5 ms·

It's fascinating to see so much fundamental work taken on by the team at matrix. One thing I still can't understand though, as a matrix user, I try to get on m

by hirako2000 5y ago

It's fascinating to see so much fundamental work taken on by the team at matrix. One thing I still can't understand though, as a matrix user, I try to get on my circle onto it. But instead of hearing praises for the technological superiority of the network, all I get is hate and quick dump of its use. I wondered why. And then realise their claim is justified. The market is dominated by centralised pseudo e2e encrypted services. And people stick to them for two reasons, network effect and the fact it just works. The official client is plagued with UX bugs. Push notifications works some of the time, sometimes the app would hang trying to open or access a channel, some message get stuck as the last entry with no means to delete them. It makes the network barely usable since clients can't keep up with whatever is going on at the network level. I think technological advances shouldn't be made at the expense of the UX. Today's problem with matrix is adoption, and the slow adoption rate isn't due to not breaking the 100byte barrier. People would greatly benefit in getting an alternative car engine that doesn't burn polluting fuel, and matrix is delivering a propulsion engine to send us to Mars, at zero cost to consumers. I still admire the project and its contributors, I just wish those hundreds of real issues on each of their github projects were being prioritised over cutting edge innovation.

foxfluff 5y ago
Not just UX.. one day Element just wouldn't connect anymore (and in a typical webapp fashion, no useful error messages). Nuking its config directory and starting from scratch fixed it (never needed to do that in 20 years of using irssi). I've seen other issues like video previews getting their bottom half completely crippled. Can't make a video call just sharing the desktop with someone -- it demands a microphone. Can't disable read markers that are broadcast to everyone (bad for privacy imo). They were working on this when I looked into it but I've no idea if they've fixed it yet. And yes I've seen UX bugs such as some UI setting getting stuck in a state when you try to toggle it in the settings. I'm guessing these are more Element issues rather than Matrix issues (except for the read markers). But I get the vibe that we won't be seeing a client I like anytime soon; or it'll be a very minimalistic client with no support for all the fancy modern features, in which case I'd likely get the same or better experience with IRC anyway.
- githubalphapapa 5y ago
  > But I get the vibe that we won't be seeing a client I like anytime soon; or it'll be a very minimalistic client with no support for all the fancy modern features, in which case I'd likely get the same or better experience with IRC anyway. I don't know if you're the Emacs type, but you might be interested in https://github.com/alphapapa/ement.el https://github.com/alphapapa/ement.el. It feels kind of like an upgraded IRC, with support for features like images and rich text, and it tries to be privacy-respecting (e.g. read receipts and typing notifications are enabled by default, to imitate Element, but optional). It doesn't support E2EE natively, but E2EE works through the Pantalaimon proxy, so it can be used with E2EE rooms that way. (Or if you don't care about E2EE rooms, like me (I mostly don't), you can use it in unencrypted rooms without using Pantalaimon.)
- lrvick 5y ago
  If you prefer Irssi I would suggest weechat-matrix which I have used with high stability for over a year. Today I use the F-Droid Element client and Element web client for all my chat needs and they just work for my needs. YMMV.
abnercoimbre 5y ago
Thank you for writing this because I'm using Matrix for my engineering conference [0] and I believe in the project. However, no one in our online community (4k members) is willing to switch for good. Virtually no one likes the client's UX at all -- they see it as strictly a downgrade. So we use Matrix briefly during the conference and then switch back to Discord. [0] https://www.handmade-seattle.com https://www.handmade-seattle.com
- jeltz 5y ago
  It is a downgrade from Discord, but from Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Google Hangouts and the pile of shit that is Skype it is an upgrade. Element is a bit buggy (just like Skype and Hangouts) but otherwise it is a pretty good client compared to its competitors.
