A week in Matrix(piegames.de) |
A week in Matrix(piegames.de) |
Matrix is making real efforts to change this with Matrix 2.0, but still seems to suffer from design debt in many places.
I think this is partially due to the people they attract who largely work on the projects for free: Tinkerers who care about some form of technical elegance for the fun of it. I’ve had a few conversations around FOSS, including Matrix, at this point, and a not-too-uncommon response to my relayed criticisms was “then the user is wrong”.
I can’t tell them what to do. I could tell them what to do if they want adoption by normal people, but many don’t seem to be interested in that and you really can’t argue with that.
If adoption by normal people is a project goal, you have to seriously engineer for that. As much (partially fair) criticism as Gnome gets, they managed to build a desktop package that can seriously be used by normal people in the real world.
Matrix started out with its early DNA in focusing on the problem of how to create a decentralised e2ee multi-client messenger.
Getting that right took a lot of time and effort, which initially came at the expense of UX.
Elsewhere in the comments, it is clear that there are not many (any?) similar projects out there that solve the same problem, especially to the level of maturity where it is trusted by governments and civil institutions around the world.
So the effort was worth it, and we have the proof points to show that Matrix solves a real problem. Now we need to continue to work hard to create a UX that matches (perhaps exceeds?) the quality of the proprietary, centralised and non e2ee messaging apps that set the UX standards users have come to expect.
This needs to happen both at the protocol level and in the client and server implementations. For me personally, this means Synapse and the Element clients, but we have many quality implementations in the wild.
Matrix 2.0, mentioned above, is part of this initiative, though there is a lot of additional work in progress to both improve existing features (like Spaces and Threads) and add expected features, such as user status.
The post calls out running on Dendrite, which, as a project not under active development, contributes to some of the problems. However, I would not want that to be an excuse, because there is legitimate feedback in the post overall.
If someone reading this is new to the project and wants to host their own server, I'd recommend checking out [ESS Community](https://github.com/element-hq/ess-helm) - though other distributions exist.
Thanks everyone for flying Matrix and sharing your experiences (good and bad), we're getting there.
I am happy that Matrix has found a place in government organizations. For many individual users, Matrix currently solves no problem because they simply can not use it. I hope this will continue to change, I am cheering for you.
What helps against this are a rigorous design, testing, perhaps some formal methods sprinkled in (because distributed systems are really hard). That's what a tinkerer community could do that does not have an investor with strict timelines and profit requirements breathing down their neck. But the community apparently does not. At the least they should mark features as experimental that clearly have such fundamental issues.
- E2EE
- Large group capable (100+ users)
- FOSS + self hostable
- Not riddled with security issues
- Relatively easy to use for iOS and Android users (safe for normies)
I help run a Matrix server for people who are at risk from the current administration and I can attest to all of the issues mentioned plus a few more.
I'd rather not move to something as hostile as Discord and while we've tried Stoat it's infinitely more buggy and the lack of iOS apps is causing problems.
Rocket chat is interesting but E2EE is early in development, lots of security issues at last check.
Simplex isn't going to be better for large group stuff, it has the same fundamental sync issues Matrix does and the devs are more interested in crypto than fixing that.
I have been using synapse for years with little issue.
Conduit gained support for SS fairly recently so that’s good.
For a decent client, I’d recommend Cinny. There’s currently a fork of Cinny in development but it doesn’t work with my self-hosted server right now.
"You want to install Element"
"But I want Matrix."
"They call it Element now."
"I want to speak on Element?"
"No you want to speak on Matrix using Element."
"Uh."
"Don't worry about it. Look, just install Element."
"Well, I see Element and Element X."
"Oh right. Well, do you want to video chat?"
"What?"
"Element X doesn't video chat well. If you want video chat and a more featureful but slower chat experience, install Element. If you don't care about reliable video chat and don't mind rooms jumping around and not organizing them, but you want to subscribe to a zillion of them, choose Element X"
"What?"
"Oookay, let me explain. See, once there were--"
"Can't I just install the Matrix app?"
"It's Element or Element X. Do you want to video chat?"
"Um probably?"
"Well then Element, not X, that's the one you want to start with."
"Start with Element without the X?"
But man being able to have all my chats bridged to one thing where I can comfortably sit in a client I control and can freely modify? The feature set and integrations available are really tough to beat.
As far as I can tell it isn't so much a protocol as a collection of apps talking different protocols while claiming to use the same protocol.
Annoying, but the other chat apps have trade-offs I don’t care for.
Nothing in any logs?
IRC was so easy. :(
The protocol was written for a different age. If you're going with old-and-proven tech, XMPP is a much better jumping-off point than IRC. Everything that made it simple and easy to use back in the day, makes it hard to use in a modern setting.
Matrix.org and liberachat used to be connected using a bridge, even then the Matrix side didn't implement the requirements of liberal chat fast enough such that the bridge was abondened.
For all the (sometimes rightful) grief Matrix gets, it's essentially the only solution targeting hard problems like multi-device encrypted group chats[0] or truly federated multi-user chats. It can also be a very quickly moving ecosystem, which is difficult to handle when you're an open federated spec. Hence why several of the complaints in this post are caused by old and no longer supported clients and servers.
