Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

xn--gckvb8fzb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 150 posts

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#41

Post by dzaima »

udev4096 wrote: post #32
dzaima wrote: post #13

The issue of broken rooms was reportedly the database having gotten corrupted indexes, which affected a bunch of rooms (2/55 of ones I was in): https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/issues/18606#issuecomm... . Not much a protocol/implementation can do about that. It did take over 2 weeks for it to be resolved though, which is a rather long period of time. Also on the status page - https://status.matrix.org/incidents/…

Wait, did anyone investigate on why messages were not stored by other homeservers? That's rather odd, given the selling point of matrix is federation

I've heard that messages not getting through federation in some cases is just a thing that can happen. How that's compatible with calling matrix as having good federation, I don't know.

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#42

Post by arp242 »

Here's what I wrote in 2019 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592195):

"The reason for Slack's success is probably because it's a "turn key solution": you register your company, invite your employees, enter your CC, and you're good to go."

"With a lot of these open solutions things are more complex. I think we should really focus on providing a good UX here if we want more adoption."

This seems unchanged, or even worse. Arathorn recommended modular.im in a reply, which now redirects to https://element.io/pricing, and "set up a server" just redirects to GitHub, and the only other option is "Talk to an expert" – yeah, no.

Self-hosting is great but realistically, lots of people are just not interested, and that's fine too. And even if they are: having a simple option to quickly evaluate $the_thing is probably a good idea.

This is of course in addition to all the technical problems outlined in this post, which I also reported in 2019: "opening https://riot.im/app/ makes Firefox use 100% CPU and my laptops fan spin; I closed it after 10 seconds of just a loading animation"

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#44

Post by buovjaga »

Takennickname wrote: post #8

I 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.…

> It's tough finding an open-standards based IM application for corporate use.

I didn't try it, but this seems interesting: https://github.com/jesse-greathouse/eIRC

"eIRC is a modern, scalable enterprise messaging architecture built on the IRC protocol. Designed for organizations that require ephemeral, real-time communication without the heavy operational overhead of pub/sub systems like Apache Kafka, eIRC delivers high-throughput, low-latency chat experiences while minimizing memory and CPU usage per user."

It does support history as well: "IRC History Bridge: Implement Redis-backed buffer for message replay".

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#45

Post by agilob »

the__alchemist wrote: post #25
arresin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This implies developers care about performance.

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#46

Post by this_user »

j45 wrote: post #37
Takennickname wrote: post #8

I 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.…

Architecture Astronauts, and Cowboy Coding are all problematic. This is more of a question of enough clarity, direction and alignment. Either both groups have it, or they don't.

Tech people don't like to hear this, but you also need product people. And I don't necessarily mean those with a business background, but those who can see the larger picture from the user/customer perspective and who can ensure that all of the technology is packaged into one coherent and actually useful thing.

If the project is run by those who are all deep in the weeds of low level technological details, odds are that the larger product turns into a giant mess that is all over the place.

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#47

Post by attendant3446 »

Takennickname wrote: post #8

I 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.…

Have you tried Delta Chat? I like the concept, but I can't convince anyone to sign up to test it out :(

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#48

Post by attendant3446 »

blfr wrote: post #15

I 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.

My main problem with Signal is that it's a mobile app with a desktop companion app. Ideally, I would prefer a federated messenger, but I would be completely fine with Signal if it wasn't a mobile-only app (you can't use the desktop version without first having the mobile app).

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#49

Post by Arathorn »

Arcuru wrote: post #28

This 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. [1] https://matrix.org/blog/2025/07/security-predisclosure/

fwiw these CVEs weren’t reported 6 months ago; they were found during a project which has been running for 6 months.
Post reply on HN