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Comment by uyzstvqs | Hacker News Reader

This does not bode well. Matrix is honestly not good, as someone who has tried to use it. It's slow, janky, often unstable, and poorly standardized.

My suggestion: https://threema.com/en/products/work (hosted) or https://zulip.com/ (OSS self-hosted).

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I've been running a Matrix homeserver for a couple of years now and I've never had any issues with it. Not saying Matrix is perfect, but it is not as bad as you are making it out to be either.

Have you never run into any issues with encrypted chats not syncing properly between different clients, or messages not getting transferred correctly between users on different homeservers because of federation issues? Or matrix clients attempting to do some action, spinning for a bit, and then failing with an error message with no details? Or searching for rooms not working correctly and the UI not being able to clearly tell you what is actually going on with the search? I set up a Matrix server relatively recently and these were all issues that came up pretty much immediately.

While I don't doubt your experience, I've been running Conduit[0] for a while now to great success (a lot simpler to configure than Synapse).

I don't think it's a fact that Matrix is not good. For MS Teams? It's pretty close to a fact.

0 - https://conduit.rs

Zulip is phenomenal. Cool and unique concept, clean and snappy UI. I have no idea why it's not more popular. (Network effects and an unfamiliar layout, I suppose.)

I see the comments that say Matrix has improved a lot, so maybe it's fine now, but yeah, when I tried it previously it sucked. Weird UI was my chief complaint, but more importantly it didn't seem like there was a proper concept of organizations, in the sense of Discord or Slack servers? With roles, channels, even silly things like custom emojis. Matrix at the time seemed like just an SMS group chat replacement, I have no idea why people recommended it for organizational use. Maybe it's improved since.

When did you try it? Both Matrix the protocol and implementations like Element X have improved immeasurably over the last year or so.

It's been more than a year, and Element X does honestly look a lot better. But it's been mobile-only for years. And if I'm correct, the desktop/web clients still require you to use embedded Jitsi. And what about non-Element clients?

As a user, I just need stuff like this to be standard, and work for every participant regardless of what client they use.

Element Desktop/Web (and Element X) use Element Call for proper encrypted group VoIP/Video these days rather than Jitsi - since Sept 2024. Meanwhile we're busy upgrading Element Web to use the same rust-sdk engine as Element X (although this will take a year or so).

In terms of non-Element clients... I can't really speak for them, but I hear really good things about Cinny for folks who want a more Discord-like experience on desktop, and we livecoded an Element Call integration for it at the Matrix Conference in October (hopefully it merged). I think FluffyChat also may support the new MatrixRTC calling too.

You will always say that.

Probably, but much like the sitar player's sitar in Moulin Rouge, I aim to only speak the truth :)

Element X is in some cases still a downgrade from Element. For instance there doesn't seem to be a way to create local key backups anymore. Also, that calls between Element and Element X are incompatible means both apps need to be installed in order to receive calls from all contacts.

Still, I love Matrix and hope that these issues will be resolved in time.

Manually importing/exporting keybackups is on the todo list (albeit towards the bottom). Supporting legacy calls is not (unless someone contributes it); the intention is to converge asap on native Matrix group calls.

This cannot be overstated. It used to be a pile of trash, now it's quite decent (but with lots of room for improvement).

Threema: proprietary, outside EU

Zulip: lacks encryption, interoperability

Why would they need encryption? Does the european commision have anything to hide?

Chat control for thee but not for me?

Threema is Swiss, which is a regional EFTA member. It's end-to-end encrypted and the clients are open-source.

Zulip has client-server encryption, which is fine if you control the server.

Threema is still vendor lock-in.

Wasn’t Threema sold this week or something?

https://comitiscapital.com/news/comitis-capital-announces-th...

Not sure what / if that changes anything, but presumably it will… sometime…

It works faster & better than Signal Desktop.

That's not a high bar.

Genuinely surprised at this - I've never heard of signal desktop not being fast, or good. Works a1 for me.

Signal Desktop is having its db corrupted every other time I launch it, and wants me to reconnect to the phone. The UX is OKish.

Your storage is dying, any Electron based app will lose its database in this scenario.

Nope. It's only Signal.

yeah, it's fine for me - probably as good as an electron app can get (def not good as a true native app but it's def better than having to use my phone...)

If you start to have higher message volumes, Element Desktop handles syncing on first launch much more gracefully than Signal Desktop.

Personally I've found Matrix significantly more user friendly than Threema work. Zulip I haven't used in anger so I can't comment on that but I've seen a few places that even open source they charge per user for things like notifications. Not ideal IMHO. There should be an option to replace notifications with a separate service.

It's hard to find a decent service that ticks all the boxes but I do sincerely hope that the EU can support Matrix to bring it up to the standard that we all deserve.

> Mobile notifications for organizations with up to 10 users

Why does the self-hosted edition have this restriction? If the software is truly OSS, the limit could be trivially patched. But this kind of restriction just does not inspire much confidence in the project to be honest.

Because mobile notifications require integration with operators and cost money.

This is not about the ones that are pushed over IP, this is about mobile push.

It doesn't require operator involvement, you can just integrate with FCM and APN?

FCM and APN are the operators

Mobile notifications do not require outside operators. UnifiedPush / ntfy is FLOSS, and allows for a single background connection for multiple apps / notification channels. It can also be self-hosted (and I do!)

This puts the operational costs (number of devices and notifications) on whomever is running the server - and because of how valuable metadata is, I expect them to be run in-house by governments

Well I guess you can do the same with zulip, redirect notifications somewhere else that is. Never hosted zulip, but it should be more or less staightforward when hosting it yourself, the 10 free looks like a limit when using their endpoint, not universal.

Can you be more specific about your criticisms? I have gripes about Matrix, but your assessment doesn't match my experience.

Sounds like something Europe would love.

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