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We have lift-off Element X, Call and Server Suite are ready

element.io

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Re: We have lift-off Element X, Call and Server Suite are ready

#61

Post by telgareith »

Klonoar wrote: post #50

Is there like, any UI/UX plan for the main chat view in Element X? I feel like I've been using it for a year now and every time I see an update available I find myself hoping it's fixed the glaring spacing/padding issues in that particular view. There's a lot of talk of Element competing with mainstream chat applications, but I don't see how it does that with what feels like an incomplete UI. I also just don't quite…

I'm probably biased by the fact that the first time I got Synapse running it was the release where it'd endlessly try and fail to join a room with more than 10 people.

But, every time I've looked at Matrix Chat it's been a disaster. That it tries, at all, to authenticate every personal(?home?) server as soon as you join #matrix is... Bad, from a lot of perspectives.

Privacy? Just put up your own DNS and find out what new servers are joining.

Security? Easy slowloris type attacks at several layers- DNS, http, etc.

Performance- eagerly enumerating all federated servers before joining a channel places a hard cap on channel and overall network size. And it provides a terrible experience.

The more I look, the less I like what I see. As a potential user, a software dev, and an admin it leaves me with two impressions: sloppy at best, braindead at worst.

Re: We have lift-off Element X, Call and Server Suite are ready

#62

Post by lousken »

turblety wrote: post #23

I really hope this fixed a bunch of encryption and key issues. We ran Element for our dev team for 6 months and had to give up because frequently a person would just not be able to decrypt a message, warnings would appear but there was no way to solve this. So literally people where missing messages and just having to ask people to post the message again (because there was no way to request the keys be sent). It was…

i havent seen any encryption issues since about q3 2023, notifications are still a thing tho, they are reliable but setting them up the way you want is still a pain

my experience is based on regular old element clients and my own server and will be moving to x and sliding sync probably at the end of the year

Re: We have lift-off Element X, Call and Server Suite are ready

#63

Post by walteweiss »

jansan wrote: post #54

Everybody seems to know what Element and Matrix are, but I cannot find a concise explanation on the website what they are. Element seems to be some kind of "communications platform", whatever that may be. Can someone please give a brief explanation for us not so cool kids?

Element is a client, matrix is a protocol, synapse is a mainline backend server. There are other clients (front-ends) and servers available on top of the matrix protocol. Hope that helps.

Re: We have lift-off Element X, Call and Server Suite are ready

#64

Post by SushiHippie »

deskamess wrote: post #56

Is ESS an OpenID compatible server, or does it integrate with OpenID backend? Looking for an OpenID provider for a small-medium friends & family group, so was hoping this fits the bill. There is a dearth of information on this aspect of the product line.

I don't know about ESS, but for selfhosting I can recommend Zitadel or Authentik, I've used both and currently I'm using Zitadel.

Re: We have lift-off Element X, Call and Server Suite are ready

#65

Post by preya2k »

jansan wrote: post #54

Everybody seems to know what Element and Matrix are, but I cannot find a concise explanation on the website what they are. Element seems to be some kind of "communications platform", whatever that may be. Can someone please give a brief explanation for us not so cool kids?

Matrix: Protocol (like SMTP/IMAP)

Element: The most popular client (like Thunderbird)

Element X: Rewrite of Element based on Rust and native UI components

Synapse: Most popular Matrix server (like Dovecot)

Element Call: Video/Audio conferencing (like Jitsi)

Element Server Suite (ESS): Paid SaaS solution that wraps all of the mentioned components into a simple turnkey solution.

Re: We have lift-off Element X, Call and Server Suite are ready

#66

Post by ffo »

SushiHippie wrote: post #64
deskamess wrote: post #56

Is ESS an OpenID compatible server, or does it integrate with OpenID backend? Looking for an OpenID provider for a small-medium friends & family group, so was hoping this fits the bill. There is a dearth of information on this aspect of the product line.

I don't know about ESS, but for selfhosting I can recommend Zitadel or Authentik, I've used both and currently I'm using Zitadel.

Out of curiosity what made you pick Zitadel over Authentik?

