11 ms·

Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

115 points by upofadown 1y ago

ranger_danger 1y ago
the amount of spec change proposals over the years is wild: https://0x0.st/H8h-.png https://0x0.st/H8h-.png
- johnisgood 1y ago
  Is there a graph for post-2022 data? I wonder if it kept its trajectory.
  - Arathorn 1y ago
    sure, i just genned a new one for you: https://matrix.org/~matthew/mscs.png https://matrix.org/~matthew/mscs.png The trajectory is the same, although obviously it's not ideal that the backlog grows at roughly the same rate as we merge/close them. Perhaps some day the Foundation will have enough $ to actually fund the spec core team to work on MSC review as their dayjob; meanwhile it's done in spare time or smuggled in as part of their dayjob. Meanwhile, the fact that MSCs are being opened as fast as ever shows that folks are trying to nudge the protocol along as much as ever.
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      Thank you! :)
- xorcist 1y ago
  Remember that their main criticism of XMPP was there is just too many protocols extensions and proposals! Turns out that maybe it was for good reasons.
  - tcfhgj 1y ago
    never heard of that
- Arathorn 1y ago
  this is a good thing, right? spec change proposals is how the spec evolves - they literally turn into PRs to the spec.
rapnie 1y ago
For some particular areas of development there is strong incentive to be on matrix. For instance most ActivityPub / Fediverse related projects favor matrix. One example of a space that has a big collection of rooms here is "ActivityPub community" space [0], but there are plenty more. Also for the FOSS projects I'm interested in I find them mostly on matrix, and Discord, Zulip, or Slack are the exception (you could say that Discord/Slack are mostly chosen by OSS projects, and FOSS prefers Matrix, IRC, Zulip, XMPP). [0] https://matrix.to/#/#activitypub-community:codelutin.com https://matrix.to/#/#activitypub-community:codelutin.com
johnisgood 1y ago
Are you deliberately using QR only for your contact details?
autumn-antlers 1y ago
[flagged]
- mikae1 1y ago
  From https://マリウス.com/faq/ https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/faq/: > According to Google reCAPTCHA, Hcaptcha and Cloudflare Turnstile, I’m a robot. Although I haven’t seen an engraved plate with the label T-800 on myself yet, these days I might as well just be a rogue LLM. Does it even matter anymore? :)
  - autumn-antlers 1y ago
    to be clear, they can be content with it themselves -- i'm self-filtering and think it's important to do so visibly and attributively c:
- deleted 1y ago
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- deleted 1y ago
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_lvbh 1y ago
I'm of the same stance. I've been using Matrix for 3 years now, primarily to communicate with family located where there is high censorship and most messengers are blocked. Probably due to the complexity of the system and inherent design, performance is horrible. Good enough for usage but just unpleasant. Their new Element X client is meant to solve a lot of problems but they're starting to deviate from common standards (e.g. TURN/STUN for calling) and towards "Element Call" and livekit which are a nightmare to set up. There's been more and more encryption problems lately where I'd sync the keys but still fail to decrypt messages on certain clients and lose history on others. I'm sticking with the old Element client but it's obvious the Vector people aren't putting much effort into it anymore seeing as there are very old but critical bugs (main one being the fact that it automatically reaches out to matrix.org when trying to sign in with other homeservers and freezes if the domain is blocked. This is fixed by Element X.) I can fix it myself but until IOS allows sideloading, I have no way of getting my fork onto my family's devices. If anyone knows an alternative that has web, IOS, and Android clients, easily self hostable, and can do calling, please let me know.
- methuselah_in 1y ago
  You can try monal xmpp. It's working great for my contacts. There are multiple servers that you can self host. On android you have better part is conversations. My entire family uses it.
- freeopinion 1y ago
  Aside from your valid concerns about Element roadmaps, you highlight a completely different really crummy problem. You have chosen (or have had chosen for you) the support of a closed platform that puts you in a pickle. The dev team for an app of interest to you doesn't seem to have the bandwidth to address all your concerns as quickly as would be super. But they have taken the hit to get their code into the walled garden where you can use it. You have the bandwidth to tackle some of your wishlist, but don't have access into the walled garden. So what might be a negotiation between two parties--you and the app dev team--is now complicated by a thorny third party--your os platform team. Presumably you derive some value in other areas from your walled garden that offsets the penalty it introduces in this case. But it's still crummy that you're caught in this snag created by your os platform.
Takennickname 1y ago
I said most of the same things in the Matrix foundation's server. The general response from the team was: "Pay money or shut up and accept what we give you". The number of gigantic changes in direction this project has had in the past couple of years is enough to sink any project. Jitsi to Webrtc, complete change in auth system, Element to Element X. There's two clients. One that's fast, and one that's full featured. You can either skip out on features, or use something slow. I try to be positive and supportive of project, but my experience with these guys is that they're incredibly arrogant. It's tough finding an open-standards based IM application for corporate use. XMPP is kinda fragmented, with no nice clients. Matrix is a clusterfuck with a BDFL who is probably too smart for his own good. Signal is open source but hostile towards self hosting. P.S I suspect the organization is being led by Architecture Astronauts [1]. Every (including the naming) is abstracted to the point of meaninglessness. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...
- ranger_danger 1y ago
  > I try to be positive and supportive of project, but my experience with these guys is that they're incredibly arrogant. This has been my experience with many FOSS projects in general. Don't even get me started on what happens when a fork emerges. "They don't want open source, they want to be the ONLY source."
  - freeopinion 1y ago
    This statement might be ok in a generic sense, but it is unfair in a discussion of Matrix and Element. They have gone out of their way to encourage other source. I get that you didn't say this explicitly about this particular project. I just think these folks deserve some credit.
    - majorchord 1y ago
      Got a link? What forks of element or synapse have they publicly endorsed?
the__alchemist 1y ago
My experience, contradicted when I bring it up usually (But not by this article): I've found the Element client to be slow and buggy, and I still can't figure out how to either verify my account, or get the verification notifications to go away.
- Arathorn 1y ago
  I think everyone agrees that the classic Element client is slow and has a tonne of tech debt, including bad encryption UX, which is why we rebuilt it as Element X. Web /Desktop is yet to follow, although we’ve started it here: https://github.com/element-hq/aurora https://github.com/element-hq/aurora
clueless 1y ago
So what are the best alternatives?
- methuselah_in 1y ago
  Xmpp! Was and is
  - ezst 1y ago
    Second!
tomsonj 1y ago
from jabber/xmpp and back. time is a flat circle
- arresin 1y ago
  Why not just use jabber and omemo?
  - ffsm8 1y ago
    I'm guessing because he doesn't just want to talk with himself
    - arresin 1y ago
      Touché
dzaima 1y ago
The issue of broken rooms was reportedly the database having gotten corrupted indexes, which affected a bunch of rooms (2/55 of ones I was in): https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/issues/18606#issuecomment-3038332995 https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/issues/18606#issuecomm.... Not much a protocol/implementation can do about that. It did take over 2 weeks for it to be resolved though, which is a rather long period of time. Also on the status page - https://status.matrix.org/incidents/8gljb3gtlv11 https://status.matrix.org/incidents/8gljb3gtlv11 (shows start at Jul 2, but I noticed it on Jun 28) After that was resolved, messages that were sent and received by/on other homeservers during that time never ended up on matrix.org, so much for federation :/
