I really hope this fixed a bunch of encryption and key issues.
We ran Element for our dev team for 6 months and had to give up because frequently a person would just not be able to decrypt a message, warnings would appear but there was no way to solve this. So literally people where missing messages and just having to ask people to post the message again (because there was no way to request the keys be sent). It was a complete disaster and only got worse over the 6 months.
The notifications icon was a mess too. You would frequently see the "unread messages" indicator for a message that was in a thread sub conversation somewhere, even though all the messages had been read. So again people were missing messages.
Despite numerous people begging for threads to be disabled while Element fixed the bug, they refused to put that option in.
In the end, we had to give up and just move to Slack. I really want Element/Matrix to work. I feel like we need it to work, but the lack of support and understanding from the development team would make be warn people to not use this in a professional/day job environment.
That being said, I'll defo be trying it out again personally with the hope they've listened to the community and fix these important bugs.
I have had similar experiences, but not on professional context. Random E2EE key issues (not often) that maybe sometimes resolve themselves or with some additional action like bringing all clients online. Matrix is still the best choice for me, though, and I expect it to improve like it has over the years.
Last time I tried the threads-feature (with Element) maybe a year ago, it was still in beta.
Anyhow, if you're ok with Slack, then you probably could have just not use E2EE at all and avoid issues related to that?
i havent seen any encryption issues since about q3 2023, notifications are still a thing tho, they are reliable but setting them up the way you want is still a pain
my experience is based on regular old element clients and my own server and will be moving to x and sliding sync probably at the end of the year
> Finally, cryptographic warnings are being eliminated. Historically, as end-to-end encryption was rolled out throughout Matrix, not all apps verified the identity of their users, triggering confusing and unactionable warnings to users. We are now shifting towards only letting devices whose ownership has been verified by their owner participate in conversations, killing those warnings - as well as other underlying protocol changes to eliminate warnings.
As the operator of a small instance for family and friends, that's an important topic. The very frequent use case is : "I lost/replaced my phone and didn't save my passphrase". Does that mean that the account would be lost ?
In my experience, there was issues of lost/undecryptable messages also when you did backup/restore your keys.
That was the annoying issue, I could not trust it.
as always, the result of more security without taking into account real-life human behaviour, only leads to less security overall as people will just use services that don't have this behaviour and always allow getting back your account
We have lift-off but we're not making it past the lower atmosphere ...
Was the Android version flow-tested by anyone at all at element.io?
When I tried registering a new account, it did not accept my handle. I guessed this because the handle text was red.
But why it didn't like it I can't see because the little box with the error message is outside to the right of the screen (I guess there is a box because I see a little arrow on the right and I understand that this just a web view of something not originally designed for mobile/portrait).
Basically, if this was my ma or any of my non-techie friends, they would close the app now without ever registering.
After I login with my existing account and verify the device via my Linux client it asks me to enter a "recovery key or security phrase".
I enter my security phrase, I get a spinner, the spinner disappears, the 'Continue' button is grayed out. Nothing happens.
These are both flows that (a) a new user would see or (b) an existing user would see, immediately when using the app for the first time.
How is it possible they're broken like this?
Is there like, any UI/UX plan for the main chat view in Element X? I feel like I've been using it for a year now and every time I see an update available I find myself hoping it's fixed the glaring spacing/padding issues in that particular view.
There's a lot of talk of Element competing with mainstream chat applications, but I don't see how it does that with what feels like an incomplete UI. I also just don't quite get how you ship a chat application in 2024 with issues like this, considering chat UI itself is somewhat of a solved problem. It's like one of those things that just has no reason to be badly laid out.
(Is this just SwiftUI being less than ideal for some types of views...?)
To be clear, I like and use Matrix daily. It's definitely still got rough edges but I appreciate the work they're doing and I think it'll eventually "get there", so I don't want to just be a (total) detractor.
I'm probably biased by the fact that the first time I got Synapse running it was the release where it'd endlessly try and fail to join a room with more than 10 people.
But, every time I've looked at Matrix Chat it's been a disaster. That it tries, at all, to authenticate every personal(?home?) server as soon as you join #matrix is... Bad, from a lot of perspectives.
Privacy? Just put up your own DNS and find out what new servers are joining.
Security? Easy slowloris type attacks at several layers- DNS, http, etc.