[0] Infamously, WhatsApp and LINE both support encrypted chats but all the encryption keys are stored on your phone, so you can only have one phone working at a time and desktop access is actually routed through it.
I think this is not true anymore. I’ve had it working with while my phone was off.
XMPP has several ways of doing e2ee, the most popular being OMEMO.
The challenge will be finding clients that supports OMEMO for MUCs (multi user chats) on each platform. They exist on desktop, at the very least.
MLS stands to rise that threshold (and there's work in progress to include it in XMPP), but that certainly won't address the fact that this is just privacy theater.
It's definitely tempting though, it seems to be by far the most flexible solution.
What I find also amazing in all this is that all the client/server/bridge names I brought up are independent and healthy projects. XMPP is very mature and decentralized. Not just in theory by nature of its protocol, but practically/politically by its many implementations across many stacks and implementers across many countries.
Give it a try
We'd be happy to pay them to host but for our size we'd be paying many thousands per year which is insane for chat.
We are in an early phase right now, where we test the product with a limited number of people, hence the invitation-only approach. We intend to drop that towards the end of the year if all goes well.
We helped co-author MLS, and we also contribute to the MIMI IETF working group. We’d like Air to be as standards-based as possible.
We are also curious to learn about specific problems that folks think have not been solved yet in the space.
UX feels less polished yet snappier than Element-Matrix and the project seems pretty active.
It does not seem like a serious project, at least not one being developed by folks who have user experience in mind
Might be too P2P for your taste though.
Dendrite may or may not have been a good choice for a Matrix homeserver at the time the decision to start it was made, years ago. But the real problem, as the blog post points out, is that there is no good way to change that decision. Migrating to a new homeserver implementation is equivalent to destroying the old server and creating a new one from scratch - which also has the implication that any user whose account was on the old server loses that account and has to create a new one, because Matrix user accounts are tied to some homeserver (a bad design decision, I think). Tying system identity to someone else's server - and that server's domain name - is the cardinal sin of federated identity systems, the ActivityPub ecosystem has exactly the same problem.
But Matrix closely follows proprietary products in its design, and the database is treated like some internal affair that you are not to meddle in. You'd have to reverse engineer the data format from source code, which is not practical for hobbyists.
I don't know any good messenger that doesn't tie their accounts to something portable. Plus, I think the ability to reset your password/passkey/whatever if you forgot it is way more important than having users manage their own identity roots for any serious messenger. The alternative is very cool, technology wise, but not really something I would care to use and maintain.
For users migrating accounts, there was a tool (not sure why it died) on the Matrix website that would log in to both accounts, go through each room and where possible invite the new account, and leave with the old account. As long as you have invite/join permissions, that's all you need to do for most chat rooms. 1-on-1 chats need some extra commands to set the metadata right so clients recognise them for what they are, but even they can be ported over, mostly. It's not a perfect solution, but it's lots better than nuking your entire account and starting over from scratch.
> Years ago, when the server was set up, choosing Dendrite seemed like a good decision
> Unfortunately, migrating between Matrix homeserver implementations remains a problem with no satisfying solution, so we're kind of stuck on slowly rotting foundations.
Using dendrite at the time was a bet on the future : "use it now and you won't have to migrate".
You can also migrate by replicating messages, or mirroring new messages via a bridge.
In my opinion they tried nothing and they're all out of options.
Usage is work, family and personal notes.
All the other things are just as true if you replace "Matrix" and "Element" with "email" and "outlook"/"gmail".
If you don't think the person you're talking to understands the difference between apps and emails ("I can email outlook people from my gmail?" is a serious question these days), just don't mention it. They're not going to get into the weeds anyway.
When I tried to explain the different "servers" in Discord to some a-technical people I had the same problem and disabling invites + not bothering with explaining the server concept seems to work out a lot better. I've given up trying to explain computer things to people who don't want to understand how the things they rely on work.
What is the Matrix equivalent to Gmail? Something that works reliably without having to understand all the background and acronyms?
It is really annoying that Element X is missing so many things Element had (you can't even do /me messages, markdown headlines aren't shown properly either), but getting someone to move apps is pretty tough, so might as well get them on the new one that will hopefully get better with time.
Also I never tell people about voice or video in Matrix unless they ask, and if they do I tell them I don't use it, it's probably not great, and to just use Mumble for voice and Jitsi for video.
Given that you seem expert in the matter, would you like to help and own the migration? That'd be awesome!
Internet groups are littered with complaints about this feature. But there is no way to turn it off and meta appears to not give a sh*t.
So, I'm not sure you can really argue that Matrix is not serious when that is the competition.
"New" is relative of course, XMPP is 27 years old. Still, XMPP lacks official support for something as basic as "I want to log in on a new device and see the old, encrypted messages that are on my other devices".
IRC itself is a reinvention of `talk` and BBSware. For as long as there will be new use cases, there will be new protocols.