- udev4096 1y ago
  Wait, did anyone investigate on why messages were not stored by other homeservers? That's rather odd, given the selling point of matrix is federation
  - dzaima 1y ago
    I've heard that messages not getting through federation in some cases is just a thing that can happen. How that's compatible with calling matrix as having good federation, I don't know.
    - Arathorn 1y ago
      I’m not aware of any scenarios, including this one, where messages don’t federate (unless the destination server has been unavailable and marked down, obviously).
    - udev4096 1y ago
      No, you are making things up. That cannot happen unless the homeservers are not configured properly. If you don't have anything to back that story up, I suggest you slow down on making matrix look bad
      - 1y ago
blfr 1y ago
I find Signal just unbeatable on all fronts: security, UX, ease of use, general thoughtfulness put into the product. It has the best simple media editor (for video clipping, blurring faces, compressing) I have ever seen casually built into the sending flow. Every time I use anything, from MS Teams to Whatsapp, I find myself wishing they were more like Signal.
- Takennickname 1y ago
  Signal is the worst of them all when it comes to self hosting.
  - simfree 1y ago
    Signal's desktop app is slower to load and has less features than Element Desktop, despite both using the same stack of Electron and Sqlite.
  - udev4096 1y ago
    Worst in terms of user freedom as well. Because according to moxie, everyone is incompetent to host their own. He was wrong
- attendant3446 1y ago
  My main problem with Signal is that it's a mobile app with a desktop companion app. Ideally, I would prefer a federated messenger, but I would be completely fine with Signal if it wasn't a mobile-only app (you can't use the desktop version without first having the mobile app).
  - keysdev 1y ago
    And it forces you to have a number.
- lousken 1y ago
  tested signal years ago and the desktop client was literally unusable, would take major redesign to fix so i am assuming it is not better
vitonsky 1y ago
Yeah, Matrix UX is disgusting in every aspect. Every client looks bad, works slow and most of them have only subset of features. At 2025 year I still can't see online status when I use most popular server and client. When I use SDK as a developer, *I can't use encryption* for bots. I've created issue about it over year ago https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk/issues/363 https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk/issues/363 and maintainer just closed it as not planned to fix. Matrix Protocol is overcomplicated and ridiculous. As I understood, the reason of mentioned problem with lack of "online status" feature is a high network load that yields by presence status feature, so server owners just disable this feature. It is ridiculous that messenger who state it is "privacy focused" - can't handle encryption for bots and sell us idea that it's fine to log-in in my account on random site on internet. Because any site where i enter my password and secret key, may steal my password. The same thing with applications. "Reference implementation" of app is an Electron app that loads javascript from internet and may inject malware anytime. My impression is that Matrix is a scam to spy over people who blindly believe in security, like a Telegram does.
- udev4096 1y ago
  The last statement is totally uncalled for. Yes, matrix is not convenient and given it's far from ideal chat experience but that doesn't mean you are allowed to spread FUD. Matrix spec, clients, homeservers, etc are fully open source. No one is "scamming" anyone
  - j45 1y ago
    No horses in this race for or against the Matrix group, but convenience, adoptability is a fair factor to look at in software, especially collaboration and interaction based software.
    - udev4096 1y ago
      It's gaining traction. Matrix will prevail, sooner or later. Don't give up on it just yet
Arcuru 1y ago
This also comes as the organization is preparing a coordinated update to fix 2 CVEs in the protocol [1], that were originally reported 6 months ago. [1] https://matrix.org/blog/2025/07/security-predisclosure/ https://matrix.org/blog/2025/07/security-predisclosure/
- Arathorn 1y ago
  fwiw these CVEs weren’t reported 6 months ago; they were found during a project which has been running for 6 months.
  - Arcuru 1y ago
    Oh interesting! I guess I read that post wrong, thanks for clarifying. I would be interested in learning more context around this issue once you are able to share, so hopefully there will be a report/post/etc after the embargo lifts.
yobid20 1y ago
Every time it was suggested to adopt matrix into our platform, we took one look at the protocol docs and said NOPE.
- Arathorn 1y ago
  What bit of the protocol docs made you nope out?
j45 1y ago
Would be interested to hear about alternatives.
arp242 1y ago
Here's what I wrote in 2019 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592195): "The reason for Slack's success is probably because it's a "turn key solution": you register your company, invite your employees, enter your CC, and you're good to go." "With a lot of these open solutions things are more complex. I think we should really focus on providing a good UX here if we want more adoption." This seems unchanged, or even worse. Arathorn recommended modular.im in a reply, which now redirects to https://element.io/pricing https://element.io/pricing, and "set up a server" just redirects to GitHub, and the only other option is "Talk to an expert" – yeah, no. Self-hosting is great but realistically, lots of people are just not interested, and that's fine too. And even if they are: having a simple option to quickly evaluate $the_thing is probably a good idea. This is of course in addition to all the technical problems outlined in this post, which I also reported in 2019: "opening https://riot.im/app/ https://riot.im/app/ makes Firefox use 100% CPU and my laptops fan spin; I closed it after 10 seconds of just a loading animation"
iforgotpassword 1y ago
To add to the pile: - The web client doesn't load any images/media anymore for me in new sessions. I log in, I cross authenticate with another client, no images load. At work I've a very old browser session going and everything works. - We host synapse at work to explore feasibility. Been going on for about 9 months now. Public profile lookup is disabled. This breaks inviting anyone from our company from another server, when the inviting user is using element. Because element tries to query the user info first, and if that fails with an unexpected error code, it will not allow you to continue sending the invitation. There's obviously an issue open for months now, where multiple people suggested they just add a warning that it couldn't check if the user exists, with a "continue anyways" button, but the devs prefer to come up with idiotic excuses why that would be a bad idea. I did some quick research myself then, and it looks like the profile lookup is relayed through the server of the inviting user to the server of the user to be invited. The inviter's server converts any http error code from the invitee's server that is "not valid" to a generic error, that element then chokes on, here: https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/blob/1920dfff40ad1078071e099a2afbfa31a5409e6b/synapse/handlers/profile.py#L127 https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/blob/1920dfff40ad10780... i.e. Only 404 is valid, according to code and comment there. But IN THE SAME FUCKING SOURCE FILE, they return a 403 if profile lookup is disabled: https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/blob/1920dfff40ad1078071e099a2afbfa31a5409e6b/synapse/handlers/profile.py#L526 https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/blob/1920dfff40ad10780... Can't get any better than this I guess. Cobbled together bullshit. I hope my company will consider this experiment failed soon and switch to slack or something. Anything.
- kuschku 1y ago
  > The web client doesn't load any images/media anymore for me in new sessions. I log in, I cross authenticate with another client, no images load. At work I've a very old browser session going and everything works. That sounds like something with authenticated media has gone really wrong. Do the fetch requests for the media fail, or does it not even attempt to make the requests? Is there an error message in the logs? Regarding the invite issue, could you please clarify in which versions of element (web/desktop, android, iOS, elementX) you've seen the issue, and in which dialogs (search for user, create new room, invite users to existing room)?
