Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory • Hacker News Board

Re: Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory

#211

Post by mxuribe » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 6:10 PM UTC

leetnewb wrote: post #182

mxuribe wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to consider myself a HUUUGE matrix fanboy....while i still respect what the teams have done over time, I have been feeling a little, i don't know, deflated maybe? Maybe its the UX/UI aspect, i don;t know...i have not run a homeserver since like maybe 2019 or so? But nowadays, i have less interest in running a homeserver, and as far using the various clients: meh. Element feels bloated, and others either might…

One thing I would note on the client side of xmpp - there does seem to be a lot of work happening under the surface. Snikket is working on an SDK to streamline modern client development. There are a couple of alpha stage clients written on it already, and maturatoin of the SDK should lower the bar for pushing clients forward. Also independently, Movim keeps advancing and Libervia is doing a ton of cool work. I'm sure…

I had only heard about Snikket as I was spinning down my xmpp experiment... maybe I can take a look nowadays (including moving and others). Thanks for sharing!

Re: Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory

#212

Post by mxuribe » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 6:14 PM UTC

toastal wrote: post #109

mxuribe wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to consider myself a HUUUGE matrix fanboy....while i still respect what the teams have done over time, I have been feeling a little, i don't know, deflated maybe? Maybe its the UX/UI aspect, i don;t know...i have not run a homeserver since like maybe 2019 or so? But nowadays, i have less interest in running a homeserver, and as far using the various clients: meh. Element feels bloated, and others either might…

> can run on such low resource hardware This is what frees a barrier to decentralization & actually owning one’s data. A few of my friends are now running their own single-user or small XMPP servers since it doesn’t use much in terms of resources or storage in comparison. > The server setup felt like i needed to study a bunch of different doc I believe this is what the Snikket project is trying to be. That said, XMPP…

> ...that isn’t the only or a generic enough use case (XMPP is behind Zoom, Jitsi, Fortnite, etc.

Great point! I forgot that xmpp can/is used for other use cases that are not just chat.

Also I guess I should be a little more forgiving about the MUCs, and client features in particular because you are right that fallbacks tend to be graceful.

Re: Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory

#213

Post by wkat4242 » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 6:18 PM UTC

Ugh.. I loved Matrix but I'm starting to hate the way they force these things through. Also last month they removed the categories (People, Rooms, Favourites) from Element Web just like that. Making it very hard to use as I use it. I had to roll back to an older version. They seem to be focused on whatever commercial or consumer experience but they are ruining it for power users.

My matrix server isn't even publicly accessible and users can't sign up. I don't federate with the network. So these issues are irrelevant to me. There should still be a way to turn it off. Because many of the bridge bots I run can't verify.

Re: Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory

#214

Post by mxuribe » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 6:18 PM UTC

chickensong wrote: post #100

mxuribe wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to consider myself a HUUUGE matrix fanboy....while i still respect what the teams have done over time, I have been feeling a little, i don't know, deflated maybe? Maybe its the UX/UI aspect, i don;t know...i have not run a homeserver since like maybe 2019 or so? But nowadays, i have less interest in running a homeserver, and as far using the various clients: meh. Element feels bloated, and others either might…

I think we all want that. The fact that it doesn't exist is an indicator that it isn't trivial to build. All those modern features are at odds with performance.

> ...it isn't trivial to build. All those modern features are at odds with performance.

I suppose both points make sense!

Re: Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory

#215

Post by wkat4242 » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 6:19 PM UTC

teekert wrote: post #91

Sanzig wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget the shock image spam issue. Public Matrix channels are plagued with horrendous shock images (including CSAM). The development team seems to not care, they have a proposal for "policy servers" which is still incomplete and not supported by all server implementations.

Let's not forget a team making a great free product. Yeah we can complain about filthy materials but imagine you working hard to build something as nice as Matrix/Element only for these low-lifes to do these horrible things to it. How annoying it must be to have to spend time battling such things.

It's free for us but not for businesses. I think this is why they are ruining the UX, because they're adapting it to their target market, like making it more like MS Teams.

