6 ms·

Why exactly don't people use matrix that much? It strikes me as a reasonably good open, secure comms protocol.

by cpfiffer 1y ago

panki27 1y ago
Because it entails getting people away from WhatsApp/Telegram/etc. - I speak from experience.
- jacooper 1y ago
  That's why bridges exist.
hashworks 1y ago
The official client is clunky and being electron on the desktop doesn't make it better. Messengers live and die on UX. Since it's an open protocol alternative clients exist of course, but are often not feature complete. Things are often slow, especially with large group channels with lots of messages. If you host a server yourself - it's great that you can! - you'll try the official implementation, synapse — ...and discover that it's a resource hog. Things got a bit better with some streaming sync protocol or something like that, but last time I looked it up that was still experimental and the server is still a chonker. Again, alternative servers exist, again the problem with feature parity. I feel like the protocol is bloated as well, but I didn't dive into it too much to have a good opinion on that. When choosing a messenger, I go to Signal for security, to IRC for simplicity and to Telegram for UX. I never thought "Oh let's use Matrix"...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- encom 1y ago
  From time to time, I go and check if there's a stable non-Electron Matrix client available - Qt would be nice. Thus, I'm still on IRC. I've tried participating in some bridged Matrix channels, but the IRC bridges I've encountered were super annoying. All messages come from one user, the bridge. Very often, the same message gets repeated twice or more, for some reason. I guess Matrix has no limit on usernames, so some users have names that are more than a line long. It's all very tedious.
  - WD-42 1y ago
    The QT client for Matrix is called Nheko: https://nheko-reborn.github.io/ https://nheko-reborn.github.io/ There's a client in just about every toolkit. Just takes a cursory internet search...
    - Arathorn 1y ago
      There's also a really great Gtk client called Fractal from GNOME; it uses the same matrix-rust-sdk as Element X: https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/fractal https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/fractal. Meanwhile the plan for Aurora (Element X Web) is to run it in Tauri or similar to placate all the Electron-haters: https://github.com/element-hq/aurora https://github.com/element-hq/aurora
    - rd07 1y ago
      There is also Neochat from KDE, not fully featured like Element and E2E Encryption still experimental the last time I checked, but it is a nice alternative if you want a non-Electron client.
    - cyphar 1y ago
      Unfortunately, they still use libolm[1] for e2ee which is deprecated[2] and has known security issues[3]. The maintainers appear to not be interested in switching to the newer Rust-based library. Matrix argue that the timing channel attacks are not possible over a network, but the history of timing channel attacks argues that this very few protocols are this fortunate (most people thought timing attacks against TLS were impossible too, until someone bothered to attack them). [1]: https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko/issues/1786 https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko/issues/1786 [2]: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/08/libolm-deprecation/ https://matrix.org/blog/2024/08/libolm-deprecation/ [3]: https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-olm-library/ https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-ol...
      - BrenBarn 1y ago
        Yeah, although Matrix is theoretically about being an open protocol supporting a range of clients and servers, in practice it winds up being heavily skewed to just Element/synapse. I think this is partly because there is still too much churn in the protocol. A decent amount of that churn is improving things, but it still makes it too hard for average-joe devs to keep up with what's hip. I don't think there's much chance of a real menu of feature-rich clients until the protocol becomes stable. Unfortunately, I don't foresee that happening soon.
- ElijahLynn 1y ago
  "Messengers live and die on UX" - THIS
- doubled112 1y ago
  Alternative clients feel like a broken promise to me, since features seem to be optional or implemented differently. You're basically stuck with Element if you want to be reasonably sure you're seeing what other people are. Even the official clients are a little weird. Element X, their next gen super fast client released in 2023, still won't allow me to create a thread on iOS. It will let me put a caption on a photo though, but Element won't.
- mqus 1y ago
  > synapse — ...and discover that it's a resource hog. I thought that, too, but at the very least it probably grows with usage. On my single-user-server, synapse currently needs ~100MB of RAM and does not consume CPU at all. It's not "slim" but I wouldn't call it a resource hog either.
