* open source
* don’t suck (too much)
* no planned rug pulls
* not infested by US or Chinese spyware
Are there any?
European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams
71–80 of 196 posts
Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I would love to see a new professional application based on Matrix, Element is buggy, other apps lacking too.
> Element is buggy Someone should tell the CEO/CTO of Element
Speaking as the CEO/CTO of Element... the classic Element apps on mobile were buggy, thanks to being a ~10 year old codebase with no shared code between platforms and effectively the 1st generation Matrix client. Which is why we replaced them over the last few years with Element X, with all the heavy lifting shared between iOS & Android via matrix-rust-sdk (effectively a 3rd gen Matrix SDK).
That said, 70% of our users haven't got the memo yet - we'll do a hard-upgrade when the remaining missing features in Element X (Spaces & Threads) are fully out of Labs.
Meanwhile, Element Web is lagging behind Element X - but we're now in the middle of an incremental in-place upgrade (not a big-bang rewrite, thank goodness) to use matrix-rust-sdk - see our talk from FOSDEM last Sunday for the details: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/DZJVTS-an-element-web...
Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams
#73This does not bode well. Matrix is honestly not good, as someone who has tried to use it. It's slow, janky, often unstable, and poorly standardized. My suggestion: https://threema.com/en/products/work (hosted) or https://zulip.com/ (OSS self-hosted).
Threema: proprietary, outside EU Zulip: lacks encryption, interoperability
Why would they need encryption? Does the european commision have anything to hide?
Chat control for thee but not for me?
Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
it’s also not decentralised (unless you bridge it to Matrix), nor end-to-end-encrypted. or standards based.
To be fair, why would you care if your internal organization or company chat is decentralized?
If you work with lots of other entities who want full control over their own comms (e.g. other governments, other departments, other EU entities like European Parliament and Council, the UN, NATO, etc) then decentralisation or federation is a big deal.
In the public sector it's basically a requirement: it's bananas if your country's critical infrastructure ends up dependent on some a product effectively controlled by another country (e.g. Teams) - and you obviously want to be able to communicate with other govt entities rather than being stuck in an island.
Then it's a natural extension to the private sector - although for now, it feels more folks are on the "nobody got sacked for using Teams" train.
Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams
#75This does not bode well. Matrix is honestly not good, as someone who has tried to use it. It's slow, janky, often unstable, and poorly standardized. My suggestion: https://threema.com/en/products/work (hosted) or https://zulip.com/ (OSS self-hosted).
Threema: proprietary, outside EU Zulip: lacks encryption, interoperability
Threema is Swiss, which is a regional EFTA member. It's end-to-end encrypted and the clients are open-source.
Zulip has client-server encryption, which is fine if you control the server.
Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Matrix has threads. So does discord, but discords UI around them basically renders them functionally useless. Anyway, the first goal listed in this project was to move to European sovereign solutions so Zulip failed at the first hurdle. Given the (lack of) speed of European bureaucracy, this is likely more a reaction to the US sanctioning the ICC than the more recent Greenland saber rattling, but you'll probably see…
> Anyway, the first goal listed in this project was to move to European sovereign solutions so Zulip failed at the first hurdle. Element Creations Ltd and The Matrix.org Foundation CIC are UK companies.
The UK is in Europe. Brexit didn't float the country out several hundred miles.
Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know much about Matrix. Maybe in this case the key is money. But having worked at various startups and enterprises, it is very common for lots of money and resources to thrown at projects and for little or no progress to be made. Money might be a necessary condition but it’s definitely not a sufficient one. See Microsoft teams. Again I know nothing about Matrix, but I found your comment about UX concerning. U…
Sometimes good enough is good enough. Slack, Teams, Matrix, whatever, as long as you're meeting most daily driving requirements, everything else is maintenance and long tail quality of life improvement (imho). What else are Teams users going to get out of Microsoft chasing an ever increasing enterprise valuation and stock price target with regards to their user experience? Email just works, make teams comms that just…
I think the PowerSync [1] team is missing out on an opportunity to showcase their impressive data sync technology by building a minimalist Slack clone.
Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams
#78This does not bode well. Matrix is honestly not good, as someone who has tried to use it. It's slow, janky, often unstable, and poorly standardized. My suggestion: https://threema.com/en/products/work (hosted) or https://zulip.com/ (OSS self-hosted).
It works faster & better than Signal Desktop.
Genuinely surprised at this - I've never heard of signal desktop not being fast, or good. Works a1 for me.
Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams
#79Help me here Why can’t a company in the EU make a secure video/voice chat app? There’s are EU companies that make teams alternatives: https://euroalternative.eu/alternatives/microsoft-teams Even if those don’t work SAP, Dassault, etc… make massively complex software and services across multiple verticals and could trivially ship a competitor
Zoom came along with a securre video/voice chat, sure it's American, but it was by far the world leader Microsoft then used its monopoly in office tools to push Teams to everyone You can't compete with a trillion dollar company offering your product as a bundle your clients already pay for, even if your product is better. Even VC money runs out eventually
Zoom has long been the most unsecure video/voice application.
Remember how they installed an open web server on people's computers which could be accessed by anyone through the web?
https://infosecwriteups.com/zoom-zero-day-4-million-webcams-...
Apple had to step in and patch it for them:
https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/10/apple-silent-update-zoom-a...
Or when they sent your chat data to Facebook?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/zoom-ios-app-sends-data-to-f...
How it was discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22703000
Or when Zoom was leaking private information?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/zoom-leaking-email-addresses...
Or do you remember how those geniuses rolled their own crypto?
https://citizenlab.ca/research/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypt...
Or maybe you remember that Zoom has the ability to listen in in real-time on meetings held on their platform?
Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Matrix has threads. So does discord, but discords UI around them basically renders them functionally useless. Anyway, the first goal listed in this project was to move to European sovereign solutions so Zulip failed at the first hurdle. Given the (lack of) speed of European bureaucracy, this is likely more a reaction to the US sanctioning the ICC than the more recent Greenland saber rattling, but you'll probably see…
> Anyway, the first goal listed in this project was to move to European sovereign solutions so Zulip failed at the first hurdle. Element Creations Ltd and The Matrix.org Foundation CIC are UK companies.
Element Software SARL and Element Software GmbH however are not. In practice I believe it's Element Software GmbH providing the European Commission deployment of ESS. (Both are owned by the UK topco, but at the current rate we might flip one of them to be the topco instead).