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Comment by j3s | Hacker News Reader

part of me wishes the matrix folks would give their core software more love instead of embarking on side projects. basic things that have been missing for years include:

   - custom emojis
   -  easy to use moderation tools
   - an admin dashboard
   - databases that don’t grow to 200+GB and require strange manual compression
   - message edits sending notifications

i’m a matrix user & really want the ecosystem to succeed, but helping operate cyberia.club’s matrix system been expensive, to say the least.

the shining light that i see in the distance is basically an open, federated Discord. but the more p2p and metaverse centric matrix gets, the less hope i tend to have for its future. it might be hard to stay away from that now, given their backers[1].

i hope i’m wrong!! trying to stay positive. matrix is still great software, and it has served us well.

[1]: https://venturebeat.com/data-infrastructure/element-bolsters...

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at the risk of repeating my other comment, we are doing a tonne of work to improve core Matrix. Third Room is a totally different and much smaller team (3 people). https://matrix.org/blog/2022/08/15/the-matrix-summer-special... details some of the ongoing work; and selfserve moderation is coming soon, as are custom emoji (which exists as a Matrix proposal, and many clients already implement it - just not Element yet).

Unsure which of Element’s investors you think would be pushing Matrix towards virtual worlds - both Protocol Labs and Metaplanet are looking on with interest, but I’m afraid the push to build out richer-than-chat comms on Matrix is all me & my cofounder Amandine rather than driven by them!

up front: so much respect for you and your team. we use your platform every day, and it's overall great. I love how transparent your org generally is, and how inclusive of the community they are.

I maintain the digitalocean synapse marketplace image, and developed nekobot - a matrix chat bot - so when I speak, I really am coming from a place of love, respect, and genuine concern.

> Unsure which of Element’s investors you think would be pushing Matrix towards virtual worlds

protocol labs in particular is heavy on web3, and I think that the development of a metaverse centric system could be pandering to their enthusiasm. even subconsciously, using that project as a lever to say "look at what we have done for web3!" seems compelling from my point of view.

> selfserve moderation is coming soon, as are custom emoji

that's fantastic news, I can't wait to see it.

sometimes it's hard to resist cynicism when I see you folks engaging in tons of (what I perceive as) side projects and duplicated effort, while dealing with UX and operational issues that have been open for years.

thanks so much for responding, again :3

> protocol labs in particular is heavy on web3, and I think that the development of a metaverse centric system could be pandering to their enthusiasm.

To be clear, Third Room has nothing whatsoever to do with “web3” as a NFT or cryptocurrency vehicle. As the headline on thirdroom.io tries to spell out, it’s explicitly a platform for interoperable virtual worlds without NFTs or cryptocurrencies.

As an early adopter and daily user of Element on multiple platforms, I want to take this opportunity to tell you personally the biggest UX problems I face (and which are unanimously agreed upon by my server's users):

1. The Markdown display processor simply doesn't mesh with expectations for chat UX. I know there's FOSS considerations, but the end result is that someone expecting it to work like Discord/Slack/Teams sees the chaotic results and says "fuck this amateur nerd shit"

2. To this day, new users are horribly confused about how to join an encrypted room, even when their hand is held through the entire verification process (via Discord)

3. "Cinny is so nice, why isn't that the official one?"

1. We are about to replace the composer in Element with a sparkly new (optional) wysiwyg editor in the coming weeks: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-wysiwyg

2. totally agreed. we are completely reworking the crypto UX; there’s already https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/8228 asa proof of concept of what’s to come.

3. glad you like Cinny - it’s written by ajbura, whose dayjob is at Element and built the UI for Third Room. Element is not “the official app” - it’s just the one that happens to be written by folks from the Matrix core team. If you prefer Cinny, knock yourself out. Meanwhile we’re frantically improving Element too.

That's great to hear! Thanks for all your work on Matrix/Element.

If you scroll down to near the bottom of the post linked by Arathorn you can read what they are currently doing about the rich text input box in element.

I'd add actually encrypting all events in so-called "end-to-end encrypted rooms" to that list :/

I don't mean to be snarky, it's just frustrating to be told that it's common sense that this wouldn't be the case, when it's come as a huge surprise to everyone I've mentioned it to.

That said, I love Matrix, big supporter of the project and of the team, etc etc. Just, there's a lot of work still to do!

Try cinny.in

It’s much better than element. It implements stickers, custom emojis and just feels much better than element.

When you say implements stickers, does that mean it has a way to create your own sticker packs? Element technically has stickers but you only have the ability to use the quite bad built in stickers unless you host your own server and I assume manually configure it with the stickers you want.

It just puzzles me how stickers were implemented in Matrix years ago but they stopped just before allowing users to create sticker packs which makes them almost useless.

it means that

The problem is, like almost all third party matrix clients, its missing a lot of features.

No voice calls, no widgets and other things.

If Cinny had link embeds and the ability to play videos from links, it would be basically perfect.

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