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A Year Using Matrix and Riot

itscode.red

41–50 of 82 posts

Re: A Year Using Matrix and Riot

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Riot on a daily basis and I like the overall concept, we love federated where I communicate. So let me try to share some experiences that bugger me the most because I really hope you could imporve on those things. Imho those things are more important than UI. (form follows function, sorry guys ;D) - Messages that can't be decrypted on only some of my devices. This for example forces me to use my phone while sit…

From what I understand, Electron is a very temporary stopgap.

I would love to see a PWA.. In my experience those work (a lot) better than their native counterparts. Some good examples are mobile.twitter.com, instagram.com and maps.google.com

Re: A Year Using Matrix and Riot

#42
post #14

> This has improved a lot since a year ago but there still needs to be a massive change in the UI design to make it comparable to the competition. I agree whole-heartedly with this. I am not entirely sure who decided on Riot's garish green UI filled with circles and non-standard UI controls and wildly variable padding/spacing and communities bar that takes up space even when not joined to any communities, but it look…

Probably a "quick and easy" way to fix this would be to just rely on Google's Material Design resources and tools, which I think are generally liked by most people. This may be an alternative: https://getmdl.io/index.html

please not another MD app! the amount of wasted space is ridiculous!

Re: A Year Using Matrix and Riot

#43
post #4

Project lead for Matrix here. This is a pretty accurate post, and in terms of the negative points we are painfully aware that UX on Riot (and performance on Synapse) still has a way to go. The current stuff we have in flight to fix this are: * Lazy-load all room members rather than push them proactively to clients. This should improve initial sync times and subsequent RAM usage by anywhere from 3x to 20x depending on…

Matrix/Riot have been what I've been wanting for a long time. My biggest issue at the moment is that communications is an intrinsically social thing. Getting friends and family to swap when there are all these minor polish issues means I'm sitting in a room all by myself. I refuse to give up.

The fact that you all are working so hard on performance and polish really gives me hope that soon I'll be able to pull some less technical people off of hangouts.

Re: A Year Using Matrix and Riot

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason Dendrite hasn't gotten more attention than it has? I can understand why you wouldn't want to write a new homeserver to begin with, but I'd think you'd want to focus heavily on it once you made that decision. Speaking of Dendrite, do you all have a general idea when it will be production-ready? I'm looking forward to being able to use it, even before it's hit full feature parity with Synapse. Just…

The problem with Dendrite is that we've had no choice but to focus on keeping the current servers (i.e. Synapse) scaling and alive, especially the matrix.org server. The problem is compounded by the two devs who originally led Dendrite sadly leaving during the funding uncertainty we had last year. However, we have new folks joining to work on Dendrite over the coming weeks, and we should be able to get it moving agai…

Thanks, that was a nice write-up.

Re: A Year Using Matrix and Riot

#46
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a bunch of work going on from the team there in preparation for the Purism Librem 5, or is that mostly their efforts that happen to rely on your tech?

Sadly it’s ended up being the latter. We’d like to help them, but doing so would pull time away from the core Matrix stuff, which would require us to fund more people to cover the work. They haven’t been able to supply any funding, so we’re supporting them on a best effort basis instead.

Gotcha. Thanks for your response.

Re: A Year Using Matrix and Riot

#47
post #36
post #4

Project lead for Matrix here. This is a pretty accurate post, and in terms of the negative points we are painfully aware that UX on Riot (and performance on Synapse) still has a way to go. The current stuff we have in flight to fix this are: * Lazy-load all room members rather than push them proactively to clients. This should improve initial sync times and subsequent RAM usage by anywhere from 3x to 20x depending on…

I'm using Slack & Riot ... and from my point of view Slack has many of the same issues that riot has as well (performance, room switching, etc). I agree the UX is not as intuitive as on slack, but I'm sure the get there. One thing that I did not ever find out in the UX is how to change own presence and how to get the others presence (it's always offline).

Not sure if it's still true, but I read a while ago that the matrix homeserver has presence turned off due to load.

Re: A Year Using Matrix and Riot

#48

What confused me about Riot when I tried it was that when I picked a friend to chat, it created some kind of new room instead of.. not sure how to call it, a P2P chat? Like it's on slack or other services. For eg. I could remove messages but my friend couldn't which makes it weird (I'm an admin in a P2P conversation?)

It seems Matrix really blurs the lines between a direct chat and group chat, it's one of the things I would like to be clearer.

For example, when you start a direct chat, it's realy just a group chat with 2 people. If you invite another person (or even just an integration like giphy search!), the UI stops listing it under the other user as a direct chat and it seems indistinguishable from a chat room. Even removing the extra user seems to not get it classified again as a direct chat.

If Matrix people are reading this - it would be great to have better distinction between direct and group. And it would be nice if integrations could somehow not break that illusion. And perhaps a warning if adding an integration / user will irreversibly make a chat a group chat.

Re: A Year Using Matrix and Riot

#50

What confused me about Riot when I tried it was that when I picked a friend to chat, it created some kind of new room instead of.. not sure how to call it, a P2P chat? Like it's on slack or other services. For eg. I could remove messages but my friend couldn't which makes it weird (I'm an admin in a P2P conversation?)

It seems Matrix really blurs the lines between a direct chat and group chat, it's one of the things I would like to be clearer. For example, when you start a direct chat, it's realy just a group chat with 2 people. If you invite another person (or even just an integration like giphy search!), the UI stops listing it under the other user as a direct chat and it seems indistinguishable from a chat room. Even removing t…

Yes! This is (one of the many things) addressed in the redesign. Also found it confusing, but don't worry, it will be fixed :)

Can't wait to share some of the new designs with everyone!

If anyone has other suggestions or frustrations, send them to me - contacts are in my description.

I'm the guy working on a major UI/UX redesign for Matrix/Riot that Matthew mentioned above.

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