12 ms·

I wonder why matrix isn't more widerspread at this point. It's open, it's e2ee, it works, it has client lib for integration with any tool.. What makes it not m

by bsaul 8mo ago

I wonder why matrix isn't more widerspread at this point. It's open, it's e2ee, it works, it has client lib for integration with any tool.. What makes it not more popular ? Is it the federated approach ? The client applications that don't look really fancy ?

bratwurst3000 8mo ago
mostly the federate aproach. Most people dont want to think about anything network related. Element is ok as an app imho
coolius 8mo ago
For me the issue that prevented me from really using matrix is that none of the big clients support multiple servers. As a non enterprise user, this has prevented me from seriously adopting it several times.
- Arathorn 8mo ago
  Element X finally has this on Android (in Labs) now. Web & iOS will follow.
- tionis 8mo ago
  Fluffychat does and I would argue is one of the big ones. Its however quite mobile optimized (basically more like WhatsApp, less like slack).
nkmnz 8mo ago
Search is essentially broken and completely useless. If I’m mistaken, maybe someone might chime in and explain how I can make it work. But right now, the only way to search for messages is to export them and search in the text file.
- j1elo 8mo ago
  If that's true, it sounds terrible, and a reason enough to not consider it at all. So much of the work in bug organizations is about just searching for past conversations when a similar issue had been discussed... Search must be flawless.
  - olafmol 8mo ago
    It’s open source right? You know what to do ;)
    - rolymath 8mo ago
      This is the fastest way to get people to say "I hate proprietary solutions but at least they work"
      - throwaway150 8mo ago
        Then you should use proprietary solutions. Open source solutions are written by developers for themselves. They are not writing it for you. They have no reason to write them for you. You are not paying them. It is a labor of love they are doing for themselves. Yet as a bonus they are offering it to you for free as a gift with the hope that if it doesn't work for you, you can improve it or hire someone you can. If you only care about consuming open source but not contributing, by all means you should buy proprietary solutions.
        jodrellblank 8mo ago
        This is a subthread of "I wonder why matrix isn't more widespread at this point". When people reply why it doesn't work for them, that's not time for "you didn't say thank you". > "They are not writing it for you." From matrix.org[1]: 'The values we follow are: Accessibility rather than elitism. Empathy rather than contrariness.' ... 'act as a neutral custodian for Matrix ... for the greater benefit of the whole ecosystem, not benefiting or privileging any single player or subset of players. For clarity: the Matrix ecosystem is defined as anyone who uses the Matrix protocol. This includes (non-exhaustively): End-users of Matrix clients. Anyone using Matrix for data communications' > "They have no reason to write them for you." How are Matrix/Element going to get anywhere with their mission to replace proprietary chat networks if they don't write their new one for millions of ordinary people to be willing to use? [1] https://matrix.org/foundation/about/ https://matrix.org/foundation/about/
- Arathorn 8mo ago
  Unencrypted room search should Just Work for unencrypted rooms (it uses postgres FTS under the hood). Encrypted room search should also Just Work... but only on Element Desktop (which uses tantivy to do clientside search). We are in the process of porting this to Element X (and Element Web), but after an initial spike over the summer we're waiting for either funding or manpower to finish it.
  - pkulak 8mo ago
    I just added search. ;) https://github.com/pkulak/matui/releases/tag/v0.6.0 https://github.com/pkulak/matui/releases/tag/v0.6.0 For encrypted rooms it just starts pulling messages down and looking for substrings... but it's actually works pretty well if you don't want to search back to the beginning of time.
    - Arathorn 8mo ago
      cool! would be even cooler to hook it up to https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/issues/5350 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/issues/5350 when it should then just work? matui looks super fun - you should come tell https://matrix.to/#/#twim:matrix.org https://matrix.to/#/#twim:matrix.org about it :)
      - pkulak 8mo ago
        Oh, very nice! I'll absolutely hook into that once it's ready.
  - nh2 8mo ago
    What about 1:1 chat? I'm using Element X and there seems to be no search button for messages at all. So I cannot even search for "shopping" to find the shopping list, or "address" to find the address a friend sent me some days ago. It is simple to see why the normal user will have a bad everyday experience. The app uses 160 MB user data on my phone which fits a lot of text, why cannot I just search it?
    - 8mo ago
andylynch 8mo ago
I think it’s a few things - lots of places kind of Teams by default - or Slack or discord m, even WhatsApp - or in intensive cases, things like Refinitiv, Bloomberg, and, Symphony , which is kind of federated, but adds all the automation and also governance stuff needed for 100MM trades via IM and the like.
- blitzar 8mo ago
  > governance stuff needed for 100MM trades via IM We have come a long way from Yahoo messenger days. https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/oil-traders-prepare-fond-farewells-to-yahoo-messenger-idUSKCN10J0SO/ https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/oil-traders-prepa...
tapoxi 8mo ago
Enterprises get Teams for free with O365, or use Slack if they really care about the experience. Most individuals don't care and use iMessage/WhatsApp. Those that do use Signal since it's dramatically easier.
- rolymath 8mo ago
  Teams has not been free with O365 for years now.
  - Quarrel 8mo ago
    I use Teams all the time (although not because it is what I'd choose..). Mostly just completely free tier, although I do have O365. On the free tier I think the main restriction is the 60 minute limit on groups > 2? Don't get me wrong, MS are almost as bad as Google in segregating their chat/video call/conferencing offerings, and even if you did know the names last week, they've probably changed them this week.
    - rolymath 8mo ago
      No I mean they were recently forced to unbundle by the EU or face monopoly claims. I guess they saw people paid anyway and unbundled everywhere else.
      - Quarrel 8mo ago
        Yeah, I see. TBH, I suspect it will only be good for MS to unbundle it. Of course, I wish they'd unbundle the whole suite. I am never ever going to run the Outlook, Access + whatever that I am forced to install to get Excel and Word.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
galbar 8mo ago
I am a daily user, family and friends chatting on Matrix. My take is that there are two layers of friction: a) people that care about chat encryption and would be willing to change, already did, to Telegram and/or Signal. "I'm not going to install yet another chat app" is a real answer by a friend of mine b) no one wants to either host their own server, nor pay someone to host it for them. If it wasn't for me and a one of my friends, none of the people I chat with daily would be on Matrix. And yes, there is the matrix.org server. Out of the ~13 people I chat frequently with, 1 is on matrix.org. "What's the point of changing apps if I'm still going to be using the centralized server" is another answer I've gotten. I don't know what the solution to this dynamic is other than us, the power users, setting it up and paying for the group of people around us.
- INTPenis 8mo ago
  What about maintaining encryption for an entire room of clients? I heard it's very difficult and prone to errors. Do you enforce it?
  - Arnt 8mo ago
    I use matrix. Every chat room I use is unencrypted and all have at least one matrix.org user. I assume it can be encrypted but the usability is such that in practice it's cleartext.
    - cge 8mo ago
      As a counterexample: I use Matrix along with ~30-50 people, on a federated server, and every room is encrypted. After sufficiently stressing to people that they need to save their secure backup key, we've had few problems with encryption usability.
      - Arnt 8mo ago
        That reminds me of RFC 1925 Truth 3.
BLKNSLVR 8mo ago
