Comment by styanax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by styanax | Hacker News Reader

As a former user I felt these pain points trying to do nothing more than have a very active one-on-one chat with a good friend. Tens of messages an hour, maybe 2 years running. Using matrix.org and the pre-X clients. It's fine for group chat (IRC style) but that's not a high bar.

(a) the encryption between using a mobile and the webapp desyncs/breaks all the time, it just sucks. I mean you'll get "cannot decrypt" a lot, have to bounce back and forth and generally try and force it to re-sync properly again. Sometimes never worked at all. Lots of issues on GH over the years.

(b) as mentioned in this article, insane delays on new message notif and sending and receiving. Just logging in on the webapp every morning took minutes of some sort of mysterious sync process, often the mobile app had the same problems. The X stuff may fix this, we were pre-X.

(c) cleanup. There's no message retention set on matrix.org, when I wanted to extract and remove our past chats the process and experience was excruciatingly bad. It took tens of hours over several weekends of the webapp (mobile completely non-op in practice for this) polling and loading old content, just so I could select 100 at a time to delete and then it took an hour. Once I started culling back over a year or so, the loading got longer and longer and longer, until eventually it 100% stopped working at all to load old messages.

Signal and DeltaChat are far, far better experiences for one-on-one chats with friends & family. The Delta client is a bit UI/UX behind but not horrible; e.g. you can't correct a typo in a sent message in Delta, unlike Signal - because each msg is a unique gpg-encrypted "email" rather than a database object that can be re-manipulated.

Thanks for mentioning Delta - https://delta.chat/ and implicitly https://chatmail.at/

> you can't correct a typo in a sent message in Delta

At least on the iOS app you can, just tested it. I run my own postfix/dovecot, so shouldn’t require any esoteric configurations.

Good to know, thank you - those of us currently using it are on Androids so we've not had a friend on iOS join yet. We're using a chatmail relay.

a) is really not a big issue any more

b) yeah, X solves it (via sliding sync)

a) As of when? I had a "cannot decrypt" room failure on matrix.org a year ago.

b) Unfortunately, X breaks other important things, like audio/video calls. It currently feels like an alpha-quality release: buggy and lots of missing features. Not ready for widespread use.

I felt bad making a long thread once I opened Element X and saw it didn't have support for threads.

Someone let me know later that threads are hidden behind a Labs setting, but it only allows the client to reply to threads, but still exposes the entire thread inline for the channel which sucks up all the air in the chat.

this is wrong - the threads support in labs lets you create threads and navigate into them as you expect.

what you are describing is the old threads workaround which predates the proper solution in labs which should exit labs asap.

I am describing what I see on Element X on iOS today. If someone replies to threads, it is not hidden and navigable on this client. Even after switching the labs feature on, the app was showing the thread interspersed with the rest of the conversation.

Uninstalling the app, reinstalling, and making sure the labs option is turned on before navigating to a room with threads, is behaving how I expect.

So maybe, its a bug that the room does not re-render after toggling that setting.

ah right - that sounds very plausible; sorry for the confusion. have filed it as a likely bug at https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-ios/issues/4810 - thanks for the report :)

I'm sorry you had a crap time, and agreed that in the past things were not great. But in defence of the Matrix team, we fixed almost all known encryption in ~Sept 2024, and the new generation of clients fixes the slow sync issues.

In terms of message retention: https://element-hq.github.io/synapse/latest/message_retentio... is how you should have/could have cleaned up those rooms. (It's not exposed in Element's UI yet as we've been prioritising more fundamental stuff).

Hi Arathorn, I recognize your name as the core developer lead. :) Alas, when I was trying to cull my old messages I tried that (and a lot of other API type hacks I found floating around) and none of them, at that time, worked.

In short: the complete lack of user-facing easy to use controls for data retention and culling in the Matrix (Element) clients is a deal killer for me. That painful experience taught me a lesson - now when I test something new, one of the first things I look for is "how do I extract from this thing?". I never want to go through my Matrix extraction pain again, so a personal life lesson was learned.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com