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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I had a similar experience with Matrix/Element. I was using the desktop app to chat with a friend, and while we were able to get some end-to-end encryption working, it was a huge pain the butt, and if two software engineers struggled this much to get the damn thing working, there's no way in hell that I'm convincing my parents to use it.

To me, we have to accept the incremental wins where we can get them; getting my parents on Signal means that they're not on WhatsApp.

I am a believer in federation, honestly, but the fact of the matter is that there's a reason that XMPP hasn't taken the world by storm, and people have gravitated towards centralized stuff: it's just easier, and not everyone is a software engineer.

That said, I would love to be wrong about this....if we can make Matrix/Element approachable by anyone, I would support that.

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Speaking as project lead for Matrix (and Element), I'm trying to understand the mixed feedback we've had this week, and somehow channel all the negativity into improving things. While some folks are clearly using it successfully and seem to like it, another bunch of people say "it was a huge pain in the butt to get E2EE working, and if it two software engineers struggled this much..." etc.

When did this E2EE failure happen (so I know if these are current bugs or ones fixed months/years ago)? What platforms was this (web, iOS & Android are entirely separate codebases)? What actually went wrong? The simple case of signing up and DMing someone should just work, and the E2EE should be transparent.

The main possible failure modes I'm aware of right now are:

* Risk of undecryptable messages during federation outages (due to messages being shared separately from their keys)

* Risk of verifying another user getting stuck if there are weird failures/edge cases we haven't spotted yet

* Verifying yourself when you log in on a new device has confusing UX, and there's a known bug that can stop keys being synced to the new login even once verified.

If anyone in the "I tried Matrix and it was awful" camp could give detailed feedback (either here, or on github.com/vector-im/element-{web,ios,android}/issues) then it would be genuinely useful for prioritising our work. At the moment the vast majority of negative feedback on HN has been "it sucked" without giving a hint of what actually went wrong.

I don't actually think anything is awful, but my main complaint about Element as a GUI app, is that aside from opening the chromium developer console and watching what it does, it has very few options to diagnose client-server connectivity or TLS crypto key handshake issues.

I wish it wasn't an Electron app built on Chromium which makes it a huge resource hog. There's lots of underlying dependency and reliance on whatever design decisions the Chromium developers might make now or in the future, which would not be best suited to the security and single-purpose-focus of a chat application.

Isn't the beauty of Matrix that you or anyone else can build a client on top of the platform easily? I know on my Linux machine there are some non-electron options, like Qt [0].

[0] https://matrix.org/clients/

> At the moment the vast majority of negative feedback on HN has been "it sucked" without giving a hint of what actually went wrong.

That's the nature of the HN beast: getting all the "it sucked" comments without STR and/or use-case descriptions is certainly demoralizing (reading HN comments about your own work is not for the unprepared) but asking folks who've had a bad time with your product to spend more time, for free, going through that same experience again so they can do a detailed report-out for you is probably not going to get a lot of takers (even if you might get a few high quality reports).

If you're not already doing so, I would strongly recommend you invest some money in getting access to "people who've never used Matrix before but are familiar with messaging apps" to do user testing (there's a number of sites for doing that for you, where you hand over money and instructions, and they find folks to do unbiased testing for you) where you ask pairs of people to get started with your software, with the explicit goal of getting to the point where they can set up E2EE messaging, and reviewing the recordings to see what roadblocks they run into.

And for bonus points, dev-blog about those experiences on the matrix/element site (where did folks get stuck? was this a surprise to you? why? how did you fix it? what were the user reactions to the fix? how much better is Matrix now, thanks to this work?).

I couldn’t emphasise this more. Stick to the YC mantra: always talk to users. Ask them what they want or have problems with, quantitatively (questionnaire style) and qualitatively (talk to them in person, real user testing).

Added a new feature? Don’t assume it’s well designed. Assume something is wrong with it and that it can and should be further optimised and sweat the details. Details matter.

Unless you sweat the details, users will notice.

> I would strongly recommend you invest some money in getting access to "people who've never used Matrix before but are familiar with messaging apps" to do user testing

I think they already do quite a bit of this, which is probably what makes it puzzling when tech oriented users on hn keep reporting how terrible it is, thus the desire for more details to see whether it's just an older anecdote, something missed in testing, etc.

Two matrix blog posts[1][2] from the past 2 months both mention new user testing/research, and there's definitely more if you go back in their blog history.

[1] https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/17/matrix-to-reloaded#whats-...

[2] https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/27/this-week-in-matrix-2020-...