mystraline 1y ago
We had a variation on this discussion a few days ago here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44591820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44591820 I discussed that their primary server had a child porn/child sex assault imagery problem. Others who had similar concerns were completely dismissed and attacked by the Element/Matrix admins. I have to agree with this article. Matrix is basically dead, and not worth keeping around. And it starves the open source ecosystem from better things taking hold.
- lousken 1y ago
  youtube has this problem, discord has this problem and many other platforms what do those platforms do to combat child stuff? i don't like to dismiss anything but it is something all platforms and even multi billion dollar ones struggle with eu tries to decrypt e2e chats while you can see this stuff everywhere without encryption and nothing is being done to combat this on these major platforms as discord and whatsapp are getting shittier, i still keep it around for talking with friends, having my own server is not that hard and there are zero issues compared to main matrix.org server, just couple dollars for vle2 on ovh is sufficient
  - hammyhavoc 1y ago
    The big platforms always use a variety of solutions. Always some kind of database of hashes of known CSAM available via an API. Always human beings on a trust and safety team. Takes considerable time, money, and emotional toll. Not just anyone can access all of the SaaS databases and it's approved on a case-by-case basis. Obviously not all CSAM is in these databases, and gen AI output adds another hurdle to preventing this kind of malicious behaviour. Personally, I feel a potential solution could be that user clients could opt into referencing hashes of media before it is downloaded, and that could either be handled by their home server, or a third-party. However, something like that is really idealism and not realistic at this point, despite being a great solution in a perfect world where people maintain encryption, yet don't expose themselves to CSAM inadvertently. In terms of the Matrix.org homeserver, perhaps an alternative (though would prove unpopular) is only allowing Matrix.org users to upload media if they're a paying supporter of the Matrix.org homeserver with a valid payment method on their account, thus obviously linking their identity to their account. https://matrix.org/membership/ https://matrix.org/membership/ The knock-on effect would be that it may offload some users onto their own infrastructure and alleviate the moneypit of a public instance, or directly fund the public instance itself if they do choose to support it financially. The Matrix.org instance doesn't support users adding bridges, so it isn't that much of a stretch to forbid media uploads from non-supporters. Portable identities would make this a no-brainer, but even without them, I still feel as if the public instance is largely an incredibly generous demo to help folks take Matrix for a spin. Decentralisation is such a major selling point that's vastly underutilized. I do think that people should at least attempt to become decentralized and manage their own community by themselves, be it public or private. Large public homeservers are always going to be considerable targets for this kind of problem. It's a lot of digital eggs in one digital basket for a lot of reasons. Nothing stopping people uploading images onto a third-party file storage system and providing the URL if they absolutely need to share a screenshot or similar on the public Matrix.org instance. Anyway, fleeting thoughts.
jasonvorhe 1y ago
I agree with all of it. I abandoned Matrix about a year ago and never looked back. Something's very smelly about their history, broken promises and overall quality.
kniffy 1y ago
I want to like matrix, but I had to give up my homeserver. For reasons that are unclear to me I was added to the matrix.org homeserver blacklist, with no communication on why or response to my asking why. Eventually I noticed some issue with the database, it having grown many hundreds of GB (something about my users being stuck in matrix.org rooms that they're blacklisted from, I guess) so I rm -rf'd it and that's that. :\
- ezst 1y ago
  Could it be that your needs would be covered by XMPP? You can run that on a RPi in a shoebox.
  - kniffy 1y ago
    Probably, yeah, though I'm not familiar with the ecosystem yet. It seems like ejabberd is written in erlang, which is promising.
    - ezst 1y ago
      > I'm not familiar with the ecosystem yet. It seems like ejabberd is written in erlang I highly recommend ejabberd: it's one of the easiest server software I ever had to sysadmin. It's rock-solid and never gets in your way. It also packs everything you need for modern instant messaging and audio/video calls. Install it, open few firewall ports, define some DNS SRV records, and you are good to go. > which is promising. I mean, ejabberd is what WhatsApp and FB Messenger started from :-)
hammyhavoc 1y ago
"Pull requests welcome" is all I can say to anyone who puts energy into long rants about the "state" of a FOSS project. If you think volunteer dev is so easy then get stuck in and be the change you want to see.
- AAAAaccountAAAA 1y ago
  Matrix is not a some sort of volunteer project. It is used by NATO as their NI2CE, as well as by many other governmental entities. Matrix runs on European taxpayer's money.
  - hammyhavoc 1y ago
    You're thinking of Element: https://element.io/case-studies/nato https://element.io/case-studies/nato Now do Nextcloud and many other projects. It's FOSS. There are volunteer contributors. https://matrix.org/blog/2025/06/dispelling-myths/ https://matrix.org/blog/2025/06/dispelling-myths/ > Matrix is not just an open standard for secure communication, it’s an openly governed and collaboratively developed ecosystem of projects powered by a growing community of volunteers and vendors. In this way, Matrix exemplifies the open source ethos, encourages greater innovation, and defies those who would try to build businesses based on extractive behavior and vendor lock-in. Oh look, more calls for volunteers, despite "running on European taxpayer money": https://conference.matrix.org/volunteer/ https://conference.matrix.org/volunteer/ Sorry, but idiotic remarks like this stink of having an agenda. You don't even put a name and identity to your HN account and provide zero sources. At best, you're clueless, at worst you're spreading FUD.
    - AAAAaccountAAAA 1y ago
      Oh, it seems you are here to just troll and insult everyone. Matrix by calling it just a some sort of volunteer project run by nerds in basements, and those too, who are not pleased with it's problems. What exactly does have a "call for volunteers" to haul around stuff in a some sort of conference has to do with anything? What has Nextcloud to do with this? You'd have known that Matrix ecosystem has lots of paid professionals working on it, if you made even a cursory research on the subject before starting to write cheeky comments. You claimed the problems with Matrix can be solved with a few pull requests. It's your duty to back it up.
the-anarchist 1y ago
This link has 71 comments and 84 points and is from 4 hours ago yet it shows for me on place 197 (page 7) of HN. Is Ycombinator (or one of the intermediary investment funds) invested in New Vector?
- Arathorn 1y ago
  neither YC nor any YC-intermediary is an investor in NV. Instead, you're likely seeing that HN has circuit-breakers against high-temperature threads which turn into pile-ons (whether they're justified or not).
Arathorn 1y ago