Disclaimer: I am the CEO of Zitadel ;-)

Re: We have lift-off Element X, Call and Server Suite are ready

#67

Post by Arathorn »

turblety wrote: post #23

I really hope this fixed a bunch of encryption and key issues. We ran Element for our dev team for 6 months and had to give up because frequently a person would just not be able to decrypt a message, warnings would appear but there was no way to solve this. So literally people where missing messages and just having to ask people to post the message again (because there was no way to request the keys be sent). It was…

We have done a huge amount of work on fixing E2EE issues - when running latest matrix-rust-sdk clients (e.g. Element X) and matrix-js-sdk using matrix-rust-sdk-crypto (e.g. Element Web/Desktop), "unable to decrypt" bugs should be unheard of.

So, the point of this blog post is to try to spell out that we've fixed this.

Meanwhile if you see ANY unable to decrypt errors, PLEASE submit debug logs on both the sender & receiver, and we will jump on it aggressively.

In terms of threads: yes, the stuck unread notification bug(s) were a disaster, but also fixed last year. Behind the scenes, 2023 was an absolutely awful year for Matrix & Element along many axes, c.f: https://matrix.org/blog/2023/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update.... Sorry that you got caught in the disruption.

Re: We have lift-off Element X, Call and Server Suite are ready

#68

Post by SushiHippie »

ffo wrote: post #66
SushiHippie wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about ESS, but for selfhosting I can recommend Zitadel or Authentik, I've used both and currently I'm using Zitadel.

Out of curiosity what made you pick Zitadel over Authentik? Disclaimer: I am the CEO of Zitadel ;-)

Regarding my use case, I'm basically the only user (I have multiple accounts, but I'm still the only person using this), I just needed a way to have one login for all my self-hosted services e.g. Nextcloud, Gitea, …

The story is, at first I used Zitadel, after trying out multiple other things like Keycloak or Ory, and then switched to Authentik, because I didn't really like the UI of Zitadel (too "enterprisy" for me, I like it more minimal, and for my setup it felt like I needed to configure too many things.).

But with Authentik I needed to configure like 3 three separate things to create a new "Application", I still don't understand why all these things are required, and if this is really needed to configure all these flows & stages, providers, outposts, ... (don't rememeber all the names, or how they were related to each other). I always just clicked through the UIs and left everything on default settings, which got really annoying after a while.

So I switched back to Zitadel, which has a pretty good UX for just creating a new application. Though it is still very confusing, all these settings which are specific for organizations or user specific, project specific etc., it's very often that I'm screaming "Where are the normal settings?".

I really would prefer to have something, where I don't need to worry about "Organizations" or "Projects", I understand that these are very useful if you use Zitadel "normally" (i.e. in an organization with multiple real people), but for my use-case it just adds too many layers which I don't need. I only need to create new users, and applications, that's it.

Re: We have lift-off Element X, Call and Server Suite are ready

#69

Post by ffo »

SushiHippie wrote: post #68
ffo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity what made you pick Zitadel over Authentik? Disclaimer: I am the CEO of Zitadel ;-)

Regarding my use case, I'm basically the only user (I have multiple accounts, but I'm still the only person using this), I just needed a way to have one login for all my self-hosted services e.g. Nextcloud, Gitea, … The story is, at first I used Zitadel, after trying out multiple other things like Keycloak or Ory, and then switched to Authentik, because I didn't really like the UI of Zitadel (too "enterprisy" for me,…

Thank you so much for the feedback, this really helps, even if you are a "solo" user!

I see what you mean with "enterprisy", that has some truth to it ;-)

We have some ideas to improve this and to reduce the learning curve for that. I guess from many people we could "hide" the whole multi-tenancy part and just given them a single organzitation to start with.

Re: We have lift-off Element X, Call and Server Suite are ready

#70

Post by SushiHippie »

qbonnard wrote: post #14
yu3zhou4 wrote: post #5

A kind suggestion - add links to Apple / Google Store so apps are easier to find and download

It's also on FDroid :)

But the version on F-Droid hasn't been updated since 3 months, and won't work with this new Synapse API endpoint (I just realized this, because it didn't work, after I switched from the proxy to the Synapse API).
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