mostly the federate aproach. Most people dont want to think about anything network related.

Element is ok as an app imho

For me the issue that prevented me from really using matrix is that none of the big clients support multiple servers. As a non enterprise user, this has prevented me from seriously adopting it several times.

Search is essentially broken and completely useless. If I’m mistaken, maybe someone might chime in and explain how I can make it work. But right now, the only way to search for messages is to export them and search in the text file.

I think it’s a few things

- lots of places kind of Teams by default - or Slack or discord m, even WhatsApp - or in intensive cases, things like Refinitiv, Bloomberg, and, Symphony , which is kind of federated, but adds all the automation and also governance stuff needed for 100MM trades via IM and the like.

Enterprises get Teams for free with O365, or use Slack if they really care about the experience.

Most individuals don't care and use iMessage/WhatsApp. Those that do use Signal since it's dramatically easier.

I am a daily user, family and friends chatting on Matrix.

My take is that there are two layers of friction:

a) people that care about chat encryption and would be willing to change, already did, to Telegram and/or Signal. "I'm not going to install yet another chat app" is a real answer by a friend of mine

b) no one wants to either host their own server, nor pay someone to host it for them. If it wasn't for me and a one of my friends, none of the people I chat with daily would be on Matrix.

And yes, there is the matrix.org server. Out of the ~13 people I chat frequently with, 1 is on matrix.org. "What's the point of changing apps if I'm still going to be using the centralized server" is another answer I've gotten.

I don't know what the solution to this dynamic is other than us, the power users, setting it up and paying for the group of people around us.

I ran a server for a while a couple (maybe a couple of couples) of years ago, and client devices periodically disconnected and had to be re-setup / re-authenticated from scratch, losing the chat history and being a general hassle. It happened often enough that I got jack of it.

I like the idea, a lot, but the implementation at the time annoyed me away from it. I just don't have time / motivation at the moment to have another go. We ended up on Discord for family communication and it works well. I know Discord is on the lower end of 'one of the bad guys', but for the same reason I don't re-setup Matrix I don't move off Discord. At least it's not WhatsApp...

I did try to get them onto Signal, but I don't think Signal did group chat back then - which means it must have been before 2020.

Bloated server implementation with lack of alternatives and a complicated protocol.

I don't remember why but I had to download a separate notification app that pushed notis

Matrix is an unserious project and the client ecosystem is a train wreck. The server ecosystem is not much better. The Element people, who are kind of the default Matrix people because as far as I can tell are the only people getting paid, will tell you that this is because a bunch of IT integrator companies unjustly profit off of the open source work by selling services to European companies but contributing none back to either Element or other open source Matrix projects.

The first issue I'd like to address is that one: as a small business, I tried to purchase software from Element and was told that I was not large enough to justify their time. Fair enough, I only wanted a 200 seat license and I was willing to pay per seat, but I guess they really want the high value contracts if they have a limited sales team. However, it is a bit much to go from that experience to their justification about the structure of their project. Maybe they should think about taking some sales opportunities that present themselves?

Then there are branding and release decisions around the clients that Element makes. There are two projects in the client space from Element: a client called Element, and a client called Element X. Element X is the newer one. Element (do you see how this is getting confusing yet) is simultaneously at different times an Electron desktop app, a mobile app, and a web app. Element X is becoming all of those things but the feature parity is not even between them. Element supports "legacy" Jitsi for voice and video calling while Element X supports newer Element call - which is different from legacy Element, Element call is a webRTC implementation native to the Matrix ecosystem while the "legacy" Jitsi is a way to send clients a URL for Jitsi calls and have them shell out to another app to actually implement the call. Fair enough. However, the desktop Element X client does not yet support new Element call but the "old" Element client does support both "legacy" Jitsi and new Element call. And the Element X mobile app cannot call the old Element mobile app - but I think the other way around can. Even getting your head around this as an IT person is confusing.

To add insult to injury the new Element X app on mobile is in some ways a downgrade because they integrated the cloud vendor push notification services into the app, so even though you have "sovereign" and "self-hosted" infrastructure you're still, on a good day, leaking meta-data about your chats back through to the people you were trying to decouple yourself from anyway. You can run your own push notification services for this mostly if you want and all your mobile clients are Android but like, why.

