Comment by _lvbh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _lvbh | Hacker News Reader

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I'm of the same stance. I've been using Matrix for 3 years now, primarily to communicate with family located where there is high censorship and most messengers are blocked. Probably due to the complexity of the system and inherent design, performance is horrible. Good enough for usage but just unpleasant. Their new Element X client is meant to solve a lot of problems but they're starting to deviate from common standards (e.g. TURN/STUN for calling) and towards "Element Call" and livekit which are a nightmare to set up. There's been more and more encryption problems lately where I'd sync the keys but still fail to decrypt messages on certain clients and lose history on others. I'm sticking with the old Element client but it's obvious the Vector people aren't putting much effort into it anymore seeing as there are very old but critical bugs (main one being the fact that it automatically reaches out to matrix.org when trying to sign in with other homeservers and freezes if the domain is blocked. This is fixed by Element X.) I can fix it myself but until IOS allows sideloading, I have no way of getting my fork onto my family's devices.

If anyone knows an alternative that has web, IOS, and Android clients, easily self hostable, and can do calling, please let me know.

It’s depressing to hear that you’ve given up on Element X, given that’s where all the work has been going, including ensuring the encryption is rock solid. Element Call is still webrtc; the fact it’s direct calling to a SFU rather than needing TURN for firewall traversal should be a good thing. How did you try to set it up? I did a basic walk through at https://github.com/element-hq/element-docker-demo in case that helps.

It's depressing to be told that we can pick between a moribund client and one that's barely usable, indeed.

Element X is a mess. You can make it look good in comparison to the previous one on a "checkbox" basis like you just did, but it's clunky, buggy, and so unappealing that I don't see myself recommending it to anyone. Even tech nerds can't stand it any longer, which was the premise of this post.

Yup, I get it, you are emotionally involved in all of this, and criticism hurts, but the only way "blaming it on the users" ends, is with no users left at all.

are we even talking about the same app? This is literally the first time i’ve heard someone accuse Element X of being clunky, buggy or unappealing - including the original post? The criticism is that it’s not got threads/spaces, surely.

> This is literally the first time i’ve heard someone accuse Element X of being clunky, buggy or unappealing

I mean, picked from the top of THIS comments section

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44627333

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617565

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617604

(the linked article being a fourth)

right, so you are talking about the old legacy Element client, which all those links and the OP are complaining about being clunky/buggy/unappealing.

Not the Element X rewrite, which everyone seems to agree is better… but just not feature complete yet. Thanks for clarifying :)

> talking about the old legacy Element client

No, out of the 4 cited sources, at least 3 clearly identify Element X. Also, great way to miss the point: users can only bear so long being told that they are wrong.

Element X is (e)xcellent. Just wanted to share that.

Been using Matrix via Synapse since ~2019 and all the Matrix odds and ends require the least maintenance out of anything in the stack. Any uptime issues I've experienced have been my own silly fault with incorrect configurations.

Even Element as it stands without the X builds is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else I've tried (and I have and continue to try a lot of FOSS, but nothing does what Element does as a client, nor what Matrix does as a protocol).

Yep, I'm also using Element X and I'm quite happy with it.

It will be nice once all the features are in, but experience seems to indicate that I can live with better performance and fewer features.

It's depressing to see and hear that New Vector is rewriting the flagship client about every 5 years or so, with each rewrite taking multiple years. Each time the new client is hailed as the saviour, and then after a while, denounced as obsolete. Soon again, the new saviour is right around the corner.

That is not the way you create high-quality software in a cost-efficient manner.

While Matrix has a value as the pretty much only open-standard IM system with even moderate levels of user adoption, all this makes it hard to actually love it or even to be enthustiastic about it.

The only problem with this statement is that it’s untrue.

Element Web/Desktop is 11 years old and has never been rewritten, and while we’re just starting to experiment with the Rust SDK for it, it’s unclear yet whether we migrate the current app to Rust SDK or write an Element X Web.

Element iOS is also 11 years old, and as fun and expensive as it was maintaining three entirely separate codebases between iOS/Android/Web, we only switched to Rust with Element X as of Sept, and have no plans to switch again.

Now, it’s true that Riot Android did get rewritten in ~2019 (into RiotX, which became Element Android) - mainly because it needed to get a proper storage layer and to move from Android 2.x vintage UI code. Now we have a common rust SDK to do all the heavy lifting it is reasonable to switch the app to use it, which is what Element X Android is.

In other words, this whole exercise is trying to simplify development on to one stable Rust codebase, rather than hunting bugs and reimplementing features over 3 entirely separate codebases.

If we did it again perhaps we’d try for a replace-the-engine like Signal did rather than rewrite-the-app - or perhaps do a big bang replacement when the rewrite is ready. But instead we wanted to get the new apps in the hands of users earlier, and we do not remotely have the funding to develop both old and new in parallel.

Hopefully history will show this was an okay approach in the end, even if everyone hates us in the final stages of the transition.

I don't actually dislike the new client. It's just that things don't work well between them. Afaik you can't call someone on Element X from old element.

Aside from your valid concerns about Element roadmaps, you highlight a completely different really crummy problem. You have chosen (or have had chosen for you) the support of a closed platform that puts you in a pickle. The dev team for an app of interest to you doesn't seem to have the bandwidth to address all your concerns as quickly as would be super. But they have taken the hit to get their code into the walled garden where you can use it. You have the bandwidth to tackle some of your wishlist, but don't have access into the walled garden.

So what might be a negotiation between two parties--you and the app dev team--is now complicated by a thorny third party--your os platform team. Presumably you derive some value in other areas from your walled garden that offsets the penalty it introduces in this case. But it's still crummy that you're caught in this snag created by your os platform.

I think this misses that GP is using this to communicate with other people who use these platforms. It’s been chosen for them by their friends and family.

You can try monal xmpp. It's working great for my contacts. There are multiple servers that you can self host. On android you have better part is conversations. My entire family uses it.

> primarily to communicate with family located where there is high censorship and most messengers are blocked

I was travelling frequently through Asia and the Middle East around a decade ago. I wanted a platform that just works, that is low on resources, that I can self-host, that I can "disguise" itself as something else when needed (run behind a different port, or IP, over ToR, etc).

Matrix was new then, and promising to right every wrong from previous protocols (mild exaggeration). I bought into the hype, and got burnt by it, finally settled with XMPP (which Matrix had told me wasn't adequate), and stayed there to this day because when Matrix really didn't go anywhere since, XMPP kept getting better and better. That would be my recommendation to you.

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