I ran a server for a while a couple (maybe a couple of couples) of years ago, and client devices periodically disconnected and had to be re-setup / re-authenticated from scratch, losing the chat history and being a general hassle. It happened often enough that I got jack of it. I like the idea, a lot, but the implementation at the time annoyed me away from it. I just don't have time / motivation at the moment to have another go. We ended up on Discord for family communication and it works well. I know Discord is on the lower end of 'one of the bad guys', but for the same reason I don't re-setup Matrix I don't move off Discord. At least it's not WhatsApp... I did try to get them onto Signal, but I don't think Signal did group chat back then - which means it must have been before 2020.
megous 8mo ago
Bloated server implementation with lack of alternatives and a complicated protocol.
jasonfrost 8mo ago
I don't remember why but I had to download a separate notification app that pushed notis
munin 8mo ago
Matrix is an unserious project and the client ecosystem is a train wreck. The server ecosystem is not much better. The Element people, who are kind of the default Matrix people because as far as I can tell are the only people getting paid, will tell you that this is because a bunch of IT integrator companies unjustly profit off of the open source work by selling services to European companies but contributing none back to either Element or other open source Matrix projects. The first issue I'd like to address is that one: as a small business, I tried to purchase software from Element and was told that I was not large enough to justify their time. Fair enough, I only wanted a 200 seat license and I was willing to pay per seat, but I guess they really want the high value contracts if they have a limited sales team. However, it is a bit much to go from that experience to their justification about the structure of their project. Maybe they should think about taking some sales opportunities that present themselves? Then there are branding and release decisions around the clients that Element makes. There are two projects in the client space from Element: a client called Element, and a client called Element X. Element X is the newer one. Element (do you see how this is getting confusing yet) is simultaneously at different times an Electron desktop app, a mobile app, and a web app. Element X is becoming all of those things but the feature parity is not even between them. Element supports "legacy" Jitsi for voice and video calling while Element X supports newer Element call - which is different from legacy Element, Element call is a webRTC implementation native to the Matrix ecosystem while the "legacy" Jitsi is a way to send clients a URL for Jitsi calls and have them shell out to another app to actually implement the call. Fair enough. However, the desktop Element X client does not yet support new Element call but the "old" Element client does support both "legacy" Jitsi and new Element call. And the Element X mobile app cannot call the old Element mobile app - but I think the other way around can. Even getting your head around this as an IT person is confusing. To add insult to injury the new Element X app on mobile is in some ways a downgrade because they integrated the cloud vendor push notification services into the app, so even though you have "sovereign" and "self-hosted" infrastructure you're still, on a good day, leaking meta-data about your chats back through to the people you were trying to decouple yourself from anyway. You can run your own push notification services for this mostly if you want and all your mobile clients are Android but like, why. Then, there's desktop client usability. During account setup, Element/Matrix makes a big ceremony out of establishing your cryptographic identity. Perfect. And as part of that you write down a 10-ish something word passphrase that is a recovery sequence for said identity. Perfect. Then some network hiccup happens that disturbs the Element client like some kind of prey animal and it spontaneously logs you out. You log back in, but there are no fields or options visible to use that recovery passphrase to restore your cryptographic identity. Your only option is to reset your identity, which makes all prior chats you have had unreadable. That part at least makes sense but why have this recovery story if it is not tested or usable in the app? This is probably an Element thing but in my research I have not found a client that people say is more robust, though at this point I'm open to trying. It's also possible that the way most people use this is as a web app, which is to be fair more robust. It does seem worse from a security point of view to have one central web server dealing in most of your users plain text, though. At that point, why not use Mattermost? I guess they're even more hostile to their users/customers, for some reason. Finally, there's the server ecosystem. The thing that is frustrating to me here is the interplay between Synapse, Matrix Authentication Service (MAS), and OIDC. This, as far as I can tell, is all intentionally hostile to drive you into Element's commercial product offering. Which I find especially galling because they won't sell your their commercial offering anyway, so you're going to have to figure it out for yourself. Synapse has some legacy support for OIDC which you are going to need to enable for backwards compatibility. However, for forwards compatibility with Element X, you are going to need MAS. Synapse is a large, mature Python project. MAS is a single Rust binary which is simultaneously a server and CLI to do user management. You'll need both configured against your OIDC provider. Why didn't the new OIDC features just get integrated into Synapse? I think that a lot of this is an outcome of the fact that Element is very literally in a "the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born" situation at this time. I do have a lot of sympathy for being in the position of having huge companies - especially companies as annoying as IT outsourcing and integration - make a line of business out of configuring and installing your open source software. However, I have to say, having spent some of my professional life now also configuring and installing this open source software, I understand why those IT outsourcing companies have a moat. If the open source software was easier to install and use, perhaps those companies would have less of a moat. It seems to me that at least some of the story from Element is that if they make the ecosystem harder to use and understand, then people will take their money and the business will survive. However, in my experience, they won't take your money anyway.
nickslaughter02 8mo ago
The UK is the number one enemy of security and encryption. Did you read and compile all of the libraries and clients yourself?
LeelaAI 8mo ago
I enjoy self hosting stuff with Docker. Matrix/synapse is one of the more difficult / PitA projects I’ve ever gotten up and running.
snorremd 8mo ago
When me and a bunch of friends and acquaintances switched away from Slack a little under a year ago (I think) we looked into Matrix. One of the primary requirements was that even our non-technical friends should be able to use it. At the time Matrix/Element had recently launched their Matrix 2.0 efforts and I tried setting up the whole stack without resorting to their all in one shell-script meant for non-production use. I did not mind hosting four different servers (Synapse, Matrix Auth Service (MAS), Call, etc), but did find the integration and config job a bit tedious. The main blocker though was the lack of an invite-system in the new Matrix Auth Server. Also the fact that the Element X app uses a new Livekit based call server while other clients/apps use a different approach is also something not great. We ended up going for Mattermost. One service easily hosted with Docker. One app, and easy invites. While I think federation would be cool, right now Mattermost was a bit simpler to get up and running. Element seems more focused on enterprise and government contracts than self-hosters. I think this is fine, they need to pay their bills. But Matrix 2.0 for self-hosters might need a better story right now.
- Arathorn 8mo ago
