The element client looked easier to use, although it still remained unclear to me what exactly is the secret key, what is stored locally inside the client (and not available once I switch clients or machines), what is in the server and what I have as a backup.
If I with some practical cryptography experience cannot understand the usage in 1 hour (and I was searching around for more than an hour in various sources) it's not ready for widespread use by people who have no idea what they are doing.
As I said last fall, so maybe October 2020.
I got the impression that the big improvement happened early 2020 and maybe the Web client I used first did not support it.
But if they say that the system has been running since 2014 and the improvement that makes it usable came in 2020 I would not yet call it a mature and proven system.
> you should never see "unable to decrypt message" warnings
Warning is an understatement here :) I could not at all decrypt the new messages other people were sending me and I had to communicate with them by an independent channel. One of them was an experienced Matrix evangelist running his own servers and he could not solve the problem and not tell what I might have done wrong.
> ...documentation is confusing, the spec has been changed less than a year ago IIRC and different clients a at different stages of implementation.
An opinion on confusion around documentation is too subjective for me to comment on, and i'm not sure if you're referring to user doc or developer doc or sys admin doc. Regardless, many folks seem to be building plenty of clients, bots, bridges, services, etc. using the documentation. So i'd at least say the dev. docs seem to be sufficient for many devs. While i do wish there were many more examples used in the dev docs, i have found them to be quite helpful and informative...but again, this is subjective. As to the spec being changed, actually i believe there is quite some acceleration around this, and i feel that is good in these early days...I feel like we might want a dynamic spec at least to get things as best as possible...and then years later, slow things down to avoid breakage - but maybe that's just me. Finally as far as the numerous clients, i think this is a good thing too. Let there be plenty of creative attempts at "getting this right", i say! Diversity is a good thing, and for apps/clients too! ...and much like the presence of numerous email clients, many users might just have different preferences, so its great that the underlying protocol (and associated specs) allow (if not encourage) that. Yes, eventually, after dust settles we might all congregate aroiund a small number of clients that are the "best"...but until then, it is still early days! I for one am enjoying my journey in the matrix world! (Caveat: I am not at all affiliated with any matrix project nor corporate entity, nor client dev. team, etc...I'm really just some random fan boy of matrix.)