- lrvick 5y ago
  Matrix is a massive upgrade from Discord, and I applaud you for trying to offer people healthy alternatives. Humans love easy button tasty junk food that put "flavor" or "UX" above all else with no regard for long term consequences. Sometimes those of us that are decision makers have to put responsible healthy options on the table for everyone's benefit even if they don't care about the benefits and also in order to avoid excluding people with higher standards for themselves. I for one don't accept the terms of service for centralized proprietary chat services like Discord, Slack, etc, and I have stopped attending or participating in communities and conferences that insist on them without at least an IRC or Matrix bridge option. I don't find it ethical to force people to accept privacy and freedom hostile terms of service in order to socialize. It is gross that has become normalized. I hope we look back on these times like when we allowing smoking everywhere in most US restaurants. Some things matter more than having the absolute best in industry UX. Freedom, privacy, and security are not optional. I would go back to AIM UX before I would give those up. Thankfully Element and other matrix clients have dramatically better UX than that, and with federation, E2EE, message editing, etc.
  - abnercoimbre 5y ago
    > Freedom, privacy, and security are not optional. This is exactly my stance. Appreciate the bit of motivation to keep using Matrix for the conference!
bscphil 5y ago
> The official client is plagued with UX bugs. Agree. As a pretty knowledgeable tech person, I tried a few days ago to get an account working with Element, and I almost failed entirely. Different logins failing to sync with each other, one login which claimed that it could not verify ITSELF as a valid login, the "emoji check" button doing quite simply nothing at all. And on top of all that, the security aspects of Matrix are sufficiently non-obvious that even I am not confident that I have things set up securely, what the relevant trade-offs are (if any), and what security model the default setup is using. It's shocking but 100% true that I feel more confident in my ability to communicate securely with someone using GPG than with Matrix at present. > I think technological advances shouldn't be made at the expense of the UX. Disagree. Every other service out there, including Signal (especially Signal) has focused on getting UX right and making it easy to use. Matrix is trying to solve a hard problem with decentralized communication, and we need someone out there trying to solve that problem. They've deliberately set themselves up for UX difficulties by refusing to compromise on features. It would be a problem if everyone did that, but not everyone is doing that - Matrix is more or less going it alone. Matrix is best understood as an experiment; maybe it will work, maybe not. I think we just have to wait and see - though I agree with you that it's not usable yet for the general public.
- lrvick 5y ago
  I really wish I understood comments like these as what you describe is just not my experience at all in over a year. My partner, entire social circle, etc and I all communicate via matrix, via a mix of clients ranging from Element to Weechat to Fluffychat across a number of different servers for both personal and business. I have helped migrate hundreds of people to matrix and in the last year or so I have not had to hand hold people anymore as UX has improved dramatically. They just go sign up and drop in just like they would with Signal or WhatsApp or any other messenger. I also admin a number of rooms with hundreds of people and everything just works. Personally Matrix and IRC (often also via Matrix) are all I use for messaging. I login with a new device, have an existing device verify me when prompted, then type messages in boxes to people and people see them, with end to end encryption that works. For conversations that require high trust I additionally do key verification. I do encounter minor bugs from time to time like stuck messages, or occasional slowdowns of the giant primary matrix.org server, but honestly I have found it dramatically more reliable than SMS for me, but with actual E2EE. We really need the internet to be open and decentralized and that happens with technical people going all in on efforts like Matrix and helping report any bugs found and get then fixed. Element -was- for sure as buggy as you describe in my experience for many in my circle a couple years ago but even then we were happy to accept occasional glitches than continue to build our social graph in walled garden ecosystems that don't care about censorship resistance, security, or privacy. It really depends on what you value.