sneak 1y ago
Because the product design people there seem to focus on an enterprise use case where the client is pushed out with a custom config to devices, instead of catering to end consumer usages. I assume this is caused by the company that does the Matrix development getting its revenue from such customers. I get the impression it is more designed to be a Slack replacement than a Signal or WhatsApp replacement, which is a shame.
VariousPrograms 1y ago
No one is going to use Matrix that doesn't have privacy-focused contact forcing them to because the privacy benefit of the slight inconvenience is something almost nobody cares about. Things that are non-issues to someone who read the online Matrix documentation becomes a mountain to a middle aged mom who taps through errors without reading them and is used to things "just working" in the way Apple products just work, not the way Linux just works. If you log into multiple devices, you have to go through a verification process to verify the new device. You may need to backup and restore your encryption keys manually or all your messages will be "Unable to decrypt message". Keeping multiple clients open simultaneously is supposed to have one client request the keys from the other client, but this either takes a while or doesn't always work. I have a contact with an unverified device (so all his messages show up with a warning) who refuses to fix it because all the other messengers just work by logging in. This is on top of people being upset that you're adding one more app to their menagerie of texts, Facebook, Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, etc. I use Matrix with my close contacts but I can't imagine anyone ever saying "Damn, I'm going to use this instead of Discord now!"
Arathorn 1y ago
One of the big problems is that folks judge Matrix based on the legacy Element apps, which have now been succeeded by Element X: https://element.io/blog/we-have-lift-off-element-x-call-and-server-suite-are-ready/ https://element.io/blog/we-have-lift-off-element-x-call-and-... etc. Element X kicks ass, in my (very biased) opinion: it's a super-speedy Rust core with fancy SwiftUI and Compose native UI layered on top. It radically outperforms any other encrypted messenger i've used in terms of UI perf and usability. However, because it's a rewrite, it doesn't quite have feature parity with the old apps, which are now over 10 years old: Threads is in beta; Spaces haven't landed yet, and Widgets aren't implemented yet. Therefore, we have to keep the old app around for users/customers who depend on those. As a result, >80% of the people who say "Matrix sucks" are actually talking about bad experiences on the old Element mobile apps - rather than better client Element X or indeed Matrix clients from other folks. There's also a large set of people who got bitten by encryption problems, almost all of which were fixed by Sept 2024. Finally, there's folks who got bitten by the sad history of bridging in Matrix: IRC bridging used to be relatively okay; the team then got very stretched due to lack of funding; we tried to land a major PR to improve its architecture; the PR introduced bugs; Libera got very upset; we tried to fix things but failed to do fast enough. As a result, bridging to Libera in particular is awful these days, using adhoc bridges which funnel all traffic through a single user, with no ability to join arbitrary IRC channels on demand or use Matrix as a bouncer. These days, the priority at Element is providing a self-hosted, decentralised WhatsApp and Teams replacement for governments... and once we get sustainable doing that, we'll be able to spend time building community features once again.
- throwaway98334 1y ago
  > One of the big problems is that folks judge Matrix based on the legacy Element apps, which have now been succeeded by Element X Which is mobile-only. Element's UX on desktop is still a joke. > These days, the priority at Element is providing a self-hosted, decentralised WhatsApp and Teams replacement for governments... and once we get sustainable doing that, we'll be able to spend time building community features once again. In other words, you don't have the community's best interests in mind, but we should rest safe because you'll have their best interests in mind at some point in the future, maybe. Not very reassuring.
stasy01 1y ago
It doesn't look consumer friendly at all to set up
- Disposal8433 1y ago
  I tried it a few years ago and it was not friendly at all too. I'm sure it hasn't changed and everything felt confusing and complicated. I don't remember the details but I have this feeling that I won't use it again. It seemed like the server could do everything (good) but they didn't found their niche (bad and impossible for such a generic framework).