Speaking as project lead for Matrix, I obviously feel pretty gutted when someone gives up like this. Doubly so when the straw that broke their back wasn't even a Matrix problem, but really gnarly postgres corruption (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44618702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44618702). Firstly, I'm sorry they had such a bad time, and as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44621077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44621077 there's a tonne of things we've (i've) done wrong. That said, there's a bunch of points raised here which aren't fully accurate. So for the sake of completeness: > The official Matrix homeserver, Synapse, was built with a tech stack ill-suited for its long-term goals and scale These days Synapse is hybrid Rust for the fast paths (https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/tree/develop/rust https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/tree/develop/rust) and Python 3 + mypy for the rest. Huge servers like matrix.org (150K concurrent users) run fine on it. I'm not convinced the "ill-suited tech stack" crit holds. > Community projects like Dendrite emerged to rewrite the homeserver more sensibly Dendrite is not a community project and never has been; it was written by the core Matrix team, and then when we realised Synapse had critical mass we backported most of its architectural improvements to Synapse. > New Vector seems to be chasing too many goals simultaneously, with no clear direction No? we killed all the sidequests in order to just do Element Web, Element X, Element Call and Synapse. > Just a few months ago, they migrated to the Matrix Authentication Service (MAS), which was supposed to be a leap forward, yet lacks even essential security features like 2FA/MFA. No? the whole point of MAS is that it lets you delegate straight through to a proper IDP which provides 2FA/MFA/Passkeys etc. > Launching the app requires network synchronization that hampers responsiveness No? Turn off your network, launch Element X, and see that it launches fine? Obviously it does need to talk to the server to retrieve new data. I guess there was the https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-ios/issues/4102 https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-ios/issues/4102 issue, but that was fixed 3 weeks ago. > The Matrix.org service, especially its matrix.org homeserver, is also slow matrix.org feels pretty good to me these days, even on my mammoth account (other than when talking in Matrix HQ) > On my laptop, I’ve been using iamb, a TUI Matrix client, and even there I experience delays of tens of seconds when launching it, and a lag of several seconds between pressing Enter and seeing the message actually appear in the chat room. I'm assuming that's because iamb hasn't enabled sliding sync, and/or hasn't implemented local echo, or has some other perf bug. Or perhaps you're on an old build. Given it's using the same matrix-rust-sdk as Element X it should in theory be instant. > And that’s certainly not iamb’s fault, because it’s written in Rust, btw™. ... > the lack of proper first-party libraries for 3rd-party developers to build on top of, it became visible that the once-vibrant ecosystem, does no longer look so healthy This is really weird. It's not clear that the Matrix Foundation should publish software at all, to be honest - it's effectively a standards body. W3C doesn't write browsers or web servers any more, for instance. As it happens, we have invested a huge amount of effort into publishing a flagship first-party client SDK anyway: matrix-rust-sdk. And matrix-js-sdk is still there too. We very deliberately have handed off other SDKs to the broader community to maintain, which they do a great job of. Surely the fact that go-matrix got surpassed by Tulir's superior go-mautrix fork is a good thing, not a bad thing? > Development on Synapse alternatives has stagnated The conduits seem as active as ever, from what I can see, even if there's been forking. Dendrite development has stalled, but this reflects lack of funding rather than the ecosystem failing, and the core team at Element having to put all its effort it into one server (Synapse) rather than splitting between two. > Other clients like SchildiChat are faced with the dilemma of continuing their existing work or starting over by forking Element X That's just false? SchildiChat seems to have quite happily forked EX into SchildiChat Next years ago and looks to be doing a great job of it; ahead of EX itself with many features (e.g. it already has spaces!) > Speaking of SDKs, New Vector appears to lack a coherent technology strategy. They’ve built infrastructure in Python and Node.js/TypeScript, moved into Go for the Synapse replacement, and now maintain a Rust-based client SDK, while abandoning their Go client library (which is now community-maintained). NV's stack is Python+Rust and Node/TS on the serverside, and Rust + (TS/Swift/Kotlin) on the clientside. It's true that over 11 years of work we've also sprouted a few Go projects (e.g. complement), and there's even some Perl (sytest), but that is very much the minority. > Especially for an organization that appears perpetually cash-strapped. New Vector’s approach feels more like indecisiveness than the right tool for the right job when looking through their repositories on GitHub. It feels unfortunate that the OP is complaining that NV doesn't provide enough 1st party implementations in different languages any more, while also complaining NV has too many languages in use. > Matthew, if you’re reading this: We both know that naming things is one of the hardest problems in computer science, right after cache invalidation. I totally get the geeky, 31337 thrill a name like Matrix might evoke, but believe me when I say that using generic names is a bad idea. Things would have been a lot easier for everyone involved if you had at least rebranded Riot to something more distinctive. For future rebrandings, I highly recommend using the Synthwave Band Name Generator and some good old human creativity. :-) Honestly Matrix & Element seem to get quite a lot of traction and successful press despite the generic names. For instance, I just spun up Tor and googled the word Element, and Element.io came up as the 2nd hit after the skateboard brand (and the whole sidebar). The data just doesn't back up this particular criticism. Overall, though, I get why the OP is frustrated and has given up. All I can say is that we're working away on getting Element X to parity with Element as fast as we can so we can retire the 'classic' app, at which point I think much of the pain people are experiencing will go away. It's taking longer than I'd like given the work is entangled with building and deploying government messaging systems as a way to keep the lights on, but if anything all the negativity here makes me more determined and stubborn to keep plugging away to dig out of the transitional period we're in, and get back on track.
sitzkrieg 1y ago
i ran a matrix homeserver for just shy of 4 years and it was the lowest user, highest maintenance service i have ever ran. thats completely putting aside the user experience issues too
floren 1y ago
I'd been maintaining my own Synapse homeserver for years mainly to chat with one friend, who uses the matrix.org server. Images shared between us break on a regular basis, and yes they broke for a bit during the authenticated media changeover but also since then he just periodically doesn't receive images I send. It happened again last week, I said "fuck it, the devs will just claim it's my fault if I ask for help, let's just take this to Signal". I'll probably shut down my homeserver once I've figured out alternative ways to access the handful of communities I also happen to follow via Matrix. I have no doubt a reply will be forthcoming soon about how that's all a coincidental thing which isn't actually Matrix's fault but I've been reading those replies here for years and the actual situation doesn't improve.
- Arathorn 1y ago
  I'm not sure where the "devs will claim it's my fault if i ask for help" trope is coming from - we really do want Matrix to work :( Do you have a bug report of where this is happening, on what set of clients? A bunch of people have been reporting images not loading, but I haven't seen anything actionable. Is it possible that this is anti-image-spam protection kicking in?
  - floren 1y ago
    > Is it possible that this is anti-image-spam protection kicking in? Man I can't see where the trope of developers implying it's the user's fault is coming from
    - Arathorn 1y ago
      …anti-image-spam protection happens serverside, configured by the room admin. it’s nothing to do with the user’s fault. i’m trying to help fix your problem. can you point me at details so I can investigate?
      - floren 1y ago
        Who's the room admin for a private chat between myself and a single other user?
wltr 1y ago
Element X works very well for my use case. My only complaint is that for some reason I’m unable to search through my messages. Even in private chats, there’s no such thing as search.
- Arathorn 1y ago
  We're on the case :) https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/issues/5350 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/issues/5350
  - wltr 1y ago
    Hey Matthew, thanks for the feedback! I didn’t know how to properly search for this to learn more. Wish you for this task to succeed. It feels it’s more complicated than I thought, because of the federation and maybe encryption too, I assume.