Performance- eagerly enumerating all federated servers before joining a channel places a hard cap on channel and overall network size. And it provides a terrible experience.
The more I look, the less I like what I see. As a potential user, a software dev, and an admin it leaves me with two impressions: sloppy at best, braindead at worst.
Does anyone know if this will let you search your messages? This is one of the lacking features I've noticed on the Android version of Element is that you can neither bookmark messages nor search throughout the (encrypted?) chat, making it difficult to find messages you want to refer back to.
You can search on the Desktop app, but not sure why you can't on mobile...
Is ESS an OpenID compatible server, or does it integrate with OpenID backend? Looking for an OpenID provider for a small-medium friends & family group, so was hoping this fits the bill. There is a dearth of information on this aspect of the product line.
I don't know about ESS, but for selfhosting I can recommend Zitadel or Authentik, I've used both and currently I'm using Zitadel.
Out of curiosity what made you pick Zitadel over Authentik?
Disclaimer: I am the CEO of Zitadel ;-)
Anyone else was welcomed with this message on the main screen of element x?
> Upgrade available. Your server supports a new, faster protocol. Log out and log back in to upgrade now. Doing this now will help you avoid a forced logout when the old protocol is removed later.
Meanwhile the desktop client upon launching flashes old analytics and UI "tips" notifications that I closed already.
It seems some localizations are not available yet in the new app (for example Japanese language), and my old messages would not decode (but I solved it using the backup key).
Otherwise looks great, it seems the app loads much faster.
We tried matrix and element a little while back and it had too many sharp corners. Now we use jabber. It also have some problems but we were able to workaround them.
When we did our tests, messages would get dropped, arrive out of order, be impossible to decrypt, joining a room was slow (sometimes days), mobile notifications would be swallowed by the desktop client left running, webhook were hard...
I don't want to speculate too much as it is just a feeling, but it felt that the protocol itself had unfixable flaws.
Personally, I don't think it's anything unfixable. At least slow joins with large rooms got improvements last year or something. E2EE is nowadays on by default, and I haven't had any decryption issues recently, but E2EE is not mandatory. Notifications have had some changes too, but I can't comment much on that or your other issues.
Is Jabber still around?
Yes but it is XMMP now. It has been working well for us.
Why would any enterprise use e2e encryption?
In most juridictions and industries you must be able to audit internal and b2b communication.
I really hope they can reduce the amount of time it takes to start a "room" / add a person to contacts. Its really a deal breaker only those with strong federation desires will wait for element to load.
Matrix is mostly a victim of the government forks taking up their time in different directions instead of having just one app like signal.
Not to rain on their parade, but as someone who used element X, gave up because of the bugs. Is currently using XMPP with conversation.im and dino.im. The later seems much more stable, offer OMEMO encryption that worked better. If you want more social media elements there is also movin.eu.
A kind suggestion - add links to Apple / Google Store so apps are easier to find and download
It's also on FDroid :)
So this is like slack and signal mashed together?
Plus it also supports federation. Oh, and it's open-source.
Matrix as a protocol, and synapse / element, the most common backend and client for the protocol (I believe), have existed for quite some time. Our co-op has been using synapse for about a year and a half now and I'm sure the majority of our members use Element as the client. Our managed hosting comes with an Element web deployment as well.
We used it as a drop in replacement for slack including automations etc. The bonus was we got, I can't remember the technical term but mirrors or duplicators for Instagram etc set up, so people can use the element app to message people on Instagram, Whatsapp, etc, if they'd like. I like it because I can message people without Instagram first trying to suck me in with Algo bs.
I think many of these features are fantastic and Matrix 2.0 is a great set of features. However I think Element X is still missing quite a number of features for (my personal) daily use (e.g. spaces, threads and roomlist). Also it's not available for Intel-based Macs, which makes it unusable for many of my team members :(
"We have lifted-off Element X, Call and Server Suite are ready." "We had a lift-off for/of Element X, Call and Server Suite are ready."
Proper language.
Or like the actual title of the blog entry?
> We have lift-off! Element X, Call and Server Suite are ready!
Just some url/tag parsing/generation gone wrong.
I think it’s the anti-clickbait thing removing the exclamation marks. (Personally, I’d just leave “Element X, Call and Server Suite are ready”)
So how exactly do I get ESS running on my TrueNAS? Cant seem to find straight answer on their page.