Re: Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory

#216

Post by trueno » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 6:35 PM UTC

amluto wrote: post #71

unbolted3032 wrote: post #24

I decommissioned my server 3 months ago and migrated my community back to IRC. I still had the IRC Podman containers kicking around, so that was easy. I dealt with ~monthly issues around my devices not being correctly verified, messages not correctly decrypting, and various other rough UX edges. There seemed to be a lot of velocity in the beginning but the last couple of years have addressed approximately nothing in…

You did better than I did. I installed the recommended Element app, created an account on matrix.org, tried to send a message to another user, and… gave up. Every try got stuck and eventually created an empty room or whatever they call it. I have literally never succeeded in sending or receiving a single message.

There really is no winning in the org comms/chat apps space when it comes to OSS. Matrix+element, rocket, mattermost, Zulip and so on.. feels like there’s either massive gotchas on free/self hosted or it’s wildly complicated to configure and set up. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Hosting a private irc server and you lose out on rich embeds and will need your own pastebin-like service to use, video conferencing is probably a big challenge, the need for a mobile app at many workplaces. Bleh. I look at something like slack and I’m like damn that is literally irc+ and I just hate that I don’t have the skills to build up something completely free that I could host at my org. Teams literally owned everyone when they started bundling it in and rug pulling slack. Ofc the execs at my workplace were like “hell yeah this is great” but so did my IT dept. I was so pissed. Out of the box it’s just instantly compliant which was a major driver then of course at the time it was seen as a free offering (I know they’ve since had to decouple that) which completely nuked slack at our org. I can’t even believe I’m saying this but teams actually makes collaborating slower. No one on my team uses the channels we all pin chat groups and exclusively use that. It’s literally garbage. I guess I’m just venting, I really hoped I could find something in the oss world to supplant this and I think the bar for organizations is: compliance, chat, video conf and sigh the ability to schedule in outlook.

Re: Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory

#217

Post by immibis » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 6:37 PM UTC

Lerc wrote: post #21

kevincox wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the purpose is the same but the UX is a bit different.

Quite. I have yet to manage a verification between clients. I have had all variations of clients ignoring requests, reporting requests only for the requesting client to ignore the response. Both ends quitting declaring that the other end cancelled, asking for the other end to input a code while the other end shows no interface for doing so. It marked the end of me using Matrix as a platform. I'd go back to the old IR…

People still use IRC

Re: Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory

#218

Post by DANmode » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 6:55 PM UTC

trueno wrote: post #216

amluto wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You did better than I did. I installed the recommended Element app, created an account on matrix.org, tried to send a message to another user, and… gave up. Every try got stuck and eventually created an empty room or whatever they call it. I have literally never succeeded in sending or receiving a single message.

There really is no winning in the org comms/chat apps space when it comes to OSS. Matrix+element, rocket, mattermost, Zulip and so on.. feels like there’s either massive gotchas on free/self hosted or it’s wildly complicated to configure and set up. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Hosting a private irc server and you lose out on rich embeds and will need your own pastebin-like service to use, video conferencing…

“Compliance” with what?

Re: Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory

#219

Post by tcfhgj » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 7:06 PM UTC

nottorp wrote: post #203

From an outsider's point of view, what is this "verifying"? Because it sounds like "we'll put them in a database so we can sell it" to me...

cryptographic process to poof that the devices you use in fact belong to you (as cryptographic identity)

Re: Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory

#220

Post by ikkun » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 7:14 PM UTC

prurigro wrote: post #80

ikkun wrote: post #51

seems like it's just that element (the official, and most popular client) will ignore messages from unverified devices, but since it's part of the spec, other clients that want to be spec-compliant will implement this too. I don't think most other clients follow the spec that closely though. I'm in favor of the change, the only downside I can think of is users with esoteric clients or simple bots that don't support v…

For what it's worth, I've been using element x with unified push for a month or so now and I get notifications with message contents without any delay. Maybe they fixed the issue you're worrying about? Self hosting the call/video feature became a lot more complicated though (and it's incompatible with the old system).

my issues with element x are with the client itself, mostly missing features and bad UX. the main reason I don't want unified push is, it's just yet another thing for me to install and maintain, plus all my users need the client app installed. the ntfy server app even defaults to having a full web interface, fortunately it's possible to disable but it's just so much stuff to replace what used to be built-in to the app, to supposedly solve a battery life problem that I've never experienced.

I'm still going to get around to it, because element classic will be deprecated eventually. one of my users is on iOS and has a well-known bug with images not loading, which will probably never get fixed because they're focusing on the new client. and unfortunately I do have users that expect voice calls to work, so it sucks to hear that'll be annoying too.