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this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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But.... They already have text channels pretty much figured out and are on better calling rn with Element Call
The messaging experience between Discord and Element is night and day. On Discord, I open the app, go to a server, and can see all the rooms and all the messages almost instantly.
On Element (at least on Android), chats from different communities intermingle with my groups. I tapped on a large and slow-moving group, and watched messages slowly lurch into view as most of the messages were "join" and "leave" ones.
ETA: I tried Commet, and I'm happy to say that while it still has the loading issue and several problems typical to new apps, it does separate private group chats from ones linked to spaces!
are you using the spaces feature in element? that's the same thing as discord "servers". they are on the left, unless you have none yet. the default setting in element is a bit silly, you should turn off showing rooms from all spaces when a space is not opened, it'll be much better.
on phone the space list is at the bottom.
which app are you using? element X, or the old, plain element? the old app is slow, the new one should work much better in that regard.
you can also disable showing name change and membership change events if you don't care, but membership is good to be aware of and shouldn't be a problem with element x
I think this is a good example of how Matrix does support most of the things we expect from Discord, but the defaults are sometimes wrong (showing rooms from spaces if not in a space), and the sheer number of client apps that are all slightly different and outdated in various ways adds a ton of friction to using it.
I wrote my comment when testing with Element X. You only get one room list, and it commingles chats from spaces with chats you made yourself.
You have to go to a separate screen to see the spaces themselves. On this screen, I clicked on a group I was in, and it took six seconds to tell me there were four available chats.
Even if you disable viewing the events, they're still loaded in the background. I like to disable them, but then you see a lot more nothing and you may not be sure why the screen is empty for a longer while.
Joining a space requires you to manually join every single room in that space, which is bound to cause even more events in low traffic rooms...
Basically, Matrix isn't fast, it doesn't look like it's gonna get fast anytime soon, and it is definitely not a Discord replacement.
can I ask which homeserver are you using?
The de facto default/official one, although I have tried others in the distant past.
I was asking to find out if the slowness could be because your server does not support sliding sync for some reason (the newer faster sync method that doesn't try to load everything), but matrix.org does. I don't use that server anymore because they are way too overloaded for years, but maybe that's the issue here too.
Ideally, a full log of joins and leaves wouldn't be bound directly to a chat anyway, right?
Matrix development seems to be getting pulled in a lot of different directions: the membership history seems like it's an IRC-inspired feature, while communities are inspired by Discord and Slack.
idk, I think it's sensible that it's part of room history. also, other platforms do that too.
what is not sensible is that loading them is slow, but I don't experience that even in popular rooms
Rooms with a high volume of messages will appear to load faster than rooms with a high volume of joins and leaves... So maybe that's what you're seeing? 25 messages appearing at once is a whole lot more engaging than 25 hidden join events.
I'm agnostic about whether room joins or leaves should be recorded at all (I've seen discord bots report this at the server level), but the pain point is that the records are joined with the messages... I also thought redactions were weird. Federation probably requires it (maybe federation requires room events to be persisted in the room history too), but having to load extra events to explain deleted messages will probably clog up the pipeline as well.
Don't mind me, I'm just thinking aloud.
The last couple updates made it better, but I wouldn't exactly call Element a smooth experience. For example it recently began to try and access a keyring that doesn't exist, ignoring the one that I already have readily available, and that works for everything else.
This is the latest in a long series of frustrating experiences with Matrix in general. To this day, Element isn't stable, and Element X is somehow worse. It is, imo, a very promising option, but it is also far from perfect.
Yeah no in no world would I call it perfect. The web version had problems of decrypting encryption keys without a phone also connected and syncing for me. I used to have an account with Element directly for a subscription so that I could have certain bridges. Since they discontinued this and botchered the transition they shut down that homeserver. I wasn't paying for a while but I expected to still be able to use the normal account matrix features on their homeserver. They just shut it down and mentioned it a few months previously in their blog posts but I didn't ever receive a mail or anything. Their data export/transfer tool stopped working with their home server shut down. I would argue actually for smaller instances because I don't trust the Matrix.org team as they split of from Elements but small servers also have a risk because they often depends on individual admins
Yeah I just set up a synapse + livekit server last night. Voice, video, and screen share rooms work flawlessly