115 points by upofadown 1y ago

ranger_danger 1y ago

the amount of spec change proposals over the years is wild: https://0x0.st/H8h-.png https://0x0.st/H8h-.png

johnisgood 1y ago
Is there a graph for post-2022 data? I wonder if it kept its trajectory.
- Arathorn 1y ago
  sure, i just genned a new one for you: https://matrix.org/~matthew/mscs.png https://matrix.org/~matthew/mscs.png The trajectory is the same, although obviously it's not ideal that the backlog grows at roughly the same rate as we merge/close them. Perhaps some day the Foundation will have enough $ to actually fund the spec core team to work on MSC review as their dayjob; meanwhile it's done in spare time or smuggled in as part of their dayjob. Meanwhile, the fact that MSCs are being opened as fast as ever shows that folks are trying to nudge the protocol along as much as ever.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    Thank you! :)
xorcist 1y ago
Remember that their main criticism of XMPP was there is just too many protocols extensions and proposals! Turns out that maybe it was for good reasons.
- tcfhgj 1y ago
  never heard of that
Arathorn 1y ago
this is a good thing, right? spec change proposals is how the spec evolves - they literally turn into PRs to the spec.

rapnie 1y ago

For some particular areas of development there is strong incentive to be on matrix. For instance most ActivityPub / Fediverse related projects favor matrix. One example of a space that has a big collection of rooms here is "ActivityPub community" space [0], but there are plenty more. Also for the FOSS projects I'm interested in I find them mostly on matrix, and Discord, Zulip, or Slack are the exception (you could say that Discord/Slack are mostly chosen by OSS projects, and FOSS prefers Matrix, IRC, Zulip, XMPP). [0] https://matrix.to/#/#activitypub-community:codelutin.com https://matrix.to/#/#activitypub-community:codelutin.com

johnisgood 1y ago

Are you deliberately using QR only for your contact details?

autumn-antlers 1y ago

[flagged]

mikae1 1y ago
From https://マリウス.com/faq/ https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/faq/: > According to Google reCAPTCHA, Hcaptcha and Cloudflare Turnstile, I’m a robot. Although I haven’t seen an engraved plate with the label T-800 on myself yet, these days I might as well just be a rogue LLM. Does it even matter anymore? :)
- autumn-antlers 1y ago
  to be clear, they can be content with it themselves -- i'm self-filtering and think it's important to do so visibly and attributively c:
deleted 1y ago
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_lvbh 1y ago

I'm of the same stance. I've been using Matrix for 3 years now, primarily to communicate with family located where there is high censorship and most messengers are blocked. Probably due to the complexity of the system and inherent design, performance is horrible. Good enough for usage but just unpleasant. Their new Element X client is meant to solve a lot of problems but they're starting to deviate from common standards (e.g. TURN/STUN for calling) and towards "Element Call" and livekit which are a nightmare to set up. There's been more and more encryption problems lately where I'd sync the keys but still fail to decrypt messages on certain clients and lose history on others. I'm sticking with the old Element client but it's obvious the Vector people aren't putting much effort into it anymore seeing as there are very old but critical bugs (main one being the fact that it automatically reaches out to matrix.org when trying to sign in with other homeservers and freezes if the domain is blocked. This is fixed by Element X.) I can fix it myself but until IOS allows sideloading, I have no way of getting my fork onto my family's devices. If anyone knows an alternative that has web, IOS, and Android clients, easily self hostable, and can do calling, please let me know.

methuselah_in 1y ago
You can try monal xmpp. It's working great for my contacts. There are multiple servers that you can self host. On android you have better part is conversations. My entire family uses it.
freeopinion 1y ago
Aside from your valid concerns about Element roadmaps, you highlight a completely different really crummy problem. You have chosen (or have had chosen for you) the support of a closed platform that puts you in a pickle. The dev team for an app of interest to you doesn't seem to have the bandwidth to address all your concerns as quickly as would be super. But they have taken the hit to get their code into the walled garden where you can use it. You have the bandwidth to tackle some of your wishlist, but don't have access into the walled garden. So what might be a negotiation between two parties--you and the app dev team--is now complicated by a thorny third party--your os platform team. Presumably you derive some value in other areas from your walled garden that offsets the penalty it introduces in this case. But it's still crummy that you're caught in this snag created by your os platform.

Takennickname 1y ago

I said most of the same things in the Matrix foundation's server. The general response from the team was: "Pay money or shut up and accept what we give you". The number of gigantic changes in direction this project has had in the past couple of years is enough to sink any project. Jitsi to Webrtc, complete change in auth system, Element to Element X. There's two clients. One that's fast, and one that's full featured. You can either skip out on features, or use something slow. I try to be positive and supportive of project, but my experience with these guys is that they're incredibly arrogant. It's tough finding an open-standards based IM application for corporate use. XMPP is kinda fragmented, with no nice clients. Matrix is a clusterfuck with a BDFL who is probably too smart for his own good. Signal is open source but hostile towards self hosting. P.S I suspect the organization is being led by Architecture Astronauts [1]. Every (including the naming) is abstracted to the point of meaninglessness. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

ranger_danger 1y ago
> I try to be positive and supportive of project, but my experience with these guys is that they're incredibly arrogant. This has been my experience with many FOSS projects in general. Don't even get me started on what happens when a fork emerges. "They don't want open source, they want to be the ONLY source."
- freeopinion 1y ago
  This statement might be ok in a generic sense, but it is unfair in a discussion of Matrix and Element. They have gone out of their way to encourage other source. I get that you didn't say this explicitly about this particular project. I just think these folks deserve some credit.
  - majorchord 1y ago
    Got a link? What forks of element or synapse have they publicly endorsed?

the__alchemist 1y ago

My experience, contradicted when I bring it up usually (But not by this article): I've found the Element client to be slow and buggy, and I still can't figure out how to either verify my account, or get the verification notifications to go away.

Arathorn 1y ago
I think everyone agrees that the classic Element client is slow and has a tonne of tech debt, including bad encryption UX, which is why we rebuilt it as Element X. Web /Desktop is yet to follow, although we’ve started it here: https://github.com/element-hq/aurora https://github.com/element-hq/aurora

clueless 1y ago

So what are the best alternatives?

methuselah_in 1y ago
Xmpp! Was and is
- ezst 1y ago
  Second!

