Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory

I think the statistic said that around 10% of users receive at least one "unable to decrypt" message on any given day. That's a lot. Perhaps not for devs who are accustomed to technical frustrations, but for non-technical people, that's far too frequent. Other messaging systems worked much better.

> There still can be technical corner cases in the interaction of clients

> a talk for details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUSucR2axWI

You linked to a German political talk show. If you wanted to show me the talk in which the guy listed reasons such as "network requests can fail and our retry logic is so buggy that it often breaks" and "the application regularly corrupts its internal state, so we have to recover from that, which is not always easily possible", let's just say I wasn't that impressed.

> well, even if this was true, they still were brave enough to try and eventually pull it off eventually. Perhaps complain to the competent people who haven't even tried.

It isn't a problem that the Matrix team are not federated networking experts. At the time, they had already received millions in investment. That's not FAANG money, but it's still enough to contract the right people to help design everything properly.

I'm not mad at them. Matrix was a bold effort that clearly succeeded in its aims. I'm just disappointed that it was so unreliable for such a long time, and still is to some extent.

I am fully appreciative of the work that goes into making a product like this, but I’m also tired of this mentality that nobody is allowed to talk about the problems with the product. Even simple comments from people who tried to use the product but encountered show-stopping issues are getting downvoted into gray text in this thread.

This mentality that we must only speak praise and cannot speak of problems because a product is free is further off putting. I’ve given Matrix/Element an honest try many times because some of the OSS projects I’m involved with use it, but month after month it’s the most troublesome of all of the apps in this space that I use, and it’s not even close. If I’ve gone a month without dealing with Matrix and I have to open it again it feels like there’s a 50:50 chance something is going to either be inexplicably broken or cause problems even though I thought I finally had it all working last time.

The contrast between how hard we’re told that Matrix is the great and superior option and the reality of what it’s like to use it as a casual or occasional user is really wearing me out on the project.

also, instead of hosting your own server or using some (more or less well-financed) public servers, you can simply throw some money at [2] to pay for hosting for your group of friends or family or whatever. (not affiliated, but I like the idea)

[1] https://media.ccc.de/b/conferences/matrix-conf [2] https://etke.cc/

I empathize a lot with the negative experiences shared in this thread.

I think the problem is that every little decision in Matrix might be reasonable to the people who have complete context about the decision, but all of the churn and rough edges have added up to a very bumpy ride. Not only that, but it has been a poorly communicated and documented ride as many in this comment section can attest.

I suspect all of these issues and changes feel like no problem to people who are active in Matrix every day and have a support network to chat with where they all get through the issues by sharing tips and info. For the rest of us who are casual users who only occasionally log in it feels like I’m rolling the dice every time I have to use it. Some times it works like it did last time, some times I have to go on a 30 minute adventure with Google and play games across devices to get it back into a working state again.

> I wasn't that impressed.

If you think, I want to impress you, you are wrong.