the amount of spec change proposals over the years is wild: https://0x0.st/H8h-.png
Remember that their main criticism of XMPP was there is just too many protocols extensions and proposals!
Turns out that maybe it was for good reasons.
Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org
21–30 of 150 posts
Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org
#22I said most of the same things in the Matrix foundation's server. The general response from the team was: "Pay money or shut up and accept what we give you". The number of gigantic changes in direction this project has had in the past couple of years is enough to sink any project. Jitsi to Webrtc, complete change in auth system, Element to Element X. There's two clients. One that's fast, and one that's full featured.…
For the past decade or so, I have used Conversations on mobile and Gajim on desktop. Seems to work fine with a minimum of work. What am I missing?
Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org
#23I said most of the same things in the Matrix foundation's server. The general response from the team was: "Pay money or shut up and accept what we give you". The number of gigantic changes in direction this project has had in the past couple of years is enough to sink any project. Jitsi to Webrtc, complete change in auth system, Element to Element X. There's two clients. One that's fast, and one that's full featured.…
> I try to be positive and supportive of project, but my experience with these guys is that they're incredibly arrogant. This has been my experience with many FOSS projects in general. Don't even get me started on what happens when a fork emerges. "They don't want open source, they want to be the ONLY source."
This statement might be ok in a generic sense, but it is unfair in a discussion of Matrix and Element. They have gone out of their way to encourage other source.
I get that you didn't say this explicitly about this particular project. I just think these folks deserve some credit.
Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org
#24Yeah, Matrix UX is disgusting in every aspect.
Every client looks bad, works slow and most of them have only subset of features.
At 2025 year I still can't see online status when I use most popular server and client.
When I use SDK as a developer, *I can't use encryption* for bots. I've created issue about it over year ago https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk/issues/363 and maintainer just closed it as not planned to fix.
Matrix Protocol is overcomplicated and ridiculous. As I understood, the reason of mentioned problem with lack of "online status" feature is a high network load that yields by presence status feature, so server owners just disable this feature.
It is ridiculous that messenger who state it is "privacy focused" - can't handle encryption for bots and sell us idea that it's fine to log-in in my account on random site on internet. Because any site where i enter my password and secret key, may steal my password.
The same thing with applications. "Reference implementation" of app is an Electron app that loads javascript from internet and may inject malware anytime.
My impression is that Matrix is a scam to spy over people who blindly believe in security, like a Telegram does.
Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org
#25I said most of the same things in the Matrix foundation's server. The general response from the team was: "Pay money or shut up and accept what we give you". The number of gigantic changes in direction this project has had in the past couple of years is enough to sink any project. Jitsi to Webrtc, complete change in auth system, Element to Element X. There's two clients. One that's fast, and one that's full featured.…
I guess it’s an old story. You can’t have pure tech guys guiding the ship.
Is that the case? If so, this makes it look worse: Pure tech guys should be able to make a performant application.
Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org
#26I find Signal just unbeatable on all fronts: security, UX, ease of use, general thoughtfulness put into the product. It has the best simple media editor (for video clipping, blurring faces, compressing) I have ever seen casually built into the sending flow. Every time I use anything, from MS Teams to Whatsapp, I find myself wishing they were more like Signal.
Signal is the worst of them all when it comes to self hosting.
Signal's desktop app is slower to load and has less features than Element Desktop, despite both using the same stack of Electron and Sqlite.
Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I try to be positive and supportive of project, but my experience with these guys is that they're incredibly arrogant. This has been my experience with many FOSS projects in general. Don't even get me started on what happens when a fork emerges. "They don't want open source, they want to be the ONLY source."
This statement might be ok in a generic sense, but it is unfair in a discussion of Matrix and Element. They have gone out of their way to encourage other source. I get that you didn't say this explicitly about this particular project. I just think these folks deserve some credit.
Got a link? What forks of element or synapse have they publicly endorsed?
Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org
#28This also comes as the organization is preparing a coordinated update to fix 2 CVEs in the protocol [1], that were originally reported 6 months ago.
Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org
#29I'm of the same stance. I've been using Matrix for 3 years now, primarily to communicate with family located where there is high censorship and most messengers are blocked. Probably due to the complexity of the system and inherent design, performance is horrible. Good enough for usage but just unpleasant. Their new Element X client is meant to solve a lot of problems but they're starting to deviate from common standa…
Aside from your valid concerns about Element roadmaps, you highlight a completely different really crummy problem. You have chosen (or have had chosen for you) the support of a closed platform that puts you in a pickle. The dev team for an app of interest to you doesn't seem to have the bandwidth to address all your concerns as quickly as would be super. But they have taken the hit to get their code into the walled garden where you can use it. You have the bandwidth to tackle some of your wishlist, but don't have access into the walled garden.
So what might be a negotiation between two parties--you and the app dev team--is now complicated by a thorny third party--your os platform team. Presumably you derive some value in other areas from your walled garden that offsets the penalty it introduces in this case. But it's still crummy that you're caught in this snag created by your os platform.
Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org
#30Every time it was suggested to adopt matrix into our platform, we took one look at the protocol docs and said NOPE.