> If anyone in the "I tried Matrix and it was awful" camp could give detailed feedback (either here, or on github.com/vector-im/element-{web,ios,android}/issues) then it would be genuinely useful for prioritising our work. At the moment the vast majority of negative feedback on HN has been "it sucked" without giving a hint of what actually went wrong.

Your two modes of suggested contact (HN, GitHub) ensure only a certain type of user will contact (both require tech skills and a login). If there really are UX issues, you might want to encourage different types of users to give feedback (and if the fear is that the feedback won't be detailed/useful, maybe a guided form can help).

I can easily use both of those methods and even I always like apps that allow me to just push a button and it composes an email in my phone's email app, prefilled with application version etc., and lets me send an email to report a bug/crash.

Yep, there should be a crash or bug report form within the app itself, and an email for bugs at something like support@element.io

There is one in Element Android. When the phone is shaken, a dialogue pops up "It seems you're shaking your phone in frustration, file a bug report". It has in-app bug reporting.

Also 'Menu > Report Bug' on Element Android.

I have used Element on n off. The UX around encryption and passphrase still needs some work. I cant imagine moving my family and less tech oriented friends on it.

I logged on to it yesterday and got a prompt to enter the passphrase. I have it all in bitwarden, so easy to get around but for the average joe that would be the end of the journey. Even the verify session, when in fact Ive verified them in the past.

Minor thing, I echo the sentiment to get some average joes and non-tech oriented using the product and get some feedback.

I can share the bugs that happened to me. All of these happened in the last 6 months:

- A message would get "pinned" to the bottom in Element. Basically, you could send new messages but a specific message would always look like it was the most recent message (even though it was not). This was a purely visual bug and the other party wouldn't have the issue.

- Messages send/receive slowly compared to other services. It could also just be the matrix.org homeserver, I'm not sure. You gotta be aware you are competing against the likes of Discord however, who deliver messages nearly instantly.

- Decryption would randomly break for one party and they would be unable to decrypt new messages until they restarted the client. I couldn't identify the trigger for this as it seemed to occur randomly.

> - A message would get "pinned" to the bottom in Element. Basically, you could send new messages but a specific message would always look like it was the most recent message (even though it was not). This was a purely visual bug and the other party wouldn't have the issue.

Is this in Element Android? I've had that issue happen there too, but only there.

I don't actually remember unfortunately, I haven't had it happen in a while. It's either the Linux client or the Android client though as those are the only two I use.

For me, this was a month or two ago. I don't remember exactly now, but my friend and I tried to verify each other, but one of us quit the device verification (with the five emojis) half-way through and uninstalled the app, so now there is a half-verified device that we can never remove. My icon with him always shows up red because of this device, and there's nothing we can do.

UPDATE: I just checked now, there's a "manually verify by text" option, I clicked "verify" and that device finally turned green, so at least now there's a way to fix this.

One major source of confusion for me is that one-on-one chats and multi-user rooms are different, but one-on-one chats seem to be multi-user rooms with just two people in them? That is confusing to me, because I see "people" and I see "rooms" but apparently people are rooms too.

All that having been said, I am very pleasantly surprised by the overall experience, and especially the pace at which it seems to improve. I use Element semi-regularly with a friend and it's been working okay. Hopefully all these kinks will be ironed out, because I really really want a better IRC, and Gitter has become infinitely better now that I can just use Element to access it.

> At the moment the vast majority of negative feedback on HN has been "it sucked" without giving a hint of what actually went wrong.

Also, I don't think that's what the majority of users are saying (and I certainly never said and don't think Matrix sucks). I'm saying "this is not good enough yet that my parents could use it", which is an extremely high bar, and I think that's the way you should take the feedback.

In case you don't know, like Gitter, Freenode has a public Matrix bridge!

I remember trying the bridge but it wasn't working entirely well, has this changed recently? That's going to be another great integration if it works well.

Another solution is for them to just delete that old device.

Settings -> Security & Privacy -> Check the box next to the old device -> Delete Session

That helps, thanks. We searched a lot but couldn't find it a few months ago, is it new? Or maybe it didn't exist on the web app?

Hi!

I'd like to share something I consider a success story.

I'm using matrix successfully with my construction contractor and his helper. They've been working on a building site 2000km away for months. He and his helper have been uploading pics and video every day. They also use the chat now and then. I've shared pdf documents with them too.

Mind you, they were used to Whatsapp, so I had to nudge them into downloading yet another app and explain. As their client, I had the necessary leverage, so they did install Element (well, riot at the time). These are people who don't speak a word of English, from a remote countryside village, and totally unfamiliar with computery stuff, and they managed.

Thank you for helping to make that possible!