  When we first announced Matrix 2.0 implementations in Sept 2024 we made a major error by not providing an easy distro, so I feel your pain. We fast-followed with https://github.com/element-hq/ess-helm https://github.com/element-hq/ess-helm as a really easy distribution (albeit using helm charts) based on the paid offering we provide for folks for NATO and the UN and folks. It really is trivial to install now - e.g. here's a live-install from FOSDEM last weekend: https://youtu.be/EngsGD30Ow0?t=929 https://youtu.be/EngsGD30Ow0?t=929 Meanwhile if you're allergic to k8s I went and published a trivial docker-compose at https://github.com/element-hq/element-docker-demo/ https://github.com/element-hq/element-docker-demo/ too.
  - horsawlarway 8mo ago
    While I definitely appreciate that this exists now (as another person who considered matrix and ended up passing due to deployment complexity) this is not what I think most folks would reasonably call a "trivial" docker compose setup. It's a 16 service compose setup, complete with init hacks, inline docker-file builds to use those init hacks, a whole bunch of required config templates, some services that aren't clear if they're examples or requirements (ex - why is mailhog in there? just give me the SMTP env vars), and just a lot of general complexity still. This feels like several discrete services that don't play nicely, herded together like cats. It doesn't feel like a solid and planned set of tools. --- From my end - it's not enough to just stand it up. If this is my primary messaging tool and I'm hosting it, I need to have a feel for how it might break, and how I can fix it when it does. Hell, I'm not even allergic to k8s (I host dozens of services on a baremetal cluster), but I am allergic to helm for very similar concerns: Complexity at the self-hosting scale (individual to small business) is rarely worth the additional overhead, and helm rapidly makes what should be simple yaml file deployments a complex, abstracted process. Your docker compose has a similar feel. My first rule of thumb is "How long will it take me to manually read and understand a compose file while converting it to a k8s deployment?" This one looks onerous, not trivial.
netdevphoenix 8mo ago
Consensus. People like to follow what the majority does even if it's suboptimal.
- em-bee 8mo ago
  not just like to follow, but are forced to follow.
Anonyneko 8mo ago
Compared to Telegram, it feels like using a laggy MSN Messenger. The experience, both client and server-wise, just feels very unpolished. It's no single big thing, it's more like death by a thousand cuts. I was bullish on Matrix because it's so extensible, but in the end I realized that only the default client experience matters as that's the one everyone will be using. And it just isn't there yet. In the end, all the group chats I was in migrated to Discord or Telegram, so I had no more reason to use it...
- Arathorn 8mo ago
  We explicitly built Element X to be competitive with Telegram's UX - I'm guessing that the feedback here is on the crusty old Element Classic app, which hasn't been touched for 3 years now, and definitely did feel like a laggy MSN by comparison. Meanwhile Element X feels really really good - especially on iOS, but also Android has improved loads in the last few months (after tweaking the rustc ARM compilation flags properly, doh)
  - bluebarbet 8mo ago
    Thank you for your work. For my money there is literally nothing that free computing needs more right now than a consumer-ready open standard for encrypted IM. Matrix has been the obvious candidate for a decade. Let's get there.
    - Arathorn 8mo ago
      thanks. we are doing our best, despite various a few misadventures along the way :)
guerrilla 8mo ago
The UIs are terrible. I've tried it a few different times with friends and we gave up each time.
mightyham 8mo ago
I publish a Firefox plugin and needed help a few years ago. Not to get too far down that rabbit hole, but they suddenly blocked my plugin because they couldn't build my source code, even though the issue with their build environment was pretty obvious. Anyways, I had to use their Matrix support channel and they recommended Element. I was immensely frustrated with how buggy the experience was, and it turned me off from ever trying it again.
- trvz 8mo ago
  You’re not alone, their iOS apps have 3.4 and 3.6 star ratings. Anything below 4.0 isn’t good. I’ve downloaded them, and neither has proper dark mode icons. Instant fail.
polski-g 8mo ago
Imagine your parents: * need to use size 18 font on their phone * refer to the phone as "that fancy music player" * calls you when their favorite blog doesn't "load" * every password they've ever had is "password1" Now you want to tell them to "download this new app, generate a private key, store it as a backup somewhere. When you get a new phone, you need to re-import it" Good luck with that.
- Bender 8mo ago
  I assume the government installations are integrating it with LDAP/AD or at least they should. This assumes both chat and LDAP/AD are logging to a SIEM for the auditors.
- onraglanroad 8mo ago
  "load" is the correct term. What would you call it?
  - tormeh 8mo ago
    You just don't say the sentence at all and instead choose a technology from one of the big tech companies.
- onraglanroad 8mo ago
  Also, I'd encourage the use of "passphrase" rather than "password". No-one normal can remember tr5vgh6##t5, but something like "$firstpetsname notatafarm garbagecan" is secure and easily remembered.
  - tsimionescu 8mo ago
    Having tried to use that, I can assure you that no one actually (a) remembers their passphrase, nor (b) is willing to type it in when it does come up. It's a fun idea, but it's actually much worse UX than even a secure password.
- pkulak 8mo ago
  Fluffy Chat is great on iOS. My mom uses it; it respects system fonts very nicely. I get the frustration with encryption though. I wish there was a way to mark a homeserver as default _NOT_ encrypted. My homeserver is in my closet. Given the choice, I'd rather take the extremely tiny opsec hit for all the simplicity and usability benefits of unencrypted rooms.
broken-kebab 8mo ago
Matrix is not out-of-the-box thing. For hosting it you really have to go through some trial-and-error before it works as you'd like, and most self-hosting enthusiasts have pretty short span of said enthusiasm. For users its easier, but there are some idiosyncrasies in terminology, and concepts. There are docs but they really would benefit from human editing to become fully useful. Synapse in particular has a problem of existing in two places on GitHub, and the one which is obsolete somehow comes first in searches, and appears in AI responses constantly. Which I guess shoots quite a lot of first tries in their steps.
- Klonoar 8mo ago
  Running an alternative like Conduwuit is a one step cargo build process. Been using it for some time now and it works great with Element X.
  - JadedBlueEyes 8mo ago
    You might want to move to a maintained fork like https://continuwuity.org https://continuwuity.org if you haven't already
    - Klonoar 8mo ago
      I'm on that, I just got the names mixed up - but thanks for linking the better one!
domoritz 8mo ago
The UX has many rough edges especially in the default element apps. UX was the primary reason my university department passed on switching to matrix from slack so far.
tormeh 8mo ago
It's a bit shit at being WhatsApp. Slow, buggy, and feature-poor. The unique selling points are very compelling, but only for a small niche. Fortunately for Matrix, that niche includes a lot of places with big budgets, but it does not include consumers.
superkuh 8mo ago
Matrix is controlled by a single company Riot.im/Element.io who decides what the protocol is now. Element.io's income stream is hosting these extremely fat synapse servers for government. It doesn't really care about anything else. The Matrix Foundation has abdicated from it's role as of a couple years back (ref: https://element.io/blog/element-to-adopt-agplv3/ https://element.io/blog/element-to-adopt-agplv3/ https://matrix.org/blog/2023/11/06/future-of-synapse-dendrite/ https://matrix.org/blog/2023/11/06/future-of-synapse-dendrit... https://blakes.dev/posts/2023-11-06-element-closing-matrix/ https://blakes.dev/posts/2023-11-06-element-closing-matrix/). And generally synapse servers RAM and storage requirements grow and grow and grow, with no effective mechanism to trim the DB, until it requires hundreds of GB of ram just to idle and it starts becoming very expensive and infeasible for non-government/corporate pocket books to pay for. Even with just a few users the min ram suggested is 8GB at the very start. For human people, for small social groups, Matrix in the form of the controlling Synapse server is infeasible over any period longer than a few years. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46376201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46376201 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617309 and the reports there or just ask around. I know Afternet gave up Matrix because of this despite really liking the features too, https://afternet.org/help/matrix https://afternet.org/help/matrix There are other Matrix protocol servers but none that implement the full protocol. Conduwuit was the most full featured but died, now there's https://continuwuity.org/ https://continuwuity.org/ and a tiny bit of hope. tldr; the Element Synapse matrix server uses too many resources (and they killed dendrite). We all wanted it to succeed but it was co-opted. Alternatives are not in control of the protocol, few, and of limited lifetime so far. XMPP and IRC are the better alternatives.
