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Encryption in Matrix is shit, and is making me feel foolish about inviting various friends onto Matrix. I set up my own server using Synapse, and invited about

Encryption in Matrix is shit, and is making me feel foolish about inviting various friends onto Matrix. I set up my own server using Synapse, and invited about half a dozen other IRL techie friends to join me in there to continue chatting during Covid times. Considering we've all worked in tech for decades and run our own servers/services, none of us can really work out how the hell it's supposed to work. I mean, after lots of time consuming verifying of devices it kind of works. Except recently, all of a sudden, one of the people in our main chat room can not see the messages I sent from one of my devices. It tells him to get my keys from another session, he has only every used a single device/session. There is no UI that either of us can find to help fix it. We can chat fine in a different encrypted room, or if I use a different device. I'm not pulling anyone else into the Matrix ecosystem until encryption stops being just so god damn awful.

kevincox 6y ago
Do you mean the UX of the encryption or the privacy guarantees?
- mike-cardwell 6y ago
  The UX. I assume it functions well technically, as they don't seem to have made any compromises to make it easy to use.
spurgu 6y ago
This I've experienced as well, plus various UI/UX glitches and inconsistencies. It's getting slowly better though it seems.
- omnimus 6y ago
  Same experience here but i feel like Element is slowly getting worse. It is starting to use popups for everything and its becoming so annoying my friends are slowly leaving. Verify this, is this you that. I think partly its because i am not always on latest version of Synapse so the self-updating clients expect slightly different backends but uff. It feels like Moxie is right with his anti federation argument. Call me stupid but i am really trying to keep it together but i still cant tell why some of the popups show up or why some sessions of my friends wont decrypt and they show gibberish.
djsumdog 6y ago
The web UI use to ask you for your encryption password, but that seems to have disappeared recently.
CodeGlitch 6y ago
Can I ask why you didn't just use email? If you wanted a technical challenge you could have setup your own email server. You could also run your own Teamspeak server for video conferencing. This is the problem with matrix et al. They have to offer something that is leagues ahead of the current baseline, which I'm not convinced they are.
- mike-cardwell 6y ago
  We aren't using email for this, because we wanted a chat room. We aren't using Teamspeak because we don't want video conferencing. I've been running my own email server for going on 20 years now. [edit] To add to the above, I use the same Matrix server to chat in various Matrix, IRC and Gitter rooms, and also to host a couple of self-written bots which I use to control a few aspects of my life. Email isn't really a replacement for the things I use Matrix for.

kevincox 6y ago

Do you mean the UX of the encryption or the privacy guarantees?

mike-cardwell 6y ago
The UX. I assume it functions well technically, as they don't seem to have made any compromises to make it easy to use.

spurgu 6y ago

This I've experienced as well, plus various UI/UX glitches and inconsistencies. It's getting slowly better though it seems.

omnimus 6y ago
Same experience here but i feel like Element is slowly getting worse. It is starting to use popups for everything and its becoming so annoying my friends are slowly leaving. Verify this, is this you that. I think partly its because i am not always on latest version of Synapse so the self-updating clients expect slightly different backends but uff. It feels like Moxie is right with his anti federation argument. Call me stupid but i am really trying to keep it together but i still cant tell why some of the popups show up or why some sessions of my friends wont decrypt and they show gibberish.

djsumdog 6y ago

The web UI use to ask you for your encryption password, but that seems to have disappeared recently.

CodeGlitch 6y ago

Can I ask why you didn't just use email? If you wanted a technical challenge you could have setup your own email server. You could also run your own Teamspeak server for video conferencing. This is the problem with matrix et al. They have to offer something that is leagues ahead of the current baseline, which I'm not convinced they are.

mike-cardwell 6y ago
We aren't using email for this, because we wanted a chat room. We aren't using Teamspeak because we don't want video conferencing. I've been running my own email server for going on 20 years now. [edit] To add to the above, I use the same Matrix server to chat in various Matrix, IRC and Gitter rooms, and also to host a couple of self-written bots which I use to control a few aspects of my life. Email isn't really a replacement for the things I use Matrix for.