pedroaraujo 5y ago
I don't know why people just keep comparing the core protocol to the client. They can both be developed independently, in fact, you don't even need to use the official client, there are many open source alternatives. If you think something is broken, you are free to contribute to a patch, the project is open source.
- ducktective 5y ago
  > there are many open source alternatives It's change-your-distro/DE all over again. Each one of them has their unique pluses and oddities. > you are free to contribute to a patch Hi, average joe! You know, you should be using Matrix so your chat logs are not sliced and diced by corpos for profiling, right?...ahh what's that? You can't jump to your last mention? Just file a bug report in GitHub issue tracker bro. PR welcome. The competition is fierce. It's really sad so many FOSS projects have moved to Discord. I hope Matrix win.
Arathorn 5y ago
> The official client is plagued with UX bugs. Push notifications works some of the time, sometimes the app would hang trying to open or access a channel, some message get stuck as the last entry with no means to delete them. It makes the network barely usable since clients can't keep up with whatever is going on at the network level. Speaking as the project lead, one of the controversial decisions we made with Matrix was to try to seed the ecosystem with effectively three entirely independent clients. Element Web, iOS and Android share zero code (other than the low-level E2EE library). The reason we did this was to dogfood the protocol, avoid a client monoculture, ensure that multiple independent clients would work well together, and also provide native SDKs for the three main platforms that others could build on or fork. This strategy worked to some extent... but the major downside has been that it's more than tripled the dev efforts on the clients (relative to doing PWAs or React Native or Flutter or whatever), and each client has ended up with a completely different set of problems and bugs. For instance, the things you've complained about above all sound specific to Element Android (other than slow room joins, which is a serverside issue that we're working on right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7tGU6vv6ZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7tGU6vv6ZQ). It's rather sad to dismiss Matrix (or even Element) as a whole due to bugs on one specific app on one specific platform. We've also ended up being massively distracted by building out the non-optional fundamental work such as E2EE and the core decentralisation bits of Matrix (as well as stuff like low bandwidth, which has been driven by paying customers who care less about UX and more about capabilities). This has in turn ended up undermanning the core app teams fairly catastrophically. Until this week there was effectively only one guy paid to work fulltime specifically on the core app for Element Android - and it's only been in the last few months that we've been able to put more than one person on Element iOS and Element Web. Everything else has been stuff which has indirectly landed via customer projects for people like the French govt or German Bundeswehr, or FOSS contributions. So, the good news is that this is being fixed (better late than never) - there are ~5 people working on improving core UX in Element Web right now, ~3 on iOS and 2 on Android. The improvements on iOS & Web over the last few months should be really quite palpable - e.g. all the stuff on https://element.io/blog/introducing-voice-messages-and-so-much-more/ https://element.io/blog/introducing-voice-messages-and-so-mu.... Android should be starting to catch up quick too. Meanwhile, if anyone likes Matrix and wants to help us improve the clients, we're frantically trying to bring on more people to work on it fulltime to fix this faster - see https://element.io/careers https://element.io/careers for details.

