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Comment by sodality2 | Hacker News Reader

Not liking what signal is becoming. I liked element but I didn't like the reliability of the apps. Are there any other alternatives besides XMPP+OMEMO/matrix for federated messages?

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I honestly believe matrix will become the go to for (federated) messaging everywhere. The element client has much improved and matrix is continuing to get better.

I'll have to try it again, then. On two occasions several months apart, as soon as I tried to use it again it just didn't deliver calls or messages. The only time I tried to use it and it flat out didn't work :/ might see if I can track down the issue through the logs.

FluffyChat is an alternative client that's also pretty far along

Syphon[1] (although open alpha) too.

[1] https://syphon.org/

as someone who just yesterday was working around what seemed to be a Matrix netsplit on our office/community server (coworkers saw different things on mobile vs desktop vs other servers), i feel like you're glamourizing Matrix. We're still hosting it and committed to it for work, but Matrix servers have been so finicky for years (with improvements)

Signal is still the clear winner rn imho

this simply shouldn’t happen; it’s almost unheard of for mobile vs desktop to get out of sync unless the server is super unhealthy. can you file a bug or ping in #synapse:matrix.org so we can try to help?

Element is my only messaging client and I don't really understand the "reliability" comments.

Sure it has momentary downtime with the official matrix.org servers for maybe a minute but this is why we should pursue setting up smaller servers for our social groups in the long run.

I can't think of anything as unreliable as the multiple days of downtime Signal had.

Several months ago (and a few months before that!) nothing would go from my phone to my laptop with separate accounts on different servers. Messages, calls, etc all didn't deliver. I'm definitely gonna try again soon, but those reliability issues put me off from it for a while. Unless it's some sort of internet issue?

Weird. we're not aware of a failure mode like that. For what it's worth, most of the VoIP stuff has been rewritten over the last few months and is feeling much better these days.

I will certainly be retrying it then, thanks! That was honestly my only holdout because everything else about matrix/element excites me (federation, easy integration, multi device with keys, etc).

There were some significant upgrades that were a bit bumpy between clients of differing versions etc, but today I have 0 problems using Element across several devices seamlessly.

Yeah, reliability is pretty much on par with discord or slack. Neither of them have the same level of reliability as say Whatsapp or iMessage, but it hasn't been a blocker to them, or isn't mentioned every time they're brought up.

From my perspective as someone who uses it every day for work on a community server my coworkers arduously maintain, this is 100% NOT true for us (I'm not leaving Matrix, but it's def not on par with Slack)

it sounds like there’s something wrong with the server; it shouldn’t be arduous to maintain. please ping us if you haven’t already.

I'd love to know what reliability metric you're going by, and which platform (Element Web/Desktop, iOS & Android are entirely different codebases). We're currently working hard on Element's UX, but it's always a bit unclear whether complaints like this refer to crashes, or UX papercuts (e.g. the cross-signing UX on login), or performance, or something else.

Several months ago (and a few months before that!) nothing would go from my phone to my laptop with separate accounts on different servers. Messages, calls, etc all didn't deliver. Could this be an internet issue? These were the only times I've tried it as well, which leads me to believe it is a network issue. Never had internet issues previously, so I would appreciate some guidance on how to enable logging to see what the problem is.

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