7 ms·

> 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 ye

by justaj 1y ago

> 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 (to Libera) is now gone, which was what initially attracted me in the first place. And I don't even use the voice / call functionality of Element Web. 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.

lrvick 1y ago
Have you considered that multiple of your complaints could be addressed by protocol improvements?
- justaj 1y ago
  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_ ?
  - lrvick 1y ago
    My minimum requirements for personal online communication outside of public web-accessible forums like this one, are open protocol, open source implementations, optional E2EE, independent hosting, client choice, and access to channels on other independently hosted servers. These are non negotiable for building my social graph of communication with family, friends, colleagues, etc. Communication is a sacred part of the human experience and I will not allow centralized entities to control my primary means of connection to my friends and family. My options for digital comms are then are limited to email, IRC, XMPP, or Matrix. Matrix has leaps and bounds the best UX and functionality by this criteria and is what I use for the overwhelming majority of my communications. Anyone that is exclusively willing to communicate over corpotech disrespects my values for freedom and privacy, and is by extension opting out of being friends with me unless we see each other in person regularly. 9/10 times the people that respect me and want to be friends with me also respect my ethical conviction and create matrix accounts to talk to me if they do not already have one. Taking back control of the internet will require conviction and I try to lead by example in my social circles. I personally could not give less of a shit if Matrix has feature parity with xyz corpotech as they are not solving the same problem. I also use IRC heavily to talk to many of the best engineers in the world and that is a low UX bar to beat. That said, as corpotech walled gardens keep screwing their users, more and more hold-outs will come over and new features and improvements will reduce that friction over time. For now though very few individuals understand the vital importance of digital sovereignty for a citizen controlled society, but governments absolutely get it and do not want people like Zuck controlling their comms, so it is not surprising governments are first in line willing to pay for help switching to Matrix. The people will follow in time.
    - msgodel 1y ago
      If you give up on E2EE (which isn't useful on smartphones anyway since the users have so little control over the OS and app distribution) email works, nearly everyone has that. If you use eg jmp.chat you can use email, other people can talk to you over SMS, and you can just pretend all this retarded crap doesn't exist.
      - lrvick 1y ago
        In the decade prior to me abandoning cell phones entirely I used E2EE email frequently on Android via OpenKeychain and K-9Mail with a Yubikey. I did not want to be locked into Google or Apple ecosystems and the ship on a truly FOSS Android device has long sailed, so I ported my number to a VoIP provider and only use PCs now. To your point -any- E2EE on proprietary platforms like iOS or Android cannot be trusted for high risk comms, so at my infosec job we exclusively use Matrix from QubesOS workstations. But yes email is normally the go-to fallback except with Gen Z who almost universally refuse to use it having grown up exclusively using corpotech.
- mqus 1y ago
  I don't see this, since the complaint is about things that used to work and not things that are still missing.
  - lrvick 1y ago
    Things working well with a few channels and a few hundred people are very different than working with thousands of channels and thousands of people.
- Teever 1y ago
  I can't tell if this comment was written in jest or not. It's always protocol improvements and 'it's coming in the next version's or 'msc #xxxx just got approved' with Matrix. It's always someone saying 'oh this next version fixed all that' and then someone says 'well what about mobile' or 'what about desktop's and then someone says 'actually it doesn't fix it there.' I'd love matrix to be the solution to my communication problems but it just isn't.
  - lrvick 1y ago
    It is a solution for plenty of people and I am one of them. Your standards must simply prioritize UX over federation and E2EE.
medstrom 1y ago
Element is just one UX.
- justaj 1y ago
  Yes, however it is also the most feature-complete UX.
zx8080 1y ago
> Loading it now takes ~10 minutes. What?! How is this possible? How come users tolerate it at all?
- fanatic2pope 1y ago
  Probably because it's hyperbole. I've been using element web for a long time and have not seen those kinds of issues. Not to say that it is perfect, there are definitely bugs.
- eredengrin 1y ago
  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.
- lrvick 1y ago
  I am a power user and have never experienced this. Their system must be disk bound or ram bound or something. Granted I have 0 systems I use with less than 64gb of memory. Ram is cheap.
Arathorn 1y ago
> - 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 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 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.
- nadir_ishiguro 1y ago