- preya2k 8mo ago
  There’s hundreds or thousands of people out there hosting Synapse for small groups and use cases. Ressource requirements for a couple of dozen or hundreds of people are pretty tame (mostly storage that grows fast). You can easily host Synapse on cheap VPS products for less than 5€/month. I’ve been doing this for multiple organizations and many years.
- panick21_ 8mo ago
  > It doesn't really care about anything else. That they don't care is unfair, they just do what makes them survive. > infeasible over any period longer than a few years. I know companies that have done so. The resources requriments are bit higher then some alternatives but its really not has crazy as you make out to be.
Aurornis 8mo ago
> What makes it not more popular ? Is it the federated approach ? The client applications that don't look really fancy ? It’s not that the UI doesn’t look fancy. The overall experience of using Matrix has a lot of catching up to do. Like many others on HN I was enthusiastic about it early on, but I’ve been so worn down by all of the little problems, random re-authentication issues that nobody can explain, and missing features that I found myself avoiding using it unless I really needed to talk to someone I couldn’t contact any other way. You can find isolated success stories about small groups who successfully use it for their group chat, but at the root of all of those stories is always one person who takes the role of very dedicated IT person to keep it all running and walk others through steps to fix it when it breaks. They’ve been churning a lot on features and design, which has added another layer of fatigue on top of it all. It’s hard to even discuss Matrix any more because every negative experience will get waved away with an explanation that it was a problem with an old app or version and you just need to try Element X and Matrix 2.0 or the newest release. However, it’s felt that way for years. I’ll revisit it again in a year but for now I’ve reached my limit for how much time I can put into trying to make a project work and stay working.
- bigfudge 8mo ago
  As someone who has dealt into this quite recently, I can confirm that it hasn’t really changed that much. The documentation for integrating clients and bots is just old or wrong or non-existent. The complexities of getting authentication right and even getting messages validated between two human clients was really much worse than it should’ve been and it’s just not in a position where normal people can use it just yet. That said, I’m hopeful that government adoption could make it right quite quickly. And adopting it within a managed setting would mean that the UX could be ironed out fairly quickly.
- etiam 8mo ago
  I think this is right. I just also want to toss in that (at least for Element in particular) the continuing lack of long-form composition or history navigation appears to be a liability with some contacts. At this point it's probably fine for chat format one-liners in the moment, but for the communications that have historically been going over e-mail as opposed to IRC it's something of a pain to use.
ufmace 8mo ago
The best way to understand why it isn't widespread is to spend 10 minutes attempting to use it to actually chat with some people you know. I don't know which issues you'll run into, but it's virtually guaranteed you'll run into a variety of incredibly dumb and inexplicable ones.
palata 8mo ago
I was very enthusiastic about Matrix a few years ago, but my experience has been relatively bad and I lost interest. Apart from the experience, I think that there is a fundamental issue in the way Matrix is built: the Matrix servers have access to a lot of metadata (at least last time I checked, but it feels quite fundamental to the protocol).
zeec123 8mo ago
The fact that a “contact” is just a room with me and my peer and renaming my contact changes the room name for both of us tells me the UX is an utter failure. How can this be acceptable?
panick21_ 8mo ago
Why would it be? Being open and e2ee is irrelevant for mpost people. Most private messaging is done in whatsapp and after that telegram. Telegram has spend more usability and less on most other things. Then it compete with Slack and Teams on the cooperate side, where it was much later and less optimized for it. Slack took much of that market. It did replace IRC in many places but that was only ever a small part of the market. Basically between Whatsapp, Teams and Slack most of the market is covered and nobody is really a big player.
pocksuppet 8mo ago
It doesn't work very well. To join a room by address, you type the address into several boxes until you find the right one. If you log out, all your private messages are deleted because they were encrypted and the key is saved nowhere.
- pkulak 8mo ago
  Keys are actually saved somewhere. On your homeserver, in a store itself encrypted by another key that only you (and your other clients) have. You can disregard that store and not use it at all, which I actually think is a totally valid use case. It turns Signal-style at that point.
Fabricio20 8mo ago
Personally what drove me away was all the thousands of little annoying things that you just dont have to deal with on other apps like Telegram or Discord or Slack. The final straw for me was the 2nd time losing all chat history because I got logged out on my browser and when logging back in and providing the super secure authentication key and resynchronizing, messages older than 7 days still didn't decrypt on all chats so I just lost all of that. Plus Element client being mega laggy and stuff (though I had a smoother experience with the third party Cinny client).
uoaei 8mo ago
It's akin to using Plex v Jellyfin for serving media files to others. If they're not technically savvy they really don't want to have to think about networking protocols and their fragility... so you just deal with Plex because at least it turns down the volume on constant calls to your support desk / personal mobile phone.
- abnercoimbre 8mo ago
  Have you heard of Emby? It seems to be closed-source. However you can still run it yourself [0]. UX appears to be better than Jellyfin, but I haven't tried either and not sure which one to go for. [0] https://emby.media https://emby.media
maelito 8mo ago
300 million users, not bad though.
- zaik 8mo ago
  Everytime I change my nickname in the XMPP room that is bridged to Matrix, the counter increases by one. Never used Matrix.
WhyNotHugo 8mo ago
Who exactly is the target audience? People who are really into e2ee and privacy use Signal. People who want open, federated networks, use XMPP. People who want something fancy with all the features, etc use Telegram or whatever. Matrix basically has a lot of hype and marketing around it (presumably due to being VC funded), but it's hard to see any appeal beyond that. And the protocol and spec are an absolute mess.
greentea23 8mo ago
Popularity is irrelevant imo, it's a general purpose FOSS tool. Ignore Element and matrix.org, the open protocol is what matters. These features are useful even if matrix never gains any network effect: 1. talking among a small-ish specific group that needs sovereign communication, e.g. when forming a company or a tight knit in person friend group 2. only data limit is the size of my harddrive 3. bridge to every other popular protocol 4. personal bots and automation with no restrictions 5. Unlimited and customizable clients with no restrictions 6. Combinations of 1-5. Can't speak for non-self hosters or people who aren't serious about chat, but for chat enthusiasts who can setup a server with bridges and bots, matrix is incredibly useful.

