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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

#71

Post by solarkraft »

When made aware of (near show stopper!!!) issues like those mentioned in this thread the typical reaction from an Element dev is “it works fine for me, make a PR or something”, which forgets that most require concerted efforts to solve, which I’d argue is only realistic with management buy-in. This buy-in seems to be happening (you’re trying to popularize a product, aren’t you??), but so slowly that I don’t see Matrix feasibly replacing proprietary services in this decade. Maybe in the next - for all their faults, they are persistent. And maybe even already big enough to stick around, with all the public sector buy-in.

I definitely want an open chat standard to succeed and I suppose the best candidate (among astonishingly few!) is Matrix. There’s just still a loooooong road until I can get my friends/acquaintances on it.

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

#72

Post by Arathorn »

qbonnard wrote: post #18

> Finally, cryptographic warnings are being eliminated. Historically, as end-to-end encryption was rolled out throughout Matrix, not all apps verified the identity of their users, triggering confusing and unactionable warnings to users. We are now shifting towards only letting devices whose ownership has been verified by their owner participate in conversations, killing those warnings - as well as other underlying pr…

First of all, we're shifting to generating a recovery key (like FileVault or similar) rather than forcing users to pick a recovery passphrase which they promptly get confused with their account password and/or lose.

Secondly, we're making it much less likely to actually need to ever enter a recovery key - with QR login meaning you just scan a QR code to launch your account, complete with all e2ee state (assuming you're already logged in somewhere; same as WA or Discord etc).

In the end, though, if you lose all your devices, you have no choice but have some kind of recovery key to get back in. We could use your account password, but (particularly in an OIDC world) it's then challenging to avoid exposing the account password to your server admin (thus breaking E2EE).

So instead, we're hoping that users will either save their recovery key, or worst case, if they do, they can reset it... but that will inevitably mean they won't be able to access their old messages from backup any more.

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

#73

Post by Arathorn »

virtualritz wrote: post #45

We have lift-off but we're not making it past the lower atmosphere ... Was the Android version flow-tested by anyone at all at element.io? When I tried registering a new account, it did not accept my handle. I guessed this because the handle text was red. But why it didn't like it I can't see because the little box with the error message is outside to the right of the screen (I guess there is a box because I see a li…

The registration flow on matrix.org was a last minute sprint to get something that works there, given we haven't finished the OIDC migration for matrix.org migration. It landed 4 days ago here: https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-android/pull/3467 and while we tried to QA it on a range of devices & OSes I'm not surprised we missed some. The good news is that it can be easily improved serverside given it's "just" a helper webapp which is doing the registration flow.

Sorry you got bitten by this. I'd be very interested if you can compare it with the flow if you specify beta.matrix.org as the homeserver.

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

#74

Post by Arathorn »

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 honestly not sure what you're talking about here - the roomlist is pure SwiftUI, and looks almost identical to iMessage or WhatsApp to me. What is the "glaring spacing/padding issues" you're talking about? Similarly on the timeline views...

Can you link to a bug on github.com/element-hq/element-x-ios/issues please?

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

#75

Post by Arathorn »

exabyte wrote: post #59

Does anyone know if this will let you search your messages? This is one of the lacking features I've noticed on the Android version of Element is that you can neither bookmark messages nor search throughout the (encrypted?) chat, making it difficult to find messages you want to refer back to. You can search on the Desktop app, but not sure why you can't on mobile...

just not implemented on mobile yet - sorry. it will be much easier to add for Element X though given the e2ee text indexer (Seshat) is already written in rust and does the right thing though.

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

#76

Post by Arathorn »

solarkraft wrote: post #71

When made aware of (near show stopper!!!) issues like those mentioned in this thread the typical reaction from an Element dev is “it works fine for me, make a PR or something”, which forgets that most require concerted efforts to solve, which I’d argue is only realistic with management buy-in. This buy-in seems to be happening (you’re trying to popularize a product, aren’t you??), but so slowly that I don’t see Matri…

> the typical reaction from an Element dev is “it works fine for me, make a PR or something”,

This is false. We check issues which people file and try to reproduce them, and we certainly don't ask randoms to contribute PRs to fix stuff - we'd much much rather fix them ourselves.

Meanwhile, you can see the issue stats at github.com/element-hq/element-x-ios/issues and github.com/element-hq/element-x-android/issues - it's not like we're ignoring or failing to close issues.

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

#77

Post by Arathorn »

telgareith wrote: post #61
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…

Yay. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/blob/mat... is the bug you're complaining about so constructively. It's on the radar; we prioritised fixing unable-to-decrypt errors.

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

#78

Post by scirob »

scirob wrote: post #13

I really hope they can reduce the amount of time it takes to start a "room" / add a person to contacts. Its really a deal breaker only those with strong federation desires will wait for element to load. Matrix is mostly a victim of the government forks taking up their time in different directions instead of having just one app like signal.

omg I want this to work so much. But the first message i send on element x crashes the app. (counter party did not have all devices verified)

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

#79

Post by Arathorn »

scirob wrote: post #13

I really hope they can reduce the amount of time it takes to start a "room" / add a person to contacts. Its really a deal breaker only those with strong federation desires will wait for element to load. Matrix is mostly a victim of the government forks taking up their time in different directions instead of having just one app like signal.

We did improve things massively (like, 5x) with Faster Remote Room Joins: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/390... and https://element-hq.github.io/synapse/latest/development/syna....

We did all the super-hard groundwork to make non-atomic joins possible - but then ran out of time & $ to go further (plus none of the Element paying customers are complaining about it). There's another order of magnitude speedup to be had there, though.

Between this and https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/blob/mat... we should be able to fix things unrecognisably, but just haven't got there yet.

> Matrix is mostly a victim of the government forks taking up their time in different directions instead of having just one app like signal.

It's a double-edged sword. On one hand, it generates $ to work on Matrix. On the other hand, it means that if none of the $-payers care about faster remote room joins, they get deprioritised :|

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

#80

Post by Arathorn »

scirob wrote: post #78
scirob wrote: post #13

I really hope they can reduce the amount of time it takes to start a "room" / add a person to contacts. Its really a deal breaker only those with strong federation desires will wait for element to load. Matrix is mostly a victim of the government forks taking up their time in different directions instead of having just one app like signal.

omg I want this to work so much. But the first message i send on element x crashes the app. (counter party did not have all devices verified)

ugh, sorry. Android or iOS? What build? please file a bug and we will jump on it.
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