Why exactly don't people use matrix that much? It strikes me as a reasonably good open, secure comms protocol.

panki27 1y ago

Because it entails getting people away from WhatsApp/Telegram/etc. - I speak from experience.

jacooper 1y ago
That's why bridges exist.

hashworks 1y ago

The official client is clunky and being electron on the desktop doesn't make it better. Messengers live and die on UX. Since it's an open protocol alternative clients exist of course, but are often not feature complete. Things are often slow, especially with large group channels with lots of messages. If you host a server yourself - it's great that you can! - you'll try the official implementation, synapse — ...and discover that it's a resource hog. Things got a bit better with some streaming sync protocol or something like that, but last time I looked it up that was still experimental and the server is still a chonker. Again, alternative servers exist, again the problem with feature parity. I feel like the protocol is bloated as well, but I didn't dive into it too much to have a good opinion on that. When choosing a messenger, I go to Signal for security, to IRC for simplicity and to Telegram for UX. I never thought "Oh let's use Matrix"...

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
encom 1y ago
From time to time, I go and check if there's a stable non-Electron Matrix client available - Qt would be nice. Thus, I'm still on IRC. I've tried participating in some bridged Matrix channels, but the IRC bridges I've encountered were super annoying. All messages come from one user, the bridge. Very often, the same message gets repeated twice or more, for some reason. I guess Matrix has no limit on usernames, so some users have names that are more than a line long. It's all very tedious.
- WD-42 1y ago
  The QT client for Matrix is called Nheko: https://nheko-reborn.github.io/ https://nheko-reborn.github.io/ There's a client in just about every toolkit. Just takes a cursory internet search...
  - Arathorn 1y ago
    There's also a really great Gtk client called Fractal from GNOME; it uses the same matrix-rust-sdk as Element X: https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/fractal https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/fractal. Meanwhile the plan for Aurora (Element X Web) is to run it in Tauri or similar to placate all the Electron-haters: https://github.com/element-hq/aurora https://github.com/element-hq/aurora
  - rd07 1y ago
    There is also Neochat from KDE, not fully featured like Element and E2E Encryption still experimental the last time I checked, but it is a nice alternative if you want a non-Electron client.
  - cyphar 1y ago
    Unfortunately, they still use libolm[1] for e2ee which is deprecated[2] and has known security issues[3]. The maintainers appear to not be interested in switching to the newer Rust-based library. Matrix argue that the timing channel attacks are not possible over a network, but the history of timing channel attacks argues that this very few protocols are this fortunate (most people thought timing attacks against TLS were impossible too, until someone bothered to attack them). [1]: https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko/issues/1786 https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko/issues/1786 [2]: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/08/libolm-deprecation/ https://matrix.org/blog/2024/08/libolm-deprecation/ [3]: https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-olm-library/ https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-ol...
    - BrenBarn 1y ago
      Yeah, although Matrix is theoretically about being an open protocol supporting a range of clients and servers, in practice it winds up being heavily skewed to just Element/synapse. I think this is partly because there is still too much churn in the protocol. A decent amount of that churn is improving things, but it still makes it too hard for average-joe devs to keep up with what's hip. I don't think there's much chance of a real menu of feature-rich clients until the protocol becomes stable. Unfortunately, I don't foresee that happening soon.
ElijahLynn 1y ago
"Messengers live and die on UX" - THIS
doubled112 1y ago
Alternative clients feel like a broken promise to me, since features seem to be optional or implemented differently. You're basically stuck with Element if you want to be reasonably sure you're seeing what other people are. Even the official clients are a little weird. Element X, their next gen super fast client released in 2023, still won't allow me to create a thread on iOS. It will let me put a caption on a photo though, but Element won't.
mqus 1y ago
> synapse — ...and discover that it's a resource hog. I thought that, too, but at the very least it probably grows with usage. On my single-user-server, synapse currently needs ~100MB of RAM and does not consume CPU at all. It's not "slim" but I wouldn't call it a resource hog either.

sneak 1y ago

Because the product design people there seem to focus on an enterprise use case where the client is pushed out with a custom config to devices, instead of catering to end consumer usages. I assume this is caused by the company that does the Matrix development getting its revenue from such customers. I get the impression it is more designed to be a Slack replacement than a Signal or WhatsApp replacement, which is a shame.