by bsaul 8mo ago

bratwurst3000 8mo ago

mostly the federate aproach. Most people dont want to think about anything network related. Element is ok as an app imho

coolius 8mo ago

For me the issue that prevented me from really using matrix is that none of the big clients support multiple servers. As a non enterprise user, this has prevented me from seriously adopting it several times.

Arathorn 8mo ago
Element X finally has this on Android (in Labs) now. Web & iOS will follow.
tionis 8mo ago
Fluffychat does and I would argue is one of the big ones. Its however quite mobile optimized (basically more like WhatsApp, less like slack).

nkmnz 8mo ago

Search is essentially broken and completely useless. If I’m mistaken, maybe someone might chime in and explain how I can make it work. But right now, the only way to search for messages is to export them and search in the text file.

j1elo 8mo ago
If that's true, it sounds terrible, and a reason enough to not consider it at all. So much of the work in bug organizations is about just searching for past conversations when a similar issue had been discussed... Search must be flawless.
- olafmol 8mo ago
  It’s open source right? You know what to do ;)
  - rolymath 8mo ago
    This is the fastest way to get people to say "I hate proprietary solutions but at least they work"
    - throwaway150 8mo ago
      Then you should use proprietary solutions. Open source solutions are written by developers for themselves. They are not writing it for you. They have no reason to write them for you. You are not paying them. It is a labor of love they are doing for themselves. Yet as a bonus they are offering it to you for free as a gift with the hope that if it doesn't work for you, you can improve it or hire someone you can. If you only care about consuming open source but not contributing, by all means you should buy proprietary solutions.
      - jodrellblank 8mo ago
        This is a subthread of "I wonder why matrix isn't more widespread at this point". When people reply why it doesn't work for them, that's not time for "you didn't say thank you". > "They are not writing it for you." From matrix.org[1]: 'The values we follow are: Accessibility rather than elitism. Empathy rather than contrariness.' ... 'act as a neutral custodian for Matrix ... for the greater benefit of the whole ecosystem, not benefiting or privileging any single player or subset of players. For clarity: the Matrix ecosystem is defined as anyone who uses the Matrix protocol. This includes (non-exhaustively): End-users of Matrix clients. Anyone using Matrix for data communications' > "They have no reason to write them for you." How are Matrix/Element going to get anywhere with their mission to replace proprietary chat networks if they don't write their new one for millions of ordinary people to be willing to use? [1] https://matrix.org/foundation/about/ https://matrix.org/foundation/about/
Arathorn 8mo ago
Unencrypted room search should Just Work for unencrypted rooms (it uses postgres FTS under the hood). Encrypted room search should also Just Work... but only on Element Desktop (which uses tantivy to do clientside search). We are in the process of porting this to Element X (and Element Web), but after an initial spike over the summer we're waiting for either funding or manpower to finish it.
- pkulak 8mo ago
  I just added search. ;) https://github.com/pkulak/matui/releases/tag/v0.6.0 https://github.com/pkulak/matui/releases/tag/v0.6.0 For encrypted rooms it just starts pulling messages down and looking for substrings... but it's actually works pretty well if you don't want to search back to the beginning of time.
  - Arathorn 8mo ago
    cool! would be even cooler to hook it up to https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/issues/5350 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/issues/5350 when it should then just work? matui looks super fun - you should come tell https://matrix.to/#/#twim:matrix.org https://matrix.to/#/#twim:matrix.org about it :)
    - pkulak 8mo ago
      Oh, very nice! I'll absolutely hook into that once it's ready.
- nh2 8mo ago
  What about 1:1 chat? I'm using Element X and there seems to be no search button for messages at all. So I cannot even search for "shopping" to find the shopping list, or "address" to find the address a friend sent me some days ago. It is simple to see why the normal user will have a bad everyday experience. The app uses 160 MB user data on my phone which fits a lot of text, why cannot I just search it?
  - 8mo ago

andylynch 8mo ago

I think it’s a few things - lots of places kind of Teams by default - or Slack or discord m, even WhatsApp - or in intensive cases, things like Refinitiv, Bloomberg, and, Symphony , which is kind of federated, but adds all the automation and also governance stuff needed for 100MM trades via IM and the like.

blitzar 8mo ago
> governance stuff needed for 100MM trades via IM We have come a long way from Yahoo messenger days. https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/oil-traders-prepare-fond-farewells-to-yahoo-messenger-idUSKCN10J0SO/ https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/oil-traders-prepa...

tapoxi 8mo ago

Enterprises get Teams for free with O365, or use Slack if they really care about the experience. Most individuals don't care and use iMessage/WhatsApp. Those that do use Signal since it's dramatically easier.

rolymath 8mo ago
Teams has not been free with O365 for years now.
- Quarrel 8mo ago
  I use Teams all the time (although not because it is what I'd choose..). Mostly just completely free tier, although I do have O365. On the free tier I think the main restriction is the 60 minute limit on groups > 2? Don't get me wrong, MS are almost as bad as Google in segregating their chat/video call/conferencing offerings, and even if you did know the names last week, they've probably changed them this week.
  - rolymath 8mo ago
    No I mean they were recently forced to unbundle by the EU or face monopoly claims. I guess they saw people paid anyway and unbundled everywhere else.
    - Quarrel 8mo ago
      Yeah, I see. TBH, I suspect it will only be good for MS to unbundle it. Of course, I wish they'd unbundle the whole suite. I am never ever going to run the Outlook, Access + whatever that I am forced to install to get Excel and Word.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

galbar 8mo ago

I am a daily user, family and friends chatting on Matrix. My take is that there are two layers of friction: a) people that care about chat encryption and would be willing to change, already did, to Telegram and/or Signal. "I'm not going to install yet another chat app" is a real answer by a friend of mine b) no one wants to either host their own server, nor pay someone to host it for them. If it wasn't for me and a one of my friends, none of the people I chat with daily would be on Matrix. And yes, there is the matrix.org server. Out of the ~13 people I chat frequently with, 1 is on matrix.org. "What's the point of changing apps if I'm still going to be using the centralized server" is another answer I've gotten. I don't know what the solution to this dynamic is other than us, the power users, setting it up and paying for the group of people around us.

INTPenis 8mo ago
What about maintaining encryption for an entire room of clients? I heard it's very difficult and prone to errors. Do you enforce it?
- Arnt 8mo ago
  I use matrix. Every chat room I use is unencrypted and all have at least one matrix.org user. I assume it can be encrypted but the usability is such that in practice it's cleartext.
  - cge 8mo ago
    As a counterexample: I use Matrix along with ~30-50 people, on a federated server, and every room is encrypted. After sufficiently stressing to people that they need to save their secure backup key, we've had few problems with encryption usability.
    - Arnt 8mo ago
      That reminds me of RFC 1925 Truth 3.

