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Matrix v1.15

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Re: Matrix v1.15

#71

Post by justaj »

lrvick wrote: post #65
justaj wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Matrix isn’t perfect but it has only improved in the 5 years I’ve been using it. I'd very much like to disagree. From the top of my head, in the past few years of using Element Web: - Notification center is now gone. - Room search is now only limited to official Matrix rooms. - At peak it consumes ~2.2 GB of RAM. - UI feels more sluggish by the day. - Loading it now takes ~10 minutes. - Using it as an IRC bouncer (…

Have you considered that multiple of your complaints could be addressed by protocol improvements?

While that would perhaps be the best solution in the long run, wouldn't you agree that gains in userbase necessary for growth (or at least sustainability) are predicated upon how good the UX is _currently_ ?

Re: Matrix v1.15

#72

Post by justaj »

medstrom wrote: post #67
justaj wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Matrix isn’t perfect but it has only improved in the 5 years I’ve been using it. I'd very much like to disagree. From the top of my head, in the past few years of using Element Web: - Notification center is now gone. - Room search is now only limited to official Matrix rooms. - At peak it consumes ~2.2 GB of RAM. - UI feels more sluggish by the day. - Loading it now takes ~10 minutes. - Using it as an IRC bouncer (…

Element is just one UX.

Yes, however it is also the most feature-complete UX.

Re: Matrix v1.15

#73

Post by eredengrin »

BrenBarn wrote: post #54
Arathorn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the big problems is that folks judge Matrix based on the legacy Element apps, which have now been succeeded by Element X: https://element.io/blog/we-have-lift-off-element-x-call-and-... etc. Element X kicks ass, in my (very biased) opinion: it's a super-speedy Rust core with fancy SwiftUI and Compose native UI layered on top. It radically outperforms any other encrypted messenger i've used in terms of UI perf…

> One of the big problems is that folks judge Matrix based on the legacy Element apps, which have now been succeeded by Element X: https://element.io/blog/we-have-lift-off-element-x-call-and- ... etc. Okay, but they do that because they used those apps, and they did that because you released those apps and said the same thing you're saying now ("use our app, it's really cool"). Surely you can understand why someone w…

I think this is a pretty fair summary. I've been using matrix since before the patreon was started and it's gotten a whole lot better for sure, but there is still no single client that does everything. Element X is right out since it doesn't support spaces yet. SchildiChat next comes close for me, but it can't edit room topics, pinned messages can get a bit weird once you start editing them, and I have a few invites to some pretty nasty looking spam dms that I can't delete, so there are still some rough edges.

On the desktop side, if there were a client as good as SchildiChat maybe that would work, but last time I tried one of the Element desktop clients I wasn't even able to log in (it either crashed or hung, can't remember), and most of the time I'm fine with Fractal anyway. Fractal is actually a very nice client for what it does, it just has a limited feature set: missing spaces, copy/paste doesn't quite work like you'd expect, no search (I'm not sure there are any clients with fully functioning search for encrypted rooms), and my memory is that heic image previews weren't supported. I can fall back to nheko for some of the other things when needed.

As far as I know, there aren't any clients that support the new element call unless you enable the labs feature in element x.

All that said, I can't overstate how much I appreciate all the work the matrix devs do, and it is still fine for my daily use. Even if I sometimes disagree with Arathorn's conclusions about how ready matrix is, I have to appreciate the optimism and I imagine it is part of why he's been able to continue through all the negativity :) and it's not entirely wrong to say that matrix beats the competition - I'd say it easily beats teams and imessage (teams does not deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as anything else), and it is mostly comparable with messenger and whatsapp. Slack probably has it slightly beat, and discord is leagues ahead of everything else.

Re: Matrix v1.15

#74

Post by DavideNL »

foresto wrote: post #59
DavideNL wrote: post #51

It baffles me that when you install the Element App (which uses matrix.org by default), you can not easily find any of your friends, because you cant “connect” your phone number… This makes the App a no-go for everyone and their grandmother. The registration and setup process was so cumbersome, even people with some tech knowledge in my friend circle had trouble getting it to work. Anyway, it seems so user hostile, w…

I don't use that functionality, but I'm pretty sure it exists: https://spec.matrix.org/latest/identity-service-api/ https://github.com/matrix-org/sydent

Yea that's correct, it seems to exist; However apparently the default server, matrix.org , does not support it...

(which everyone uses who follows the default App setup flow.)

Re: Matrix v1.15

#75

Post by eredengrin »

zx8080 wrote: post #68
justaj wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Matrix isn’t perfect but it has only improved in the 5 years I’ve been using it. I'd very much like to disagree. From the top of my head, in the past few years of using Element Web: - Notification center is now gone. - Room search is now only limited to official Matrix rooms. - At peak it consumes ~2.2 GB of RAM. - UI feels more sluggish by the day. - Loading it now takes ~10 minutes. - Using it as an IRC bouncer (…

> Loading it now takes ~10 minutes. What?! How is this possible? How come users tolerate it at all?

I don't think that is normal, at least I've never had any client take that long to load, and nobody I communicate with on matrix has ever mentioned that as being an issue either.

Re: Matrix v1.15

#76

Post by mqus »

lrvick wrote: post #65
justaj wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Matrix isn’t perfect but it has only improved in the 5 years I’ve been using it. I'd very much like to disagree. From the top of my head, in the past few years of using Element Web: - Notification center is now gone. - Room search is now only limited to official Matrix rooms. - At peak it consumes ~2.2 GB of RAM. - UI feels more sluggish by the day. - Loading it now takes ~10 minutes. - Using it as an IRC bouncer (…

Have you considered that multiple of your complaints could be addressed by protocol improvements?

I don't see this, since the complaint is about things that used to work and not things that are still missing.

