But it's funny because anytime someone talks about Signal lots of people point to Matrix as "better". I'm not going to do the reverse because they solve different problems, which is okay. Besides, we should have a diversity of platforms, competition is good and there's no one size fits all. Biggest problem is people thinking there should be one superapp.
I'm pretty confident people are mostly forming opinions to justify their decisions rather than speaking from informed points of view. My evidence is that these platforms solve different problems. Personally, I don't use matrix other than occasionally playing around. But I'm glad it exists and want it to keep existing
I'd very much like to disagree.
From the top of my head, in the past few years of using Element Web:
- Notification center is now gone.
- Room search is now only limited to official Matrix rooms.
- At peak it consumes ~2.2 GB of RAM.
- UI feels more sluggish by the day.
- Loading it now takes ~10 minutes.
- Using it as an IRC bouncer (to Libera) is now gone, which was what initially attracted me in the first place.
And I don't even use the voice / call functionality of Element Web.
I somewhat understand the reasoning behind the decisions, but I feel like they should have improved the UX first before working on the protocol itself.
Communication is a sacred part of the human experience and I will not allow centralized entities to control my primary means of connection to my friends and family.
My options for digital comms are then are limited to email, IRC, XMPP, or Matrix.
Matrix has leaps and bounds the best UX and functionality by this criteria and is what I use for the overwhelming majority of my communications.
Anyone that is exclusively willing to communicate over corpotech disrespects my values for freedom and privacy, and is by extension opting out of being friends with me unless we see each other in person regularly.
9/10 times the people that respect me and want to be friends with me also respect my ethical conviction and create matrix accounts to talk to me if they do not already have one.
Taking back control of the internet will require conviction and I try to lead by example in my social circles. I personally could not give less of a shit if Matrix has feature parity with xyz corpotech as they are not solving the same problem. I also use IRC heavily to talk to many of the best engineers in the world and that is a low UX bar to beat.
That said, as corpotech walled gardens keep screwing their users, more and more hold-outs will come over and new features and improvements will reduce that friction over time.
For now though very few individuals understand the vital importance of digital sovereignty for a citizen controlled society, but governments absolutely get it and do not want people like Zuck controlling their comms, so it is not surprising governments are first in line willing to pay for help switching to Matrix. The people will follow in time.
I did not want to be locked into Google or Apple ecosystems and the ship on a truly FOSS Android device has long sailed, so I ported my number to a VoIP provider and only use PCs now.
To your point -any- E2EE on proprietary platforms like iOS or Android cannot be trusted for high risk comms, so at my infosec job we exclusively use Matrix from QubesOS workstations.
But yes email is normally the go-to fallback except with Gen Z who almost universally refuse to use it having grown up exclusively using corpotech.
It's always protocol improvements and 'it's coming in the next version's or 'msc #xxxx just got approved' with Matrix.
It's always someone saying 'oh this next version fixed all that' and then someone says 'well what about mobile' or 'what about desktop's and then someone says 'actually it doesn't fix it there.'
I'd love matrix to be the solution to my communication problems but it just isn't.
It's still there; it just got moved into Labs given it never worked in encrypted rooms, and having a flakey feature for new users was (correctly) considered worse than not having a feature at all. Go look for "Enable the notifications panel in the room header (Unreliable in encrypted rooms)" in Labs on develop.element.io or Element Nightly.
> - Room search is now only limited to official Matrix rooms.
This isn't accurate. On one server (matrix.org) the room directory is currently locked down to stop it filling up with spam, however this should be opened up again to be a curated room list in the near future.
> - At peak it consumes ~2.2 GB of RAM.
> - UI feels more sluggish by the day.
> - Loading it now takes ~10 minutes.
So agreed that Element Web performance is very painful for power-users. This is because we've been putting all of our effort into fixing perf in the protocol itself (via sliding sync etc) using matrix-rust-sdk on mobile in Element X to prove it all out. We've also spent huge amounts of time on encryption reliability.
However, good news is that we've finally moved to Element X Web (codenamed as Aurora: https://github.com/element-hq/aurora), which runs matrix-rust-sdk in browser but with MVVM React components from Element Web for the UI. You can play with an alpha at https://dangerousdemos.net (non-permenant-URL) right now. In contrast:
- At peak it consumes 80MB of heap.