foxfluff 5y ago

Not just UX.. one day Element just wouldn't connect anymore (and in a typical webapp fashion, no useful error messages). Nuking its config directory and starting from scratch fixed it (never needed to do that in 20 years of using irssi). I've seen other issues like video previews getting their bottom half completely crippled. Can't make a video call just sharing the desktop with someone -- it demands a microphone. Can't disable read markers that are broadcast to everyone (bad for privacy imo). They were working on this when I looked into it but I've no idea if they've fixed it yet. And yes I've seen UX bugs such as some UI setting getting stuck in a state when you try to toggle it in the settings. I'm guessing these are more Element issues rather than Matrix issues (except for the read markers). But I get the vibe that we won't be seeing a client I like anytime soon; or it'll be a very minimalistic client with no support for all the fancy modern features, in which case I'd likely get the same or better experience with IRC anyway.

githubalphapapa 5y ago
> But I get the vibe that we won't be seeing a client I like anytime soon; or it'll be a very minimalistic client with no support for all the fancy modern features, in which case I'd likely get the same or better experience with IRC anyway. I don't know if you're the Emacs type, but you might be interested in https://github.com/alphapapa/ement.el https://github.com/alphapapa/ement.el. It feels kind of like an upgraded IRC, with support for features like images and rich text, and it tries to be privacy-respecting (e.g. read receipts and typing notifications are enabled by default, to imitate Element, but optional). It doesn't support E2EE natively, but E2EE works through the Pantalaimon proxy, so it can be used with E2EE rooms that way. (Or if you don't care about E2EE rooms, like me (I mostly don't), you can use it in unencrypted rooms without using Pantalaimon.)
lrvick 5y ago
If you prefer Irssi I would suggest weechat-matrix which I have used with high stability for over a year. Today I use the F-Droid Element client and Element web client for all my chat needs and they just work for my needs. YMMV.

abnercoimbre 5y ago

Thank you for writing this because I'm using Matrix for my engineering conference [0] and I believe in the project. However, no one in our online community (4k members) is willing to switch for good. Virtually no one likes the client's UX at all -- they see it as strictly a downgrade. So we use Matrix briefly during the conference and then switch back to Discord. [0] https://www.handmade-seattle.com https://www.handmade-seattle.com

jeltz 5y ago
It is a downgrade from Discord, but from Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Google Hangouts and the pile of shit that is Skype it is an upgrade. Element is a bit buggy (just like Skype and Hangouts) but otherwise it is a pretty good client compared to its competitors.
lrvick 5y ago
Matrix is a massive upgrade from Discord, and I applaud you for trying to offer people healthy alternatives. Humans love easy button tasty junk food that put "flavor" or "UX" above all else with no regard for long term consequences. Sometimes those of us that are decision makers have to put responsible healthy options on the table for everyone's benefit even if they don't care about the benefits and also in order to avoid excluding people with higher standards for themselves. I for one don't accept the terms of service for centralized proprietary chat services like Discord, Slack, etc, and I have stopped attending or participating in communities and conferences that insist on them without at least an IRC or Matrix bridge option. I don't find it ethical to force people to accept privacy and freedom hostile terms of service in order to socialize. It is gross that has become normalized. I hope we look back on these times like when we allowing smoking everywhere in most US restaurants. Some things matter more than having the absolute best in industry UX. Freedom, privacy, and security are not optional. I would go back to AIM UX before I would give those up. Thankfully Element and other matrix clients have dramatically better UX than that, and with federation, E2EE, message editing, etc.
- abnercoimbre 5y ago
  > Freedom, privacy, and security are not optional. This is exactly my stance. Appreciate the bit of motivation to keep using Matrix for the conference!

bscphil 5y ago

> The official client is plagued with UX bugs. Agree. As a pretty knowledgeable tech person, I tried a few days ago to get an account working with Element, and I almost failed entirely. Different logins failing to sync with each other, one login which claimed that it could not verify ITSELF as a valid login, the "emoji check" button doing quite simply nothing at all. And on top of all that, the security aspects of Matrix are sufficiently non-obvious that even I am not confident that I have things set up securely, what the relevant trade-offs are (if any), and what security model the default setup is using. It's shocking but 100% true that I feel more confident in my ability to communicate securely with someone using GPG than with Matrix at present. > I think technological advances shouldn't be made at the expense of the UX. Disagree. Every other service out there, including Signal (especially Signal) has focused on getting UX right and making it easy to use. Matrix is trying to solve a hard problem with decentralized communication, and we need someone out there trying to solve that problem. They've deliberately set themselves up for UX difficulties by refusing to compromise on features. It would be a problem if everyone did that, but not everyone is doing that - Matrix is more or less going it alone. Matrix is best understood as an experiment; maybe it will work, maybe not. I think we just have to wait and see - though I agree with you that it's not usable yet for the general public.