BLKNSLVR 8mo ago

I ran a server for a while a couple (maybe a couple of couples) of years ago, and client devices periodically disconnected and had to be re-setup / re-authenticated from scratch, losing the chat history and being a general hassle. It happened often enough that I got jack of it. I like the idea, a lot, but the implementation at the time annoyed me away from it. I just don't have time / motivation at the moment to have another go. We ended up on Discord for family communication and it works well. I know Discord is on the lower end of 'one of the bad guys', but for the same reason I don't re-setup Matrix I don't move off Discord. At least it's not WhatsApp... I did try to get them onto Signal, but I don't think Signal did group chat back then - which means it must have been before 2020.

megous 8mo ago

Bloated server implementation with lack of alternatives and a complicated protocol.

jasonfrost 8mo ago

I don't remember why but I had to download a separate notification app that pushed notis

munin 8mo ago

Matrix is an unserious project and the client ecosystem is a train wreck. The server ecosystem is not much better. The Element people, who are kind of the default Matrix people because as far as I can tell are the only people getting paid, will tell you that this is because a bunch of IT integrator companies unjustly profit off of the open source work by selling services to European companies but contributing none back to either Element or other open source Matrix projects. The first issue I'd like to address is that one: as a small business, I tried to purchase software from Element and was told that I was not large enough to justify their time. Fair enough, I only wanted a 200 seat license and I was willing to pay per seat, but I guess they really want the high value contracts if they have a limited sales team. However, it is a bit much to go from that experience to their justification about the structure of their project. Maybe they should think about taking some sales opportunities that present themselves? Then there are branding and release decisions around the clients that Element makes. There are two projects in the client space from Element: a client called Element, and a client called Element X. Element X is the newer one. Element (do you see how this is getting confusing yet) is simultaneously at different times an Electron desktop app, a mobile app, and a web app. Element X is becoming all of those things but the feature parity is not even between them. Element supports "legacy" Jitsi for voice and video calling while Element X supports newer Element call - which is different from legacy Element, Element call is a webRTC implementation native to the Matrix ecosystem while the "legacy" Jitsi is a way to send clients a URL for Jitsi calls and have them shell out to another app to actually implement the call. Fair enough. However, the desktop Element X client does not yet support new Element call but the "old" Element client does support both "legacy" Jitsi and new Element call. And the Element X mobile app cannot call the old Element mobile app - but I think the other way around can. Even getting your head around this as an IT person is confusing. To add insult to injury the new Element X app on mobile is in some ways a downgrade because they integrated the cloud vendor push notification services into the app, so even though you have "sovereign" and "self-hosted" infrastructure you're still, on a good day, leaking meta-data about your chats back through to the people you were trying to decouple yourself from anyway. You can run your own push notification services for this mostly if you want and all your mobile clients are Android but like, why. Then, there's desktop client usability. During account setup, Element/Matrix makes a big ceremony out of establishing your cryptographic identity. Perfect. And as part of that you write down a 10-ish something word passphrase that is a recovery sequence for said identity. Perfect. Then some network hiccup happens that disturbs the Element client like some kind of prey animal and it spontaneously logs you out. You log back in, but there are no fields or options visible to use that recovery passphrase to restore your cryptographic identity. Your only option is to reset your identity, which makes all prior chats you have had unreadable. That part at least makes sense but why have this recovery story if it is not tested or usable in the app? This is probably an Element thing but in my research I have not found a client that people say is more robust, though at this point I'm open to trying. It's also possible that the way most people use this is as a web app, which is to be fair more robust. It does seem worse from a security point of view to have one central web server dealing in most of your users plain text, though. At that point, why not use Mattermost? I guess they're even more hostile to their users/customers, for some reason. Finally, there's the server ecosystem. The thing that is frustrating to me here is the interplay between Synapse, Matrix Authentication Service (MAS), and OIDC. This, as far as I can tell, is all intentionally hostile to drive you into Element's commercial product offering. Which I find especially galling because they won't sell your their commercial offering anyway, so you're going to have to figure it out for yourself. Synapse has some legacy support for OIDC which you are going to need to enable for backwards compatibility. However, for forwards compatibility with Element X, you are going to need MAS. Synapse is a large, mature Python project. MAS is a single Rust binary which is simultaneously a server and CLI to do user management. You'll need both configured against your OIDC provider. Why didn't the new OIDC features just get integrated into Synapse? I think that a lot of this is an outcome of the fact that Element is very literally in a "the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born" situation at this time. I do have a lot of sympathy for being in the position of having huge companies - especially companies as annoying as IT outsourcing and integration - make a line of business out of configuring and installing your open source software. However, I have to say, having spent some of my professional life now also configuring and installing this open source software, I understand why those IT outsourcing companies have a moat. If the open source software was easier to install and use, perhaps those companies would have less of a moat. It seems to me that at least some of the story from Element is that if they make the ecosystem harder to use and understand, then people will take their money and the business will survive. However, in my experience, they won't take your money anyway.

nickslaughter02 8mo ago

The UK is the number one enemy of security and encryption. Did you read and compile all of the libraries and clients yourself?

LeelaAI 8mo ago

I enjoy self hosting stuff with Docker. Matrix/synapse is one of the more difficult / PitA projects I’ve ever gotten up and running.

snorremd 8mo ago

When me and a bunch of friends and acquaintances switched away from Slack a little under a year ago (I think) we looked into Matrix. One of the primary requirements was that even our non-technical friends should be able to use it. At the time Matrix/Element had recently launched their Matrix 2.0 efforts and I tried setting up the whole stack without resorting to their all in one shell-script meant for non-production use. I did not mind hosting four different servers (Synapse, Matrix Auth Service (MAS), Call, etc), but did find the integration and config job a bit tedious. The main blocker though was the lack of an invite-system in the new Matrix Auth Server. Also the fact that the Element X app uses a new Livekit based call server while other clients/apps use a different approach is also something not great. We ended up going for Mattermost. One service easily hosted with Docker. One app, and easy invites. While I think federation would be cool, right now Mattermost was a bit simpler to get up and running. Element seems more focused on enterprise and government contracts than self-hosters. I think this is fine, they need to pay their bills. But Matrix 2.0 for self-hosters might need a better story right now.