This is not in the same vein as what you're looking for. (I haven't tried user-user encryption), but the verification popups are annoying.

- I don't want popups or notifications, but whenever I use it, I'm greeted with one.

- Once I click "Verify", it's not clear how to proceed. It indicates to use a mobile phone etc with the app installed to verify. There are two clickable things: A big red "Skip" that appears to be the default button: This takes you back. A green hyperlink showing "Use recovery key or passphrase". Is this the "continue with verification and making the popup go away" button? It then asks for a passphrase, which I can only pass because it's stored in Firefox. What does this have to do with phone? Is the phone picture supposed to be clickable?

- Once I get past this, it still show a popup every time I open the page; this time, it asks me to review where I've logged in.

- Once I click review, I'm sent to a "Welcome to Element" page. The popup shows again next time I refresh or open the page.

OOT: Haters are going to hate anyway. Thank you for the incredible work you do with Matrix and the open ecosystem it fosters.

On another note, yesterday I set up my own matrix-synapse [0] homeserver along with a token-based registration page [1] with nginx+lets encrypt as a reverse proxy. I spent ~1 hour setting it up on a fresh Ubuntu 20.04 VM.

I then on-boarded my wife, brother, father and mother without issue. I just sent them a text with screenshots and detailed instructions on what to do. Everyone's in, and we have E2EE group chats going. Within ~20 minutes of sending instructions everyone was participating in chat.

The only issue encountered was that my mom entered the wrong homeserver URL (I set up the sign-up page to be join.subdomain.tld and the homeserver to be chat.subdomain.tld and she entered the former into Element). My dad was able to resolve the issue quickly for her.

All clients are Element [2] right now, though I plan on trying Weechat [3] this week.

Honestly, I didn't expect it to be this easy to do after seeing all the complaints on HN. I subscribed on Patreon yesterday and wish you all the best of luck!

[0] https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse

[1] https://github.com/ZerataX/matrix-registration

[2] https://element.io

[3] https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix

Here's a screen recording of me trying to log in to app.element.io [0].

0:10 - Stuck on "Verify this login" despite cancelling

1:00 - Same as above. The security phrase I have saved seems to be invalid.

1:38 - Can't drag or expand the left panel. Went away when I made the window wider after I stopped recording.

1:52 - After clicking "Verify" again, the session immediately verifies? I didn't enter any passphrase or do anything in my other logged in sessions.

2:18 - Every time I log in I get a notification about trusting a bunch of old sessions. There doesn't seem to be a way to get rid of them.

This is on a non-private Firefox (68, Debian) session, so maybe the security key is saved somewhere and didn't get loaded the first 2 times I tried to verify?

Also, not necessarily a bug, but to verify by phone I should just get a notification and not have to do 'Settings > Security & Privacy > Show All Sessions > [Guess one of several identical unverified Element Web sessions] > Verify.

[0]: http://files.widloski.com/matrixbug.webm

Mirror: https://youtu.be/QIRHAusQyYI

Firefox 68? I'm running Firefox 84.0.2 on Pop_OS 20.04. I can empathize with the project maintainer for not prioritizing a browser ~20 versions behind latest.

I forgot to turn on automatic updates. Still, it's only 1.5 years old.

I'm not able to load your video, Firefox says unable to connect.

Fixed.

It's against the rules to call it out on HN, but given how incredible Matrix is, I will happily risk being banned to share that I believe there is an astroturfing campaign currently being undertaken to promote Signal and that you should take the complaints with a grain of salt. Matrix and other competition are being cast with FUD in an attempt to sway fence sitters.

Thank you for Matrix and Element. My non-technical friends and family all use it without issue.

Funnily enough it seems like opposite and people are trying to put down Singal. Seriously we are all on the same side. It's not competition.

I've been running matrix instance for probably 6 years from times even before Vector.

The constant popups happening and mysterious verification fails gotten pretty annoying. So much that my non-technical friends started to complain. It has gotten objectively worse in past year.

I happily use both Signal as SMS replacement and Matrix for community/slack. Signal can't do chatrooms / more people well and it will probably never will. Matrix on the other hand is much worse at ux of the encryption process and overall user friendliness for casual users. It's not long ago when matrix didn't have 1on1 chats and would just make new room with 2people named after them.

Signal is a single point of failure, cell-phone number dependent chat app. It should be put down along with WhatsApp.

If you don't own the server, you are not in control of your information.

Nobody cares if you own the server if there are no users on it.

Also it's not like Matrix.org is not single master instance that can fail just as easily. Even better most of data there is not e2e encrypted so yes if somebody hacks it you will loose all the information.