- UI feels instant and is O(1) regardless of account size
- Loading takes ~2 seconds (although that's about 20x slower than it should be given Aurora doesn't currently persist any local state, so it's loading everything from scratch on launch).
> - Using it as an IRC bouncer (to Libera) is now gone, which was what initially attracted me in the first place.
Agreed that this sucks. We did everything we could to stop Libera removing the bridge, but failed due to lack of $ meaning we didn't have enough dedicated manpower to meet Libera's demands.
> And I don't even use the voice / call functionality of Element Web.
Element Call's actually rather good, in terms of providing end-to-end encrypted group calling. If you used it you'd probably complain that we broke backwards compatibility with the legacy 1:1 Matrix voip calling though, which would be true; again, due to lack of dedicated manpower.
> I somewhat understand the reasoning behind the decisions, but I feel like they should have improved the UX first before working on the protocol itself.
To improve the UX with clients, we had to improve the protocol, and Element X shows how good that UX improvement is. We're now catching up on Web.
As a user of Element call via the desktop app, I found myself sometimes confused whether I was actually using the new implementation or the legacy version.
Has the move to encrypted calls happened on the non-element-x platforms? Is there a difference between group and one-on-one calls on those platforms?
Is Jitsi still in use anywhere?
What?! How is this possible? How come users tolerate it at all?
Granted I have 0 systems I use with less than 64gb of memory. Ram is cheap.
But there are reasons it isn't competing with discord, slack or teams. I would like to say a lot of that has to do with matrix.org not having a serious/good commercial play, but I think it's a lot more nuanced than that.
Matrix is sort of like Mastodon and Lemmy in its target audience and usage, and there is nothing wrong with that. But I think a lot of us wanted something like Bluesky but for chat apps.
Marketing and UI are very important. something like Signal can get away with being terrible at it because they were able to get publicity and marketing from snowden, politicians,etc... I even think Matrix is a better OMEMO/E2EE communication client than Signal. But having a good product isn't enough, the user experience needs to be competitive for the general public to join and things like branding and publicity are especially important for Matrix because a good product other people aren't using isn't usable for communication purposes.
Don't get me wrong, I know the matrix team is well aware of this and they try their best, but it seems for now at least they know their target audience and that audience is happy enough with it. I suspect in Europe at least they're going to do really well. Whatsapp and Viber are very popular east of the Atlantic. Matrix should focus on disrupting those. Having something like whatsapp numbers instead of full on user id's (or translating them) for example would help compete there.
Matrix is carving out a nice but they're developing it like it should be competing with the bigger/dominant players. I interact with very technical people that are into opensource, development, security, etc... and every single time, I am the first person they hear about Matrix from.
In terms of permissions: I'm a bit surprised that folks feel limited by Matrix's freeform hierarchy of permissions. Every user can have a 'power level' from 0 to 100, and you can then customise the threshold required for literally permission (e.g. you need power level 54 or higher to kick users, or whatever). The only difference with Discord is that Discord lets you pick entirely arbitrary combinations of permissions (e.g. have one user able to kick but not ban, but another user able to ban but not kick, or whatever). How useful really is this in real life usage though?
I'm trying to work out whether the problem is if Element's UI for configuring permissions is too basic, or whether folks really do need a full RBAC permission matrix, and if so, for what use case?
The idea of ever increasing and overlapping scopes I don’t think maps well to most people’s mental model of who should be allowed to do what. People mostly want to define an arbitrary role; admin, user, team leader, whatever, and just pick what that role is allowed to do in isolation. It’s marginally more work to setup initially picking all of the permissions again, but it removes all of the overhead of having to monitor what permissions are being adopted from lower scopes on the power level axis.
I also think the power level system makes it much harder to “refactor” permissions for specific roles without affecting permissions for everyone “above and below”
However I'm constantly adding new roles which are really just groups of users. I would say 90% of all the Discord roles I've ever created have no permissions associated with them at all and just exist to ping a group of users (or act as a tag for bots).
Maybe that's served by a different feature in Matrix for user groups. If so, that's still not quite as useful, because sometimes later on you decide the group needs a permission (e.g. a casual gaming group has grown enough to justify having it's own channel).