VariousPrograms 1y ago

No one is going to use Matrix that doesn't have privacy-focused contact forcing them to because the privacy benefit of the slight inconvenience is something almost nobody cares about. Things that are non-issues to someone who read the online Matrix documentation becomes a mountain to a middle aged mom who taps through errors without reading them and is used to things "just working" in the way Apple products just work, not the way Linux just works. If you log into multiple devices, you have to go through a verification process to verify the new device. You may need to backup and restore your encryption keys manually or all your messages will be "Unable to decrypt message". Keeping multiple clients open simultaneously is supposed to have one client request the keys from the other client, but this either takes a while or doesn't always work. I have a contact with an unverified device (so all his messages show up with a warning) who refuses to fix it because all the other messengers just work by logging in. This is on top of people being upset that you're adding one more app to their menagerie of texts, Facebook, Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, etc. I use Matrix with my close contacts but I can't imagine anyone ever saying "Damn, I'm going to use this instead of Discord now!"

Arathorn 1y ago

One of the big problems is that folks judge Matrix based on the legacy Element apps, which have now been succeeded by Element X: https://element.io/blog/we-have-lift-off-element-x-call-and-server-suite-are-ready/ https://element.io/blog/we-have-lift-off-element-x-call-and-... etc. Element X kicks ass, in my (very biased) opinion: it's a super-speedy Rust core with fancy SwiftUI and Compose native UI layered on top. It radically outperforms any other encrypted messenger i've used in terms of UI perf and usability. However, because it's a rewrite, it doesn't quite have feature parity with the old apps, which are now over 10 years old: Threads is in beta; Spaces haven't landed yet, and Widgets aren't implemented yet. Therefore, we have to keep the old app around for users/customers who depend on those. As a result, >80% of the people who say "Matrix sucks" are actually talking about bad experiences on the old Element mobile apps - rather than better client Element X or indeed Matrix clients from other folks. There's also a large set of people who got bitten by encryption problems, almost all of which were fixed by Sept 2024. Finally, there's folks who got bitten by the sad history of bridging in Matrix: IRC bridging used to be relatively okay; the team then got very stretched due to lack of funding; we tried to land a major PR to improve its architecture; the PR introduced bugs; Libera got very upset; we tried to fix things but failed to do fast enough. As a result, bridging to Libera in particular is awful these days, using adhoc bridges which funnel all traffic through a single user, with no ability to join arbitrary IRC channels on demand or use Matrix as a bouncer. These days, the priority at Element is providing a self-hosted, decentralised WhatsApp and Teams replacement for governments... and once we get sustainable doing that, we'll be able to spend time building community features once again.

throwaway98334 1y ago
> One of the big problems is that folks judge Matrix based on the legacy Element apps, which have now been succeeded by Element X Which is mobile-only. Element's UX on desktop is still a joke. > These days, the priority at Element is providing a self-hosted, decentralised WhatsApp and Teams replacement for governments... and once we get sustainable doing that, we'll be able to spend time building community features once again. In other words, you don't have the community's best interests in mind, but we should rest safe because you'll have their best interests in mind at some point in the future, maybe. Not very reassuring.

stasy01 1y ago

It doesn't look consumer friendly at all to set up

Disposal8433 1y ago
I tried it a few years ago and it was not friendly at all too. I'm sure it hasn't changed and everything felt confusing and complicated. I don't remember the details but I have this feeling that I won't use it again. It seemed like the server could do everything (good) but they didn't found their niche (bad and impossible for such a generic framework).