Like many who work in open source communities, IRC is a key part of my daily life. Its simplicity has made it a mainstay. But the lack of richness also makes it unattractive to many newcomers. As a result, newer chat protocols are gaining traction. Matrix is one of those. I first created a Matrix account to participate in the Fedora Social Hour. But since Matrix.org is bridged to Freenode, I thought I’d give Element (a popular Matrix client) a try as an IRC client, too.

I’ve been using Element almost exclusively for the last few months. Here’s what I think of it.

Pros

The biggest pro for me is also the most surprising. I like getting IRC notifications on my phone. Despite being bad at it (as you may have read last week), I’m a big fan of putting work aside when I’m done with work. But I’m also an anxious person who constantly worries about what’s going on when I’m not around. It’s not that I think the place will fall apart because I’m not there. I just worry that it happens to be falling apart when I’m not there.

Getting mobile notifications means I can look, see that everything is fine (or at least not on fire enough that I need to jump in and help), and then go back to what I’m doing. But it also means I can engage with conversations if I choose to without having to sit at my computer all day. As someone who has previously had to learn and re-learn not to have work email alert on the phone, I’m surprised at my reaction to having chat notifications on my phone.

Speaking of notifications, I like the ability to set per-room notification settings. I can set different levels of notification for each channel and those settings reflect across all devices. This isn’t unique to Element, but it’s a nice feature nonetheless. In fact, I wish it were even richer. Ideally, I’d like to have my mobile notifications be more restrictive than my desktop notifications. Some channels I want to see notifications for when I’m at my desk, but don’t care enough to see them when I’m away.

I also really like the fact that I can have one fewer app open. Generally, I have Element, Signal, Slack, and Telegram, plus Google Chat all active. Not running a standalone IRC client saves a little bit of system resources and also lets me find the thing that dinged at me a little quicker.

Cons

By far the biggest drawback, and the reason I still use Konversation sometimes, is the mishandling of multi-line copy/paste. Element sends it as a single multi-line message, which appears on the IRC side as “bcotton has sent a long message: <url>”. When running an IRC meeting, I often have reason to paste several lines at once. I’d like them to be sent as individual lines so that IRC clients (and particularly our MeetBot implementation), see them.

The Matrix<->IRC bridge is also laggy sometimes. Every so often, something gets stuck and messages don’t go through for up to a few minutes. This is not how instant messaging is supposed to work and is particularly troublesome in meetings.

Overall

Generally, using Element for IRC has been a net positive. I’m looking forward to more of the chats I use becoming Matrix-native so I don’t have to worry about the IRC side as much. I’d also like the few chats I have on Facebook Messenger and Slack to move to Matrix. But that’s not a windmill I’m willing to tilt at for now. In the meantime, I’ll keep using Element for most of my IRC need,s, but I’m not quite ready to uninstall Konversation.