Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

are we even talking about the same app? This is literally the first time i’ve heard someone accuse Element X of being clunky, buggy or unappealing - including the original post? The criticism is that it’s not got threads/spaces, surely.

> I think you may be unfairly paraphrasing "we don't have enough funding to be able to work on both Element & Element X, or Synapse & Dendrite, or to have landed Threads/Spaces in Element X yet, or ".

I asked in the chat what's the plan for people who are running on old servers when it comes to migrating to MAS. The general response was "Welp, should've gotten a support contract." Or maybe it was migrating from Element to Element X. I can't remember.

> It feels ironic that our attempts to improve the project are characterised as "gigantic changes in direction which are enough to sink any project".

The real irony is mentioning working on both Element and Element X, Synapse and Dendrite, and not see how much work that's already been done is being completely thrown away. This is not even including all the weird 3D stuff that was once a thing. Even the all the rebranding is kind of like 'wtf is happening over there'

> Jitsi is unencrypted by default.

Then why implement it? Or you could have contributed to it/fixed it instead of building something from scratch using technologies like SFU which no has has heard of before.

> There's two clients. One that's fast, and one that's full featured". Well, that's true, but most people seem to feel Element X's improvements outweigh the fact it doesn't have threads/spaces yet (although they are both in dev currently).

Since when have threads and spaces been in development? Probably almost a year now. And this is not even including the bug/unimplemented feature where in the android app where clicking a message notification just takes you to the bottom of the room instead of the message itself. And what about clicking to join rooms? Matrix.to? Come on, bro.

> For what it's worth, I think i've made some spectacular mistakes in running Matrix,

I wasn't talking just about you, your arrogance is kind of endearing in the right light. The community itself is so hostile to any criticism it feels like talking to toddlers.

> as well as bunch of good stuff

Matrix is great. Just not ready. The communication about how it's so great and ready is probably a big reason of why people are turned off. If Matrix was still labeled beta (and people weren't afraid of New Vector one day moving development behind closed doors) I can almost guarantee the community would be so much more vibrant. The threat of New Vector going fully proprietary is the main reason we decided not to move forward with contributing to the ecosystem. (we're still looking for our messaging home).

> On the Element side: does https://youtu.be/IwZ4rE_Pt64 feel like an org led by architecture astronauts?

I remember when this video first came out. I think it was around the time of MatrixConf. Element X is not ready, and starting the video by calling it "Not just the best Matrix messaging app, but the best messaging app available" is (with all due respect) delusional, or marketing-led dishonesty.

I say all the above with love. I'm someone who has developed an admin panel for our internal proof-of-concept other than the one provided by New Vector or the other half-baked open-source one (I forget what it's called). So I've really dived deep into the ecosystem. But it's not there, yet.

I can see the vision you have for Matrix. The global federated network of eventually-consistent event servers. I love it and I hope it succeeds. But when commercial interests play a role and New Vector has some sort of conflict of interest between spreading Matrix as far as possible, and making it profitable, it's hard to buy in to that utopian vision. Be Linux, not Red Hat. You can't be both, that's where the conflict of interest comes in. Yeah Matrix is an independent foundation etc. etc. but if Synapse dies, the entire ecosystem dies.

I'm not sure where the "devs will claim it's my fault if i ask for help" trope is coming from - we really do want Matrix to work :( Do you have a bug report of where this is happening, on what set of clients? A bunch of people have been reporting images not loading, but I haven't seen anything actionable. Is it possible that this is anti-image-spam protection kicking in?

Seconds after a video is released on big yt channels bots spam the hell out of it with nasty stuff. But youtube rather fights adblockers rather than this nasty stuff. Discord is just less obvious but it is also a huge issue there

As for matrix i think non-paying user should have limited interactions in large rooms only, maybe require mod approval. There is no reason to limit personal chats or friends chat with five people.

Gajim has been genuinely pretty unstable and buggy for me on Wayland (Sway) with lots of "crashing", in quotes because they tell me it's not crashing if I try to report it, but it's more like the windows are lost suddenly (this has improved over time somewhat at least, it used to be the whole client several times per day and now it's just the file picker, which can mostly be avoided). As for Conversations, mostly works great, if I had to complain it would be that you're forced to use relative timestamps with no way to configure them.

To compare Matrix and XMPP, I like that with Matrix you can edit messages that are as far back as you want, not just the most recent one sent from the same device you're on. Sometimes I fire off a storm of messages and then while I'm waiting for replies I go to read over them again and catch some things I wanna fix that I didn't see before. I also like that Matrix is a bit more distributed in that if the homeserver the room is on/from goes down, everyone else can still chat. I even have a group chat originally made on a now completely dead homeserver but we're all still happily chatting in it. I'm using both XMPP and Matrix daily, but Matrix is the one I got IRL friends and family on. XMPP seems more popular with people from fedi and the like, what you might call "internet weirdos". I have considered trying to convince more IRL contacts to get on XMPP, but I'm not sure they could handle another move, and I'm not sure I could justify it when it's not an objectively better across the board upgrade. When we moved people off Facebook chat or Google Hangouts, we were going from something proprietary and centralized to something free and decentralized, also there was encryption I guess. XMPP is kind of a sidegrade. Ideally it wouldn't be a full move anyway so much as getting them all to sign up on it as back-up comms, but again I'm just not sure they could be bothered at this point.