Seems like ESS ist their managed solution, which uses Synapse but with an admin UI.
Thats at least how I understand it, because to "get" ESS you need to fill out a contact form.
Ah, so I can get this free opensource decentralized solution if I pay a company to host it for me on their centralized server, got it.
I mean i wouldnt have a problem paying one-time fee of around $100 if that would mean I can get that soft running locally for my groups, but I guess I am not the target potential customer group.
If you want to self-host the actual free open-source software, you can totally do that. You just shouldn't go looking at the product page of the enterprise offering for it (:
It looks like ESS is mostly managed deployment of otherwise opensourced software like Synapse, Element Web, Element Call, and friends. And I guess they have some backoffice with a glossy web UI for account/user management.
https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy is a good starting point!
It is free and opensource, but there are different parts to it if you selfhost. Synapse is the Matrix server backend, and Element is the UI (web/mobile app). [0]
ESS is a paid, fully managed service by the Element team for ease of use.
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You can also host it yourself, but what ESS offers is a combination of multiple discrete services. You’re gonna have to host Synapse itself, the Matrix Authentication Service (for native OIDC), Element Call (which requires LiveKit) and Element Web.
It is generally not a good idea to run web services on a file server.
Seems like this is a paid product meant for enterprise use.
I have trouble even just veryfing that on their page. So far its an instant turnoff, when I cant even find basic info.
FWIW, pricing here (10 EUR/user/month, min 100 users; self-hosted apparently also supported): https://element.io/pricing
Want to make account, no idea whats wrong because of the app forbidding landscape mode. https://imgur.com/a/spFQ1md
Have you tried desktop to register your account?
I can't find anything on the page - does this mean Sliding Sync is now part of Synapse proper, without the proxy being needed?
I can't test right now myself, maybe somebody else knows.
Yes, it's included (and enabled by default) since v1.114.0, which came out 3 weeks ago. It's a modified version of Sliding Sync (called Simplified Sliding Sync), but it works just the same. So you can deprecate/shut down existing sliding sync proxies.
SwiftUI only/iOS 16.4 requirement excludes a lot of older devices.
They already excluded older iOS devices before - on my older Air I had to switch to Fluffychat until I've got a newer device
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How does one browse rooms on a server using Element X for Android?
I’m curious why this is a separate app and not an update to the old app?
They wanted to reduce the duplicate work of maintaining multiple clients for each Platform, and created a rust library which can be used on all platforms.
And for the UI they use Jetpack Compose for the Android App and SwiftUI (I think that's how its called, correct me if I'm wrong) for iOS.
This way only the UI is "duplicate" but the core logic is maintained in the rust library.
EDIT: Okay just found my comment from 300 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38402710
Element X is a totally new implementation, done in Rust. It's fast and nice but for now some features are missing compared to the old one.
Including critical ones like threading...
Hey, I've heard of Element X forever, time to try it :)
I use Element X every day. On the phone it's very buggy and doesn't get push notification for the latest messages sometimes.
Everybody seems to know what Element and Matrix are, but I cannot find a concise explanation on the website what they are. Element seems to be some kind of "communications platform", whatever that may be. Can someone please give a brief explanation for us not so cool kids?
Matrix: Protocol (like SMTP/IMAP)
Element: The most popular client (like Thunderbird)
Element X: Rewrite of Element based on Rust and native UI components
Synapse: Most popular Matrix server (like Dovecot)
Element Call: Video/Audio conferencing (like Jitsi)
Element Server Suite (ESS): Paid SaaS solution that wraps all of the mentioned components into a simple turnkey solution.
Matrix is the protocol, Element X is one of many clients for the Matrix protocol.
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If element x doesn't have threading on Android yet, and I checked last week, it's not ready compared to the default element app.
My co-op uses matrix as our primary communication method, replacing slack because it was too expensive, and we're very happy with it, but I was always surprised that element x was even on the app store considering how primitive it was compares to Element (the first app).
The images embedded in the blog post look horribly compressed
Looks crisp on my iPhone SE 2020, and scrolling does not make it lag - something that happens frequently on HUGE images encounter. Didn’t look at the media queries but I’m happy the default/broken state is the one easily accessible.
No such issue on my end.
Not for me?