brought the experience down compared to other stuff that “just works”, and losing community support for the IRC bridge took a huge use of my own away from it.

> but the last couple of years have addressed approximately nothing in terms of the UX

This sucks to hear. I thought they had made massive improvements in the last year or so (I don't know because I feel too burnt by past experience).

The rough edges are too much for even very technical users and admins, so there's no way we're going to get friends and family to adopt this.