Re: Matrix v1.15

#77

Post by mqus »

hashworks wrote: post #15
cpfiffer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why exactly don't people use matrix that much? It strikes me as a reasonably good open, secure comms protocol.

The official client is clunky and being electron on the desktop doesn't make it better. Messengers live and die on UX. Since it's an open protocol alternative clients exist of course, but are often not feature complete. Things are often slow , especially with large group channels with lots of messages. If you host a server yourself - it's great that you can! - you'll try the official implementation, synapse — ...and…

> synapse — ...and discover that it's a resource hog.

I thought that, too, but at the very least it probably grows with usage. On my single-user-server, synapse currently needs ~100MB of RAM and does not consume CPU at all. It's not "slim" but I wouldn't call it a resource hog either.

Re: Matrix v1.15

#78

Post by Arathorn »

justaj wrote: post #60
deberon wrote: post #39

There’s a surprising amount of negativity in here. Matrix is great for me. I’m happy to see the improvements. I’m also happy to hear the team is approaching sustainability. Matrix isn’t perfect but it has only improved in the 5 years I’ve been using it. I’m looking forward to what they can do in another 5 years.

> Matrix isn’t perfect but it has only improved in the 5 years I’ve been using it. I'd very much like to disagree. From the top of my head, in the past few years of using Element Web: - Notification center is now gone. - Room search is now only limited to official Matrix rooms. - At peak it consumes ~2.2 GB of RAM. - UI feels more sluggish by the day. - Loading it now takes ~10 minutes. - Using it as an IRC bouncer (…

> - Notification center is now gone.

It's still there; it just got moved into Labs given it never worked in encrypted rooms, and having a flakey feature for new users was (correctly) considered worse than not having a feature at all. Go look for "Enable the notifications panel in the room header (Unreliable in encrypted rooms)" in Labs on develop.element.io or Element Nightly.

> - Room search is now only limited to official Matrix rooms.

This isn't accurate. On one server (matrix.org) the room directory is currently locked down to stop it filling up with spam, however this should be opened up again to be a curated room list in the near future.

> - At peak it consumes ~2.2 GB of RAM.

> - UI feels more sluggish by the day.

> - Loading it now takes ~10 minutes.

So agreed that Element Web performance is very painful for power-users. This is because we've been putting all of our effort into fixing perf in the protocol itself (via sliding sync etc) using matrix-rust-sdk on mobile in Element X to prove it all out. We've also spent huge amounts of time on encryption reliability.

However, good news is that we've finally moved to Element X Web (codenamed as Aurora: https://github.com/element-hq/aurora), which runs matrix-rust-sdk in browser but with MVVM React components from Element Web for the UI. You can play with an alpha at https://dangerousdemos.net (non-permenant-URL) right now. In contrast:

- At peak it consumes 80MB of heap.

- UI feels instant and is O(1) regardless of account size

- Loading takes ~2 seconds (although that's about 20x slower than it should be given Aurora doesn't currently persist any local state, so it's loading everything from scratch on launch).

> - Using it as an IRC bouncer (to Libera) is now gone, which was what initially attracted me in the first place.

Agreed that this sucks. We did everything we could to stop Libera removing the bridge, but failed due to lack of $ meaning we didn't have enough dedicated manpower to meet Libera's demands.

> And I don't even use the voice / call functionality of Element Web.

Element Call's actually rather good, in terms of providing end-to-end encrypted group calling. If you used it you'd probably complain that we broke backwards compatibility with the legacy 1:1 Matrix voip calling though, which would be true; again, due to lack of dedicated manpower.

> I somewhat understand the reasoning behind the decisions, but I feel like they should have improved the UX first before working on the protocol itself.

To improve the UX with clients, we had to improve the protocol, and Element X shows how good that UX improvement is. We're now catching up on Web.

Re: Matrix v1.15

#79

Post by Arathorn »

martindevans wrote: post #40
Arathorn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you say the delta is between Element's current video-rooms and Discord-style voice-rooms (if you go and mute video for everyone), ooi? The only reason Element hasn't implemented precisely the same UI as Discord is because it's not (currently) trying to be a Discord competitor, but more a "run your own encrypted Teams alternative", given that's what Element customers are asking for right now, and we're havi…

In my experience with running Discord servers you setup a couple of hierarchical roles (admin, moderator, user etc) when you first setup the server and never again. However I'm constantly adding new roles which are really just groups of users. I would say 90% of all the Discord roles I've ever created have no permissions associated with them at all and just exist to ping a group of users (or act as a tag for bots). M…

Right - this matches my hunch; that folks want to define groups of users (which you can already in Matrix in 'spaces', but the UX in most clients is awful) - and what they really want is group-based permissions (which isn't part of the protocol, and instead gets layered on at the application layer today.

So the problem here isn't that folks want contradictory access levels (e.g. Admins can kick people but can't set topic, but Mods can kick people but can't set topic) but the ability to set them via group?

Re: Matrix v1.15

#80

Post by freilanzer »

Arathorn wrote: post #8
fishgoesblub wrote: post #2

Every new release or "This week in Matrix" post I check to see if Discord style detailed permissions and voice channels get added and every time I get disappointed. I fear it'll never be added at this point due to the funding issues. I hyped it up to all of my friends who stick to Discord that "One day" it'll compete with Discord and we, and millions of others can all finally be happy. I hope that day will come, but…

What would you say the delta is between Element's current video-rooms and Discord-style voice-rooms (if you go and mute video for everyone), ooi? The only reason Element hasn't implemented precisely the same UI as Discord is because it's not (currently) trying to be a Discord competitor, but more a "run your own encrypted Teams alternative", given that's what Element customers are asking for right now, and we're havi…

Idc about permissions, but the usability difference is astronomical.
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