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Comment by robto | Hacker News Reader

I'm really excited about using Matrix for more than instant messaging. This November I spent a week reading all the specs (which were really well documented!) and some spec proposals that I think are really important for non-IM clients (room types, event relations (replies), portable identities). I was able to get a simple web client up and running in ~300 lines of clojurescript.

Cerulean is looking great! Does it support e2e threads? I'm about to take a stab at implementing e2e in my application and I'm curious how much overhead it is.

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I'd be excited to even start using Matrix for instant messaging. Elements seems pretty half-baked on my phone and I'd feel bad for convincing anyone to switch from Whatsapp to it.

I would agree, while the UI looks nice on first glance I think some UI concepts are way weird and it's over all overloaded.

On Android I quite like SchildiChat, which is a simple-at-first-look client.

We're constantly iterating on Element's UI, and the concepts are getting constantly de-weirded. For instance, one of the things many people complain about is that it's possible (and indeed easy) to end up with multiple DMs with the same person. So we're in the process of defaulting to "canonical DMs" (i.e. one DM for each pair of people). Others complain about the hassle of managing E2EE (verifying new logins; backing up your keys with recovery passphrases/keys, etc) - the Matrix equivalent of the Signal recovery PIN drama. We're going to be reworking that all (again) next year, too. So yeah, the UI isn't perfect, but hopefully we're working on it, and it should get better.

Meanwhile, the nice thing about Matrix is you can use whatever app you like - e.g. SchildiChat is a fork of Element Android, FluffyChat's good too, so use whatever floats your boat.

A big problem for me on any client is the scrollback. It sometimes gets stuck or takes longer than 15s to load the next portion. The only time I've been able to catch up with old pings was if I had the client open in the background.

using which server? matrix.org is pretty fast these days and scrollback should load instantly.

matrix.org / element. Seems to be more prevalent in larger rooms (#nixos GET /sync requests take 30s and time out)

Cerulean doesn't have E2EE yet because it deliberately doesn't use a Matrix SDK but just talks simple raw Matrix directly via HTTPS. However, it'd be easy to swap out for a real SDK like the one in https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web to get E2EE (or pipe it via pantalaimon :)

What is the point of E2E-encryption in microblogging?

for private threads and DMs :)

But then couldn't one just use ordinary Matrix?

well, this /is/ ordinary Matrix - just with threading implemented! :)

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