I should be clear, I wouldn't say Matrix/Element "sucked", and I apologize if that's the tone that my comment implied. It's pretty cool, and I greatly preferred it over trying to finagle XMPP + OMEMO, and I will probably try it again soon enough.

In my case, my issues came down to mostly your last point:

> Verifying yourself when you log in on a new device has confusing UX, and there's a known bug that can stop keys being synced to the new login even once verified.

If I installed a desktop client on two different mac computers, I would have issues with messages not decrypting properly until I do a re-verification, and figuring that out took some Googling and trial-and-error.

I've been self-hosting synapse for 6 years (? before vector) with small active group of about 30 non technical users. You've helped me to set up synapse all those years ago. I am super grateful for that and for your work.

But we've had issues over the years

Some issues i thought are happening because we are not always on the most up to date synapse (my problem) and clients expect version of the master instance but it seems happening even on the root instance: - Verification issues that are impossible to understand even for me. Often it fails even you go through the process. - In past year huge increase in amount of notifications. Everytime i log in i am greeted with "Review where you’re logged in Verify all your sessions to ensure your account & messages are safe". - Some my users enabled e2e and randomly locked self out of rooms because they log out somewhere or updated client and couldn't back in.

All my users have similar problems and actually started avoid e2e on matrix now. It's shame because most of them are now also on Signal because they want e2e.

Other issues:

- I had to make special video tutorial for users to be able to register and log in at our own instance. They keep trying to log into matrix.org instance. Custom instance seems like something second tier in clients. It would be really nice if instead "login to matrix" vs "use custom server". It would be login to your server with multiple public servers as options by default and + button to add custom servers. More like you add services/logins in ios or something. It wouldn't feel like discrimination.

Overall i feel like there is some duality in Matrix goals. On one hand it markets federation and decentralization but on other hand it promotes matrix.org so it looks like is the only instance. It would be cool to support different servers to get some diversity (like this https://www.hello-matrix.net/public_servers.php is not on matrix.org page).

My experience with Matrix/Element and the various standard-compliant Matrix chat clients, in an ISP environment, is that it's totally possible to set up a rock solid replacement for Slack within an organization that has a person on staff to spend some cycles setting it up, and periodically maintaining it.

We don't have any major technical challenges or problems running our own Synapse daemon server. It's a debian stable xen PV VM stored on a LVM logical volume, so easily moved between hypervisors, or cloned, if ever necessary. It runs at a load average of 0.01.

In my specific ISP environment it's the same person that admins the X.509 private root CA PKI so we're well equipped to deal with running it in a purely intranet environment with no access to the global routing table.

For widespread non technical random end user use? Totally agreed it's not ready yet.

An "internally-run-Slack" is definitely a great use case for Matrix in its current form. I don't own a business, but if I did, I would almost certainly consider running my own Synapse server, just to have a stronger guarantee that internal chats stay internal.

It's an sqlite database on disk, so in our case fairly easy to know exactly where the data lives, and keep it secure.

Yes at my bigco they've set up a whole matrix (rebranded) service. Great. Only thing I miss is some kind of 'ephemeral chatroom' option, where nothing is saved or expires after some time. Some conversations are not worth saving and wading through all the chat logs to find some stuff can be painful.

Also I like the other tools' (cisco jabber and some others) option to save chat logs in exchange folders, so you have local search indexation/capabilities.

On the other side, I'd also like a button to record a whole conf-call, so minutes of meetings can be backed up with the actual conversation. Yes, how 'trusting' of me...

I'm not worried about people that I moved to signal "grumbling" about being moved again to Matrix. If the Signal move was successful it should build confidence in future moves.

The killer app for Matrix for most people won't be ability to run your own home server, but the easy generalization of Matrix to things like Reddit/HN with good integration with 1-1 chat someday will be. Also organizational usage. That of course is way cooler than Signal "not being facebook". So biding our time is fine.

When the time does come, we should probably campaign for HN to be officially bridged with Matrix too :D.

HN won't even get dark mode, so the only way we'd ever get Matrix on HN is through a random macroscopic quantum event.

It doesn't seem like these problems are fundamental to Matrix, though.

I agree that Element is not that good, but if you were to replace Signal's backend with Matrix, your experience would (could?) be nearly identical as Signal is now and we wouldn't have the issues of a closed ecosystem anymore.

Ehhh, Matrix is more than a transport protocol though, it lives a lot higher up the stack. It would be akin to trying to make Signal into a Slack client. So you’re basically saying “if you paper over all the weirdness of Matrix with a better UI” which is easier said than done.

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