tomsonj 1y ago

from jabber/xmpp and back. time is a flat circle

arresin 1y ago
Why not just use jabber and omemo?
- ffsm8 1y ago
  I'm guessing because he doesn't just want to talk with himself
  - arresin 1y ago
    Touché

dzaima 1y ago

The issue of broken rooms was reportedly the database having gotten corrupted indexes, which affected a bunch of rooms (2/55 of ones I was in): https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/issues/18606#issuecomment-3038332995 https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/issues/18606#issuecomm.... Not much a protocol/implementation can do about that. It did take over 2 weeks for it to be resolved though, which is a rather long period of time. Also on the status page - https://status.matrix.org/incidents/8gljb3gtlv11 https://status.matrix.org/incidents/8gljb3gtlv11 (shows start at Jul 2, but I noticed it on Jun 28) After that was resolved, messages that were sent and received by/on other homeservers during that time never ended up on matrix.org, so much for federation :/

udev4096 1y ago
Wait, did anyone investigate on why messages were not stored by other homeservers? That's rather odd, given the selling point of matrix is federation
- dzaima 1y ago
  I've heard that messages not getting through federation in some cases is just a thing that can happen. How that's compatible with calling matrix as having good federation, I don't know.
  - Arathorn 1y ago
    I’m not aware of any scenarios, including this one, where messages don’t federate (unless the destination server has been unavailable and marked down, obviously).
  - udev4096 1y ago
    No, you are making things up. That cannot happen unless the homeservers are not configured properly. If you don't have anything to back that story up, I suggest you slow down on making matrix look bad
    - 1y ago

blfr 1y ago

I find Signal just unbeatable on all fronts: security, UX, ease of use, general thoughtfulness put into the product. It has the best simple media editor (for video clipping, blurring faces, compressing) I have ever seen casually built into the sending flow. Every time I use anything, from MS Teams to Whatsapp, I find myself wishing they were more like Signal.

Takennickname 1y ago
Signal is the worst of them all when it comes to self hosting.
- simfree 1y ago
  Signal's desktop app is slower to load and has less features than Element Desktop, despite both using the same stack of Electron and Sqlite.
- udev4096 1y ago
  Worst in terms of user freedom as well. Because according to moxie, everyone is incompetent to host their own. He was wrong
attendant3446 1y ago
My main problem with Signal is that it's a mobile app with a desktop companion app. Ideally, I would prefer a federated messenger, but I would be completely fine with Signal if it wasn't a mobile-only app (you can't use the desktop version without first having the mobile app).
- keysdev 1y ago
  And it forces you to have a number.
lousken 1y ago
tested signal years ago and the desktop client was literally unusable, would take major redesign to fix so i am assuming it is not better

vitonsky 1y ago

Yeah, Matrix UX is disgusting in every aspect. Every client looks bad, works slow and most of them have only subset of features. At 2025 year I still can't see online status when I use most popular server and client. When I use SDK as a developer, *I can't use encryption* for bots. I've created issue about it over year ago https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk/issues/363 https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk/issues/363 and maintainer just closed it as not planned to fix. Matrix Protocol is overcomplicated and ridiculous. As I understood, the reason of mentioned problem with lack of "online status" feature is a high network load that yields by presence status feature, so server owners just disable this feature. It is ridiculous that messenger who state it is "privacy focused" - can't handle encryption for bots and sell us idea that it's fine to log-in in my account on random site on internet. Because any site where i enter my password and secret key, may steal my password. The same thing with applications. "Reference implementation" of app is an Electron app that loads javascript from internet and may inject malware anytime. My impression is that Matrix is a scam to spy over people who blindly believe in security, like a Telegram does.

udev4096 1y ago
The last statement is totally uncalled for. Yes, matrix is not convenient and given it's far from ideal chat experience but that doesn't mean you are allowed to spread FUD. Matrix spec, clients, homeservers, etc are fully open source. No one is "scamming" anyone
- j45 1y ago
  No horses in this race for or against the Matrix group, but convenience, adoptability is a fair factor to look at in software, especially collaboration and interaction based software.
  - udev4096 1y ago
    It's gaining traction. Matrix will prevail, sooner or later. Don't give up on it just yet

Arcuru 1y ago

This also comes as the organization is preparing a coordinated update to fix 2 CVEs in the protocol [1], that were originally reported 6 months ago. [1] https://matrix.org/blog/2025/07/security-predisclosure/ https://matrix.org/blog/2025/07/security-predisclosure/

Arathorn 1y ago
fwiw these CVEs weren’t reported 6 months ago; they were found during a project which has been running for 6 months.
- Arcuru 1y ago
  Oh interesting! I guess I read that post wrong, thanks for clarifying. I would be interested in learning more context around this issue once you are able to share, so hopefully there will be a report/post/etc after the embargo lifts.

yobid20 1y ago

Every time it was suggested to adopt matrix into our platform, we took one look at the protocol docs and said NOPE.

Arathorn 1y ago
What bit of the protocol docs made you nope out?

j45 1y ago

Would be interested to hear about alternatives.

arp242 1y ago

Here's what I wrote in 2019 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592195): "The reason for Slack's success is probably because it's a "turn key solution": you register your company, invite your employees, enter your CC, and you're good to go." "With a lot of these open solutions things are more complex. I think we should really focus on providing a good UX here if we want more adoption." This seems unchanged, or even worse. Arathorn recommended modular.im in a reply, which now redirects to https://element.io/pricing https://element.io/pricing, and "set up a server" just redirects to GitHub, and the only other option is "Talk to an expert" – yeah, no. Self-hosting is great but realistically, lots of people are just not interested, and that's fine too. And even if they are: having a simple option to quickly evaluate $the_thing is probably a good idea. This is of course in addition to all the technical problems outlined in this post, which I also reported in 2019: "opening https://riot.im/app/ https://riot.im/app/ makes Firefox use 100% CPU and my laptops fan spin; I closed it after 10 seconds of just a loading animation"

iforgotpassword 1y ago

To add to the pile: - The web client doesn't load any images/media anymore for me in new sessions. I log in, I cross authenticate with another client, no images load. At work I've a very old browser session going and everything works. - We host synapse at work to explore feasibility. Been going on for about 9 months now. Public profile lookup is disabled. This breaks inviting anyone from our company from another server, when the inviting user is using element. Because element tries to query the user info first, and if that fails with an unexpected error code, it will not allow you to continue sending the invitation. There's obviously an issue open for months now, where multiple people suggested they just add a warning that it couldn't check if the user exists, with a "continue anyways" button, but the devs prefer to come up with idiotic excuses why that would be a bad idea. I did some quick research myself then, and it looks like the profile lookup is relayed through the server of the inviting user to the server of the user to be invited. The inviter's server converts any http error code from the invitee's server that is "not valid" to a generic error, that element then chokes on, here: https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/blob/1920dfff40ad1078071e099a2afbfa31a5409e6b/synapse/handlers/profile.py#L127 https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/blob/1920dfff40ad10780... i.e. Only 404 is valid, according to code and comment there. But IN THE SAME FUCKING SOURCE FILE, they return a 403 if profile lookup is disabled: https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/blob/1920dfff40ad1078071e099a2afbfa31a5409e6b/synapse/handlers/profile.py#L526 https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/blob/1920dfff40ad10780... Can't get any better than this I guess. Cobbled together bullshit. I hope my company will consider this experiment failed soon and switch to slack or something. Anything.

kuschku 1y ago
> The web client doesn't load any images/media anymore for me in new sessions. I log in, I cross authenticate with another client, no images load. At work I've a very old browser session going and everything works. That sounds like something with authenticated media has gone really wrong. Do the fetch requests for the media fail, or does it not even attempt to make the requests? Is there an error message in the logs? Regarding the invite issue, could you please clarify in which versions of element (web/desktop, android, iOS, elementX) you've seen the issue, and in which dialogs (search for user, create new room, invite users to existing room)?