lrvick 5y ago
I really wish I understood comments like these as what you describe is just not my experience at all in over a year. My partner, entire social circle, etc and I all communicate via matrix, via a mix of clients ranging from Element to Weechat to Fluffychat across a number of different servers for both personal and business. I have helped migrate hundreds of people to matrix and in the last year or so I have not had to hand hold people anymore as UX has improved dramatically. They just go sign up and drop in just like they would with Signal or WhatsApp or any other messenger. I also admin a number of rooms with hundreds of people and everything just works. Personally Matrix and IRC (often also via Matrix) are all I use for messaging. I login with a new device, have an existing device verify me when prompted, then type messages in boxes to people and people see them, with end to end encryption that works. For conversations that require high trust I additionally do key verification. I do encounter minor bugs from time to time like stuck messages, or occasional slowdowns of the giant primary matrix.org server, but honestly I have found it dramatically more reliable than SMS for me, but with actual E2EE. We really need the internet to be open and decentralized and that happens with technical people going all in on efforts like Matrix and helping report any bugs found and get then fixed. Element -was- for sure as buggy as you describe in my experience for many in my circle a couple years ago but even then we were happy to accept occasional glitches than continue to build our social graph in walled garden ecosystems that don't care about censorship resistance, security, or privacy. It really depends on what you value.

pedroaraujo 5y ago

I don't know why people just keep comparing the core protocol to the client. They can both be developed independently, in fact, you don't even need to use the official client, there are many open source alternatives. If you think something is broken, you are free to contribute to a patch, the project is open source.

ducktective 5y ago
> there are many open source alternatives It's change-your-distro/DE all over again. Each one of them has their unique pluses and oddities. > you are free to contribute to a patch Hi, average joe! You know, you should be using Matrix so your chat logs are not sliced and diced by corpos for profiling, right?...ahh what's that? You can't jump to your last mention? Just file a bug report in GitHub issue tracker bro. PR welcome. The competition is fierce. It's really sad so many FOSS projects have moved to Discord. I hope Matrix win.

Arathorn 5y ago

> The official client is plagued with UX bugs. Push notifications works some of the time, sometimes the app would hang trying to open or access a channel, some message get stuck as the last entry with no means to delete them. It makes the network barely usable since clients can't keep up with whatever is going on at the network level. Speaking as the project lead, one of the controversial decisions we made with Matrix was to try to seed the ecosystem with effectively three entirely independent clients. Element Web, iOS and Android share zero code (other than the low-level E2EE library). The reason we did this was to dogfood the protocol, avoid a client monoculture, ensure that multiple independent clients would work well together, and also provide native SDKs for the three main platforms that others could build on or fork. This strategy worked to some extent... but the major downside has been that it's more than tripled the dev efforts on the clients (relative to doing PWAs or React Native or Flutter or whatever), and each client has ended up with a completely different set of problems and bugs. For instance, the things you've complained about above all sound specific to Element Android (other than slow room joins, which is a serverside issue that we're working on right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7tGU6vv6ZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7tGU6vv6ZQ). It's rather sad to dismiss Matrix (or even Element) as a whole due to bugs on one specific app on one specific platform. We've also ended up being massively distracted by building out the non-optional fundamental work such as E2EE and the core decentralisation bits of Matrix (as well as stuff like low bandwidth, which has been driven by paying customers who care less about UX and more about capabilities). This has in turn ended up undermanning the core app teams fairly catastrophically. Until this week there was effectively only one guy paid to work fulltime specifically on the core app for Element Android - and it's only been in the last few months that we've been able to put more than one person on Element iOS and Element Web. Everything else has been stuff which has indirectly landed via customer projects for people like the French govt or German Bundeswehr, or FOSS contributions. So, the good news is that this is being fixed (better late than never) - there are ~5 people working on improving core UX in Element Web right now, ~3 on iOS and 2 on Android. The improvements on iOS & Web over the last few months should be really quite palpable - e.g. all the stuff on https://element.io/blog/introducing-voice-messages-and-so-much-more/ https://element.io/blog/introducing-voice-messages-and-so-mu.... Android should be starting to catch up quick too. Meanwhile, if anyone likes Matrix and wants to help us improve the clients, we're frantically trying to bring on more people to work on it fulltime to fix this faster - see https://element.io/careers https://element.io/careers for details.