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Comment by phyzome | Hacker News Reader

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phyzome·

> I'm thinking of switching to Matrix solely because the desktop client is pretty bad.

Oooooh, I've got some bad news for you.

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What is it? Riot works beautifully.

Beautifully mediocre, but yeah it mostly works. (Never been able to use Signal so I can't compare, but Riot's encryption was completely broken until a few weeks ago, and now there is only the occasional "hold on, gotta fetch keys for 10 seconds" and slow scrolling up, etc. It can't compete with something like Telegram in terms of UX; it is infinitely better for privacy but it doesn't "work beautifully".)

It was a non-stop shitfest of buggy encryption and broken UX last I tried. A group of us tried using it for a bit and gave up because we kept losing messages, couldn't figure out which messages were "secure" in various ways, and had confusing horizon effects where only some people could see some messages.

That was a couple months ago. Maybe it has improved massively since then? I guess I'll try it again later this year.

Definitely improved somewhere last month. Not bug-free by a long shot, but while I also gave up on it after trying it in February, I'm now using it in favor of Keybase that got bought by some shitcorp.

No idea what problems you have, but I have been using encryption heavily since it got enabled by default. And I have never had any issue with it - even the transfer of encryption keys in the background to verified 3rd party clients worked like a charm.

But, also this experience may not have been possible before may (when they released a big update with e2ee by default).

> No idea what problems you have, but I have been using encryption heavily since it got enabled by default.

So like three weeks.

They wrote:

> That was a couple months ago.

And in a sibling comment I also confirmed the issues before the new encryption stuff, but no issues after (not with the encryption part at least).

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