mystraline 1y ago

We had a variation on this discussion a few days ago here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44591820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44591820 I discussed that their primary server had a child porn/child sex assault imagery problem. Others who had similar concerns were completely dismissed and attacked by the Element/Matrix admins. I have to agree with this article. Matrix is basically dead, and not worth keeping around. And it starves the open source ecosystem from better things taking hold.

lousken 1y ago
youtube has this problem, discord has this problem and many other platforms what do those platforms do to combat child stuff? i don't like to dismiss anything but it is something all platforms and even multi billion dollar ones struggle with eu tries to decrypt e2e chats while you can see this stuff everywhere without encryption and nothing is being done to combat this on these major platforms as discord and whatsapp are getting shittier, i still keep it around for talking with friends, having my own server is not that hard and there are zero issues compared to main matrix.org server, just couple dollars for vle2 on ovh is sufficient
- hammyhavoc 1y ago
  The big platforms always use a variety of solutions. Always some kind of database of hashes of known CSAM available via an API. Always human beings on a trust and safety team. Takes considerable time, money, and emotional toll. Not just anyone can access all of the SaaS databases and it's approved on a case-by-case basis. Obviously not all CSAM is in these databases, and gen AI output adds another hurdle to preventing this kind of malicious behaviour. Personally, I feel a potential solution could be that user clients could opt into referencing hashes of media before it is downloaded, and that could either be handled by their home server, or a third-party. However, something like that is really idealism and not realistic at this point, despite being a great solution in a perfect world where people maintain encryption, yet don't expose themselves to CSAM inadvertently. In terms of the Matrix.org homeserver, perhaps an alternative (though would prove unpopular) is only allowing Matrix.org users to upload media if they're a paying supporter of the Matrix.org homeserver with a valid payment method on their account, thus obviously linking their identity to their account. https://matrix.org/membership/ https://matrix.org/membership/ The knock-on effect would be that it may offload some users onto their own infrastructure and alleviate the moneypit of a public instance, or directly fund the public instance itself if they do choose to support it financially. The Matrix.org instance doesn't support users adding bridges, so it isn't that much of a stretch to forbid media uploads from non-supporters. Portable identities would make this a no-brainer, but even without them, I still feel as if the public instance is largely an incredibly generous demo to help folks take Matrix for a spin. Decentralisation is such a major selling point that's vastly underutilized. I do think that people should at least attempt to become decentralized and manage their own community by themselves, be it public or private. Large public homeservers are always going to be considerable targets for this kind of problem. It's a lot of digital eggs in one digital basket for a lot of reasons. Nothing stopping people uploading images onto a third-party file storage system and providing the URL if they absolutely need to share a screenshot or similar on the public Matrix.org instance. Anyway, fleeting thoughts.

jasonvorhe 1y ago

I agree with all of it. I abandoned Matrix about a year ago and never looked back. Something's very smelly about their history, broken promises and overall quality.

kniffy 1y ago

I want to like matrix, but I had to give up my homeserver. For reasons that are unclear to me I was added to the matrix.org homeserver blacklist, with no communication on why or response to my asking why. Eventually I noticed some issue with the database, it having grown many hundreds of GB (something about my users being stuck in matrix.org rooms that they're blacklisted from, I guess) so I rm -rf'd it and that's that. :\

ezst 1y ago
Could it be that your needs would be covered by XMPP? You can run that on a RPi in a shoebox.
- kniffy 1y ago
  Probably, yeah, though I'm not familiar with the ecosystem yet. It seems like ejabberd is written in erlang, which is promising.
  - ezst 1y ago
    > I'm not familiar with the ecosystem yet. It seems like ejabberd is written in erlang I highly recommend ejabberd: it's one of the easiest server software I ever had to sysadmin. It's rock-solid and never gets in your way. It also packs everything you need for modern instant messaging and audio/video calls. Install it, open few firewall ports, define some DNS SRV records, and you are good to go. > which is promising. I mean, ejabberd is what WhatsApp and FB Messenger started from :-)

hammyhavoc 1y ago

"Pull requests welcome" is all I can say to anyone who puts energy into long rants about the "state" of a FOSS project. If you think volunteer dev is so easy then get stuck in and be the change you want to see.

AAAAaccountAAAA 1y ago
Matrix is not a some sort of volunteer project. It is used by NATO as their NI2CE, as well as by many other governmental entities. Matrix runs on European taxpayer's money.
- hammyhavoc 1y ago
  You're thinking of Element: https://element.io/case-studies/nato https://element.io/case-studies/nato Now do Nextcloud and many other projects. It's FOSS. There are volunteer contributors. https://matrix.org/blog/2025/06/dispelling-myths/ https://matrix.org/blog/2025/06/dispelling-myths/ > Matrix is not just an open standard for secure communication, it’s an openly governed and collaboratively developed ecosystem of projects powered by a growing community of volunteers and vendors. In this way, Matrix exemplifies the open source ethos, encourages greater innovation, and defies those who would try to build businesses based on extractive behavior and vendor lock-in. Oh look, more calls for volunteers, despite "running on European taxpayer money": https://conference.matrix.org/volunteer/ https://conference.matrix.org/volunteer/ Sorry, but idiotic remarks like this stink of having an agenda. You don't even put a name and identity to your HN account and provide zero sources. At best, you're clueless, at worst you're spreading FUD.
  - AAAAaccountAAAA 1y ago
    Oh, it seems you are here to just troll and insult everyone. Matrix by calling it just a some sort of volunteer project run by nerds in basements, and those too, who are not pleased with it's problems. What exactly does have a "call for volunteers" to haul around stuff in a some sort of conference has to do with anything? What has Nextcloud to do with this? You'd have known that Matrix ecosystem has lots of paid professionals working on it, if you made even a cursory research on the subject before starting to write cheeky comments. You claimed the problems with Matrix can be solved with a few pull requests. It's your duty to back it up.

the-anarchist 1y ago

This link has 71 comments and 84 points and is from 4 hours ago yet it shows for me on place 197 (page 7) of HN. Is Ycombinator (or one of the intermediary investment funds) invested in New Vector?

Arathorn 1y ago
neither YC nor any YC-intermediary is an investor in NV. Instead, you're likely seeing that HN has circuit-breakers against high-temperature threads which turn into pile-ons (whether they're justified or not).