by justaj 1y ago

lrvick 1y ago

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

justaj 1y ago
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_ ?
- lrvick 1y ago
  My minimum requirements for personal online communication outside of public web-accessible forums like this one, are open protocol, open source implementations, optional E2EE, independent hosting, client choice, and access to channels on other independently hosted servers. These are non negotiable for building my social graph of communication with family, friends, colleagues, etc. Communication is a sacred part of the human experience and I will not allow centralized entities to control my primary means of connection to my friends and family. My options for digital comms are then are limited to email, IRC, XMPP, or Matrix. Matrix has leaps and bounds the best UX and functionality by this criteria and is what I use for the overwhelming majority of my communications. Anyone that is exclusively willing to communicate over corpotech disrespects my values for freedom and privacy, and is by extension opting out of being friends with me unless we see each other in person regularly. 9/10 times the people that respect me and want to be friends with me also respect my ethical conviction and create matrix accounts to talk to me if they do not already have one. Taking back control of the internet will require conviction and I try to lead by example in my social circles. I personally could not give less of a shit if Matrix has feature parity with xyz corpotech as they are not solving the same problem. I also use IRC heavily to talk to many of the best engineers in the world and that is a low UX bar to beat. That said, as corpotech walled gardens keep screwing their users, more and more hold-outs will come over and new features and improvements will reduce that friction over time. For now though very few individuals understand the vital importance of digital sovereignty for a citizen controlled society, but governments absolutely get it and do not want people like Zuck controlling their comms, so it is not surprising governments are first in line willing to pay for help switching to Matrix. The people will follow in time.
  - msgodel 1y ago
    If you give up on E2EE (which isn't useful on smartphones anyway since the users have so little control over the OS and app distribution) email works, nearly everyone has that. If you use eg jmp.chat you can use email, other people can talk to you over SMS, and you can just pretend all this retarded crap doesn't exist.
    - lrvick 1y ago
      In the decade prior to me abandoning cell phones entirely I used E2EE email frequently on Android via OpenKeychain and K-9Mail with a Yubikey. I did not want to be locked into Google or Apple ecosystems and the ship on a truly FOSS Android device has long sailed, so I ported my number to a VoIP provider and only use PCs now. To your point -any- E2EE on proprietary platforms like iOS or Android cannot be trusted for high risk comms, so at my infosec job we exclusively use Matrix from QubesOS workstations. But yes email is normally the go-to fallback except with Gen Z who almost universally refuse to use it having grown up exclusively using corpotech.
mqus 1y ago
I don't see this, since the complaint is about things that used to work and not things that are still missing.
- lrvick 1y ago
  Things working well with a few channels and a few hundred people are very different than working with thousands of channels and thousands of people.
Teever 1y ago
I can't tell if this comment was written in jest or not. It's always protocol improvements and 'it's coming in the next version's or 'msc #xxxx just got approved' with Matrix. It's always someone saying 'oh this next version fixed all that' and then someone says 'well what about mobile' or 'what about desktop's and then someone says 'actually it doesn't fix it there.' I'd love matrix to be the solution to my communication problems but it just isn't.
- lrvick 1y ago
  It is a solution for plenty of people and I am one of them. Your standards must simply prioritize UX over federation and E2EE.

medstrom 1y ago

Element is just one UX.

justaj 1y ago
Yes, however it is also the most feature-complete UX.

zx8080 1y ago

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

fanatic2pope 1y ago
Probably because it's hyperbole. I've been using element web for a long time and have not seen those kinds of issues. Not to say that it is perfect, there are definitely bugs.
eredengrin 1y ago
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.
lrvick 1y ago
I am a power user and have never experienced this. Their system must be disk bound or ram bound or something. Granted I have 0 systems I use with less than 64gb of memory. Ram is cheap.

Arathorn 1y ago

> - 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 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 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.

nadir_ishiguro 1y ago