Then, there's desktop client usability. During account setup, Element/Matrix makes a big ceremony out of establishing your cryptographic identity. Perfect. And as part of that you write down a 10-ish something word passphrase that is a recovery sequence for said identity. Perfect. Then some network hiccup happens that disturbs the Element client like some kind of prey animal and it spontaneously logs you out. You log back in, but there are no fields or options visible to use that recovery passphrase to restore your cryptographic identity. Your only option is to reset your identity, which makes all prior chats you have had unreadable. That part at least makes sense but why have this recovery story if it is not tested or usable in the app? This is probably an Element thing but in my research I have not found a client that people say is more robust, though at this point I'm open to trying.

It's also possible that the way most people use this is as a web app, which is to be fair more robust. It does seem worse from a security point of view to have one central web server dealing in most of your users plain text, though. At that point, why not use Mattermost? I guess they're even more hostile to their users/customers, for some reason.

Finally, there's the server ecosystem. The thing that is frustrating to me here is the interplay between Synapse, Matrix Authentication Service (MAS), and OIDC. This, as far as I can tell, is all intentionally hostile to drive you into Element's commercial product offering. Which I find especially galling because they won't sell your their commercial offering anyway, so you're going to have to figure it out for yourself. Synapse has some legacy support for OIDC which you are going to need to enable for backwards compatibility. However, for forwards compatibility with Element X, you are going to need MAS. Synapse is a large, mature Python project. MAS is a single Rust binary which is simultaneously a server and CLI to do user management. You'll need both configured against your OIDC provider. Why didn't the new OIDC features just get integrated into Synapse?

I think that a lot of this is an outcome of the fact that Element is very literally in a "the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born" situation at this time. I do have a lot of sympathy for being in the position of having huge companies - especially companies as annoying as IT outsourcing and integration - make a line of business out of configuring and installing your open source software. However, I have to say, having spent some of my professional life now also configuring and installing this open source software, I understand why those IT outsourcing companies have a moat. If the open source software was easier to install and use, perhaps those companies would have less of a moat. It seems to me that at least some of the story from Element is that if they make the ecosystem harder to use and understand, then people will take their money and the business will survive. However, in my experience, they won't take your money anyway.

The UK is the number one enemy of security and encryption. Did you read and compile all of the libraries and clients yourself?

I enjoy self hosting stuff with Docker. Matrix/synapse is one of the more difficult / PitA projects I’ve ever gotten up and running.

When me and a bunch of friends and acquaintances switched away from Slack a little under a year ago (I think) we looked into Matrix. One of the primary requirements was that even our non-technical friends should be able to use it.

At the time Matrix/Element had recently launched their Matrix 2.0 efforts and I tried setting up the whole stack without resorting to their all in one shell-script meant for non-production use. I did not mind hosting four different servers (Synapse, Matrix Auth Service (MAS), Call, etc), but did find the integration and config job a bit tedious. The main blocker though was the lack of an invite-system in the new Matrix Auth Server. Also the fact that the Element X app uses a new Livekit based call server while other clients/apps use a different approach is also something not great.

We ended up going for Mattermost. One service easily hosted with Docker. One app, and easy invites. While I think federation would be cool, right now Mattermost was a bit simpler to get up and running.

Element seems more focused on enterprise and government contracts than self-hosters. I think this is fine, they need to pay their bills. But Matrix 2.0 for self-hosters might need a better story right now.

Consensus. People like to follow what the majority does even if it's suboptimal.

Compared to Telegram, it feels like using a laggy MSN Messenger. The experience, both client and server-wise, just feels very unpolished. It's no single big thing, it's more like death by a thousand cuts.

I was bullish on Matrix because it's so extensible, but in the end I realized that only the default client experience matters as that's the one everyone will be using. And it just isn't there yet. In the end, all the group chats I was in migrated to Discord or Telegram, so I had no more reason to use it...

The UIs are terrible. I've tried it a few different times with friends and we gave up each time.

Thanks for the info, what do you think about Delta chat?

> Olm/Megolm does not offer forward secrecy for group messaging

Megolm does provide forward secrecy - just in blocks of messages. If a message key gets stolen, an attacker could decrypt subsequent messages from that sending device until the next session begins: by default this happens either after 100 msgs have been sent, a week has elapsed, or if the room membership changes. Most folks consider this to be adequate perfect secrecy.

In terms of the Matrix Fdn being incorporated in the UK… I guess that means one shouldn’t use the Internet, given IETF is US incorporated? :)

Which tool did you guys end up using?