Arathorn 1y ago

Speaking as project lead for Matrix, I obviously feel pretty gutted when someone gives up like this. Doubly so when the straw that broke their back wasn't even a Matrix problem, but really gnarly postgres corruption (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44618702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44618702). Firstly, I'm sorry they had such a bad time, and as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44621077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44621077 there's a tonne of things we've (i've) done wrong. That said, there's a bunch of points raised here which aren't fully accurate. So for the sake of completeness: > The official Matrix homeserver, Synapse, was built with a tech stack ill-suited for its long-term goals and scale These days Synapse is hybrid Rust for the fast paths (https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/tree/develop/rust https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/tree/develop/rust) and Python 3 + mypy for the rest. Huge servers like matrix.org (150K concurrent users) run fine on it. I'm not convinced the "ill-suited tech stack" crit holds. > Community projects like Dendrite emerged to rewrite the homeserver more sensibly Dendrite is not a community project and never has been; it was written by the core Matrix team, and then when we realised Synapse had critical mass we backported most of its architectural improvements to Synapse. > New Vector seems to be chasing too many goals simultaneously, with no clear direction No? we killed all the sidequests in order to just do Element Web, Element X, Element Call and Synapse. > Just a few months ago, they migrated to the Matrix Authentication Service (MAS), which was supposed to be a leap forward, yet lacks even essential security features like 2FA/MFA. No? the whole point of MAS is that it lets you delegate straight through to a proper IDP which provides 2FA/MFA/Passkeys etc. > Launching the app requires network synchronization that hampers responsiveness No? Turn off your network, launch Element X, and see that it launches fine? Obviously it does need to talk to the server to retrieve new data. I guess there was the https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-ios/issues/4102 https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-ios/issues/4102 issue, but that was fixed 3 weeks ago. > The Matrix.org service, especially its matrix.org homeserver, is also slow matrix.org feels pretty good to me these days, even on my mammoth account (other than when talking in Matrix HQ) > On my laptop, I’ve been using iamb, a TUI Matrix client, and even there I experience delays of tens of seconds when launching it, and a lag of several seconds between pressing Enter and seeing the message actually appear in the chat room. I'm assuming that's because iamb hasn't enabled sliding sync, and/or hasn't implemented local echo, or has some other perf bug. Or perhaps you're on an old build. Given it's using the same matrix-rust-sdk as Element X it should in theory be instant. > And that’s certainly not iamb’s fault, because it’s written in Rust, btw™. ... > the lack of proper first-party libraries for 3rd-party developers to build on top of, it became visible that the once-vibrant ecosystem, does no longer look so healthy This is really weird. It's not clear that the Matrix Foundation should publish software at all, to be honest - it's effectively a standards body. W3C doesn't write browsers or web servers any more, for instance. As it happens, we have invested a huge amount of effort into publishing a flagship first-party client SDK anyway: matrix-rust-sdk. And matrix-js-sdk is still there too. We very deliberately have handed off other SDKs to the broader community to maintain, which they do a great job of. Surely the fact that go-matrix got surpassed by Tulir's superior go-mautrix fork is a good thing, not a bad thing? > Development on Synapse alternatives has stagnated The conduits seem as active as ever, from what I can see, even if there's been forking. Dendrite development has stalled, but this reflects lack of funding rather than the ecosystem failing, and the core team at Element having to put all its effort it into one server (Synapse) rather than splitting between two. > Other clients like SchildiChat are faced with the dilemma of continuing their existing work or starting over by forking Element X That's just false? SchildiChat seems to have quite happily forked EX into SchildiChat Next years ago and looks to be doing a great job of it; ahead of EX itself with many features (e.g. it already has spaces!) > Speaking of SDKs, New Vector appears to lack a coherent technology strategy. They’ve built infrastructure in Python and Node.js/TypeScript, moved into Go for the Synapse replacement, and now maintain a Rust-based client SDK, while abandoning their Go client library (which is now community-maintained). NV's stack is Python+Rust and Node/TS on the serverside, and Rust + (TS/Swift/Kotlin) on the clientside. It's true that over 11 years of work we've also sprouted a few Go projects (e.g. complement), and there's even some Perl (sytest), but that is very much the minority. > Especially for an organization that appears perpetually cash-strapped. New Vector’s approach feels more like indecisiveness than the right tool for the right job when looking through their repositories on GitHub. It feels unfortunate that the OP is complaining that NV doesn't provide enough 1st party implementations in different languages any more, while also complaining NV has too many languages in use. > Matthew, if you’re reading this: We both know that naming things is one of the hardest problems in computer science, right after cache invalidation. I totally get the geeky, 31337 thrill a name like Matrix might evoke, but believe me when I say that using generic names is a bad idea. Things would have been a lot easier for everyone involved if you had at least rebranded Riot to something more distinctive. For future rebrandings, I highly recommend using the Synthwave Band Name Generator and some good old human creativity. :-) Honestly Matrix & Element seem to get quite a lot of traction and successful press despite the generic names. For instance, I just spun up Tor and googled the word Element, and Element.io came up as the 2nd hit after the skateboard brand (and the whole sidebar). The data just doesn't back up this particular criticism. Overall, though, I get why the OP is frustrated and has given up. All I can say is that we're working away on getting Element X to parity with Element as fast as we can so we can retire the 'classic' app, at which point I think much of the pain people are experiencing will go away. It's taking longer than I'd like given the work is entangled with building and deploying government messaging systems as a way to keep the lights on, but if anything all the negativity here makes me more determined and stubborn to keep plugging away to dig out of the transitional period we're in, and get back on track.

sitzkrieg 1y ago

i ran a matrix homeserver for just shy of 4 years and it was the lowest user, highest maintenance service i have ever ran. thats completely putting aside the user experience issues too

floren 1y ago

I'd been maintaining my own Synapse homeserver for years mainly to chat with one friend, who uses the matrix.org server. Images shared between us break on a regular basis, and yes they broke for a bit during the authenticated media changeover but also since then he just periodically doesn't receive images I send. It happened again last week, I said "fuck it, the devs will just claim it's my fault if I ask for help, let's just take this to Signal". I'll probably shut down my homeserver once I've figured out alternative ways to access the handful of communities I also happen to follow via Matrix. I have no doubt a reply will be forthcoming soon about how that's all a coincidental thing which isn't actually Matrix's fault but I've been reading those replies here for years and the actual situation doesn't improve.

Arathorn 1y ago
I'm not sure where the "devs will claim it's my fault if i ask for help" trope is coming from - we really do want Matrix to work :( Do you have a bug report of where this is happening, on what set of clients? A bunch of people have been reporting images not loading, but I haven't seen anything actionable. Is it possible that this is anti-image-spam protection kicking in?
- floren 1y ago
  > Is it possible that this is anti-image-spam protection kicking in? Man I can't see where the trope of developers implying it's the user's fault is coming from
  - Arathorn 1y ago
    …anti-image-spam protection happens serverside, configured by the room admin. it’s nothing to do with the user’s fault. i’m trying to help fix your problem. can you point me at details so I can investigate?
    - floren 1y ago
      Who's the room admin for a private chat between myself and a single other user?

wltr 1y ago

Element X works very well for my use case. My only complaint is that for some reason I’m unable to search through my messages. Even in private chats, there’s no such thing as search.

Arathorn 1y ago
We're on the case :) https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/issues/5350 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/issues/5350
- wltr 1y ago
  Hey Matthew, thanks for the feedback! I didn’t know how to properly search for this to learn more. Wish you for this task to succeed. It feels it’s more complicated than I thought, because of the federation and maybe encryption too, I assume.