Arathorn 8mo ago
When we first announced Matrix 2.0 implementations in Sept 2024 we made a major error by not providing an easy distro, so I feel your pain. We fast-followed with https://github.com/element-hq/ess-helm https://github.com/element-hq/ess-helm as a really easy distribution (albeit using helm charts) based on the paid offering we provide for folks for NATO and the UN and folks. It really is trivial to install now - e.g. here's a live-install from FOSDEM last weekend: https://youtu.be/EngsGD30Ow0?t=929 https://youtu.be/EngsGD30Ow0?t=929 Meanwhile if you're allergic to k8s I went and published a trivial docker-compose at https://github.com/element-hq/element-docker-demo/ https://github.com/element-hq/element-docker-demo/ too.
- horsawlarway 8mo ago
  While I definitely appreciate that this exists now (as another person who considered matrix and ended up passing due to deployment complexity) this is not what I think most folks would reasonably call a "trivial" docker compose setup. It's a 16 service compose setup, complete with init hacks, inline docker-file builds to use those init hacks, a whole bunch of required config templates, some services that aren't clear if they're examples or requirements (ex - why is mailhog in there? just give me the SMTP env vars), and just a lot of general complexity still. This feels like several discrete services that don't play nicely, herded together like cats. It doesn't feel like a solid and planned set of tools. --- From my end - it's not enough to just stand it up. If this is my primary messaging tool and I'm hosting it, I need to have a feel for how it might break, and how I can fix it when it does. Hell, I'm not even allergic to k8s (I host dozens of services on a baremetal cluster), but I am allergic to helm for very similar concerns: Complexity at the self-hosting scale (individual to small business) is rarely worth the additional overhead, and helm rapidly makes what should be simple yaml file deployments a complex, abstracted process. Your docker compose has a similar feel. My first rule of thumb is "How long will it take me to manually read and understand a compose file while converting it to a k8s deployment?" This one looks onerous, not trivial.

netdevphoenix 8mo ago

Consensus. People like to follow what the majority does even if it's suboptimal.

em-bee 8mo ago
not just like to follow, but are forced to follow.

Anonyneko 8mo ago

Compared to Telegram, it feels like using a laggy MSN Messenger. The experience, both client and server-wise, just feels very unpolished. It's no single big thing, it's more like death by a thousand cuts. I was bullish on Matrix because it's so extensible, but in the end I realized that only the default client experience matters as that's the one everyone will be using. And it just isn't there yet. In the end, all the group chats I was in migrated to Discord or Telegram, so I had no more reason to use it...

Arathorn 8mo ago
We explicitly built Element X to be competitive with Telegram's UX - I'm guessing that the feedback here is on the crusty old Element Classic app, which hasn't been touched for 3 years now, and definitely did feel like a laggy MSN by comparison. Meanwhile Element X feels really really good - especially on iOS, but also Android has improved loads in the last few months (after tweaking the rustc ARM compilation flags properly, doh)
- bluebarbet 8mo ago
  Thank you for your work. For my money there is literally nothing that free computing needs more right now than a consumer-ready open standard for encrypted IM. Matrix has been the obvious candidate for a decade. Let's get there.
  - Arathorn 8mo ago
    thanks. we are doing our best, despite various a few misadventures along the way :)

guerrilla 8mo ago

The UIs are terrible. I've tried it a few different times with friends and we gave up each time.

mightyham 8mo ago

I publish a Firefox plugin and needed help a few years ago. Not to get too far down that rabbit hole, but they suddenly blocked my plugin because they couldn't build my source code, even though the issue with their build environment was pretty obvious. Anyways, I had to use their Matrix support channel and they recommended Element. I was immensely frustrated with how buggy the experience was, and it turned me off from ever trying it again.

trvz 8mo ago
You’re not alone, their iOS apps have 3.4 and 3.6 star ratings. Anything below 4.0 isn’t good. I’ve downloaded them, and neither has proper dark mode icons. Instant fail.

polski-g 8mo ago

Imagine your parents: * need to use size 18 font on their phone * refer to the phone as "that fancy music player" * calls you when their favorite blog doesn't "load" * every password they've ever had is "password1" Now you want to tell them to "download this new app, generate a private key, store it as a backup somewhere. When you get a new phone, you need to re-import it" Good luck with that.

Bender 8mo ago
I assume the government installations are integrating it with LDAP/AD or at least they should. This assumes both chat and LDAP/AD are logging to a SIEM for the auditors.
onraglanroad 8mo ago
"load" is the correct term. What would you call it?
- tormeh 8mo ago
  You just don't say the sentence at all and instead choose a technology from one of the big tech companies.
onraglanroad 8mo ago
Also, I'd encourage the use of "passphrase" rather than "password". No-one normal can remember tr5vgh6##t5, but something like "$firstpetsname notatafarm garbagecan" is secure and easily remembered.
- tsimionescu 8mo ago
  Having tried to use that, I can assure you that no one actually (a) remembers their passphrase, nor (b) is willing to type it in when it does come up. It's a fun idea, but it's actually much worse UX than even a secure password.
pkulak 8mo ago
Fluffy Chat is great on iOS. My mom uses it; it respects system fonts very nicely. I get the frustration with encryption though. I wish there was a way to mark a homeserver as default _NOT_ encrypted. My homeserver is in my closet. Given the choice, I'd rather take the extremely tiny opsec hit for all the simplicity and usability benefits of unencrypted rooms.

broken-kebab 8mo ago

Matrix is not out-of-the-box thing. For hosting it you really have to go through some trial-and-error before it works as you'd like, and most self-hosting enthusiasts have pretty short span of said enthusiasm. For users its easier, but there are some idiosyncrasies in terminology, and concepts. There are docs but they really would benefit from human editing to become fully useful. Synapse in particular has a problem of existing in two places on GitHub, and the one which is obsolete somehow comes first in searches, and appears in AI responses constantly. Which I guess shoots quite a lot of first tries in their steps.

Klonoar 8mo ago
Running an alternative like Conduwuit is a one step cargo build process. Been using it for some time now and it works great with Element X.
- JadedBlueEyes 8mo ago
  You might want to move to a maintained fork like https://continuwuity.org https://continuwuity.org if you haven't already
  - Klonoar 8mo ago
    I'm on that, I just got the names mixed up - but thanks for linking the better one!

domoritz 8mo ago

The UX has many rough edges especially in the default element apps. UX was the primary reason my university department passed on switching to matrix from slack so far.

tormeh 8mo ago

It's a bit shit at being WhatsApp. Slow, buggy, and feature-poor. The unique selling points are very compelling, but only for a small niche. Fortunately for Matrix, that niche includes a lot of places with big budgets, but it does not include consumers.

superkuh 8mo ago

Matrix is controlled by a single company Riot.im/Element.io who decides what the protocol is now. Element.io's income stream is hosting these extremely fat synapse servers for government. It doesn't really care about anything else. The Matrix Foundation has abdicated from it's role as of a couple years back (ref: https://element.io/blog/element-to-adopt-agplv3/ https://element.io/blog/element-to-adopt-agplv3/ https://matrix.org/blog/2023/11/06/future-of-synapse-dendrite/ https://matrix.org/blog/2023/11/06/future-of-synapse-dendrit... https://blakes.dev/posts/2023-11-06-element-closing-matrix/ https://blakes.dev/posts/2023-11-06-element-closing-matrix/). And generally synapse servers RAM and storage requirements grow and grow and grow, with no effective mechanism to trim the DB, until it requires hundreds of GB of ram just to idle and it starts becoming very expensive and infeasible for non-government/corporate pocket books to pay for. Even with just a few users the min ram suggested is 8GB at the very start. For human people, for small social groups, Matrix in the form of the controlling Synapse server is infeasible over any period longer than a few years. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46376201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46376201 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617309 and the reports there or just ask around. I know Afternet gave up Matrix because of this despite really liking the features too, https://afternet.org/help/matrix https://afternet.org/help/matrix There are other Matrix protocol servers but none that implement the full protocol. Conduwuit was the most full featured but died, now there's https://continuwuity.org/ https://continuwuity.org/ and a tiny bit of hope. tldr; the Element Synapse matrix server uses too many resources (and they killed dendrite). We all wanted it to succeed but it was co-opted. Alternatives are not in control of the protocol, few, and of limited lifetime so far. XMPP and IRC are the better alternatives.

