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Comment by pm3003 | Hacker News Reader

Federation can feel like "just a feature" but the E2E encryption (also in group chats) is a reason for Matrix to exist and a big reason why it's so slow.

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It's so slow because it's so badly designed as a protocol, E2E isn't really the problem (the slowness is roughly equivalent for non-encrypted rooms)

"Slow" in what sense? Development? Because I self host a Conduit server and I don't ever notice messages being slow. It would be hard to notice anyway, as in a group chat people usually take some time to type in their responses.

The sync between large groups used to be slow because of amount of data, but Element X and "sliding windows" were rolled out to help with it.

AFAIK, the public Matrix server used to be slow because of a heavy load (I think), but on my self-hosted instance that's not a problem at all.

The experience of using Matrix involves a lot of sluggishness at various points in the client - waiting to decrypt messages or properly sync keys, waiting to join a room or for room search to load - these are the things that have been salient to me using multiple matrix clients with a freshly-spun-up server within the past month.

I more mindfully played a bit with my Element (web UI), and Element X (Android), and while there might something to it, and I suspect the e2e encrypted data model will always lead to some extra work required. Element seems a bit sluggish. However Element X on my Android seems butter smooth.

And event the slower Element seems far better than Discord that I'm forced to use, where I can't even scroll history without the whole thing stuttering.

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