preya2k 8mo ago
There’s hundreds or thousands of people out there hosting Synapse for small groups and use cases. Ressource requirements for a couple of dozen or hundreds of people are pretty tame (mostly storage that grows fast). You can easily host Synapse on cheap VPS products for less than 5€/month. I’ve been doing this for multiple organizations and many years.
panick21_ 8mo ago
> It doesn't really care about anything else. That they don't care is unfair, they just do what makes them survive. > infeasible over any period longer than a few years. I know companies that have done so. The resources requriments are bit higher then some alternatives but its really not has crazy as you make out to be.

Aurornis 8mo ago

> What makes it not more popular ? Is it the federated approach ? The client applications that don't look really fancy ? It’s not that the UI doesn’t look fancy. The overall experience of using Matrix has a lot of catching up to do. Like many others on HN I was enthusiastic about it early on, but I’ve been so worn down by all of the little problems, random re-authentication issues that nobody can explain, and missing features that I found myself avoiding using it unless I really needed to talk to someone I couldn’t contact any other way. You can find isolated success stories about small groups who successfully use it for their group chat, but at the root of all of those stories is always one person who takes the role of very dedicated IT person to keep it all running and walk others through steps to fix it when it breaks. They’ve been churning a lot on features and design, which has added another layer of fatigue on top of it all. It’s hard to even discuss Matrix any more because every negative experience will get waved away with an explanation that it was a problem with an old app or version and you just need to try Element X and Matrix 2.0 or the newest release. However, it’s felt that way for years. I’ll revisit it again in a year but for now I’ve reached my limit for how much time I can put into trying to make a project work and stay working.

bigfudge 8mo ago
As someone who has dealt into this quite recently, I can confirm that it hasn’t really changed that much. The documentation for integrating clients and bots is just old or wrong or non-existent. The complexities of getting authentication right and even getting messages validated between two human clients was really much worse than it should’ve been and it’s just not in a position where normal people can use it just yet. That said, I’m hopeful that government adoption could make it right quite quickly. And adopting it within a managed setting would mean that the UX could be ironed out fairly quickly.
etiam 8mo ago
I think this is right. I just also want to toss in that (at least for Element in particular) the continuing lack of long-form composition or history navigation appears to be a liability with some contacts. At this point it's probably fine for chat format one-liners in the moment, but for the communications that have historically been going over e-mail as opposed to IRC it's something of a pain to use.

ufmace 8mo ago

The best way to understand why it isn't widespread is to spend 10 minutes attempting to use it to actually chat with some people you know. I don't know which issues you'll run into, but it's virtually guaranteed you'll run into a variety of incredibly dumb and inexplicable ones.

palata 8mo ago

I was very enthusiastic about Matrix a few years ago, but my experience has been relatively bad and I lost interest. Apart from the experience, I think that there is a fundamental issue in the way Matrix is built: the Matrix servers have access to a lot of metadata (at least last time I checked, but it feels quite fundamental to the protocol).

zeec123 8mo ago

The fact that a “contact” is just a room with me and my peer and renaming my contact changes the room name for both of us tells me the UX is an utter failure. How can this be acceptable?

panick21_ 8mo ago

Why would it be? Being open and e2ee is irrelevant for mpost people. Most private messaging is done in whatsapp and after that telegram. Telegram has spend more usability and less on most other things. Then it compete with Slack and Teams on the cooperate side, where it was much later and less optimized for it. Slack took much of that market. It did replace IRC in many places but that was only ever a small part of the market. Basically between Whatsapp, Teams and Slack most of the market is covered and nobody is really a big player.

pocksuppet 8mo ago

It doesn't work very well. To join a room by address, you type the address into several boxes until you find the right one. If you log out, all your private messages are deleted because they were encrypted and the key is saved nowhere.

pkulak 8mo ago
Keys are actually saved somewhere. On your homeserver, in a store itself encrypted by another key that only you (and your other clients) have. You can disregard that store and not use it at all, which I actually think is a totally valid use case. It turns Signal-style at that point.

Fabricio20 8mo ago

Personally what drove me away was all the thousands of little annoying things that you just dont have to deal with on other apps like Telegram or Discord or Slack. The final straw for me was the 2nd time losing all chat history because I got logged out on my browser and when logging back in and providing the super secure authentication key and resynchronizing, messages older than 7 days still didn't decrypt on all chats so I just lost all of that. Plus Element client being mega laggy and stuff (though I had a smoother experience with the third party Cinny client).

uoaei 8mo ago

It's akin to using Plex v Jellyfin for serving media files to others. If they're not technically savvy they really don't want to have to think about networking protocols and their fragility... so you just deal with Plex because at least it turns down the volume on constant calls to your support desk / personal mobile phone.

abnercoimbre 8mo ago
Have you heard of Emby? It seems to be closed-source. However you can still run it yourself [0]. UX appears to be better than Jellyfin, but I haven't tried either and not sure which one to go for. [0] https://emby.media https://emby.media

maelito 8mo ago

300 million users, not bad though.

zaik 8mo ago
Everytime I change my nickname in the XMPP room that is bridged to Matrix, the counter increases by one. Never used Matrix.

WhyNotHugo 8mo ago

Who exactly is the target audience? People who are really into e2ee and privacy use Signal. People who want open, federated networks, use XMPP. People who want something fancy with all the features, etc use Telegram or whatever. Matrix basically has a lot of hype and marketing around it (presumably due to being VC funded), but it's hard to see any appeal beyond that. And the protocol and spec are an absolute mess.

greentea23 8mo ago

Popularity is irrelevant imo, it's a general purpose FOSS tool. Ignore Element and matrix.org, the open protocol is what matters. These features are useful even if matrix never gains any network effect: 1. talking among a small-ish specific group that needs sovereign communication, e.g. when forming a company or a tight knit in person friend group 2. only data limit is the size of my harddrive 3. bridge to every other popular protocol 4. personal bots and automation with no restrictions 5. Unlimited and customizable clients with no restrictions 6. Combinations of 1-5. Can't speak for non-self hosters or people who aren't serious about chat, but for chat enthusiasts who can setup a server with bridges and bots, matrix is incredibly useful.