So the problem here isn't that folks want contradictory access levels (e.g. Admins can kick people but can't set topic, but Mods can kick people but can't set topic) but the ability to set them via group?
and even harder to leave Discord now when a lot of users invested in Nitro fancy emoticons and profile enchantments
I really want to love matrix but at least last time I tried it, the app was very noticeably more clunky and featureless.
I played around with this implementation and it's looking pretty good. Not there yet, obviously, but we're in the ballpark I'd say. Obviously, there's lots more to Discord than just voice rooms and a similar-enough UI. But we're slowly getting there.
I do see what people are talking about in reference to the voice channels though, even though I can't stand them.
I think hierarchical permission systems are awkward. Role based is easy to understand and setup, even if more complex technically.
Well, also because Ido is the superior language. But also inertia, yes.
This makes the App a no-go for everyone and their grandmother. The registration and setup process was so cumbersome, even people with some tech knowledge in my friend circle had trouble getting it to work.
Anyway, it seems so user hostile, why not just make connecting a phone number optional? That would attract many more people?
Most probably don't add it anyway because it's far from mandatory (I haven't created an account for some time, but I assume it's not part of the flow), so it probably wouldn't work out great in practice.
(which everyone uses who follows the default App setup flow.)
Meanwhile, government deployments typically have LDAP or similar to discover users - and so it hasn't come up as a big requirement for the folks generating $. It's on the radar though as one of the main blockers for mainstream uptake... but right now we're trying to keep the lights on first before focusing on accelerating mainstream uptake.
That makes sense, hopefully it’s something that can be resolved sometime soon. Would be great if mainstream people have another, privacy conscious, alternative to big tech…
It baffles me that people use corporate surveillance software, and balk at the tiniest of privacy hurdles.
I couldn't find anything on https://matrix.org/blog/2022/09/28/upgrade-now-to-address-en...
Constraining the user membership to be controlled by the client is Hard in a fully decentralised world, but we're working on it: one option is MSC4256 (which pushes the whole problem to MLS); another option is to run Matrix's state resolution algorithm on the client (making the client implementation even more complex) to ensure that the client agrees with the server on the correct user membership.
View from 1000 feet: maybe a way to lock a room's users would be interesting? So that new users in, say, a DM room do not get decryption keys for messages from the client. Something like a weaker form of "only send messages to verified users", where you could have a DM room with (at most) 2 people.
Or, instead, maybe an option to disable forwarding session keys older than the user's room join event, to keep forward secrecy so that a new user does not get to read old messages (or does this already happen every 100 messages?).
That's a really interesting idea - having immutable memberships could be a good band-aid. The problem is that right now the fact that room membership is typically mutable can be valuable: you add assistants into DMs (human or virtual); you can bridge the DM to other platforms; you can add (benign) audit bots for compliance purposes; you can migrate between Matrix IDs by inviting in your new ID and kicking out the old one; etc.
Of course, this same flexibility comes with a risk, and I see the point that it might be better to 'seal' membership if you know this is flexibility you don't want. We'll have a think.
> Or, instead, maybe an option to disable forwarding session keys older than the user's room join event, to keep forward secrecy so that a new user does not get to read old messages (or does this already happen every 100 messages?).
Currently we never forward session keys, so new users don't get to read old messages whatever. This obviously causes its own problems, especially for Slack/Teams style use cases where new joiners expect to be able to read conversation history. Work is ongoing right now to finally fix this (https://github.com/element-hq/element-meta/issues/39), but we are very mindful of the risk of not sharing existing history to the wrong users (or devices), which is one of the reasons it's taken so long to land.
The 100-message thing is separate: it's the maximum number of times a session-key ratchet can be advanced before it gets replaced. In other words, if you steal a session key, you can only use it to decrypt a maximum of the 100 subsequent messages sent by that device.
If you host a server yourself - it's great that you can! - you'll try the official implementation, synapse — ...and discover that it's a resource hog. Things got a bit better with some streaming sync protocol or something like that, but last time I looked it up that was still experimental and the server is still a chonker. Again, alternative servers exist, again the problem with feature parity.
I feel like the protocol is bloated as well, but I didn't dive into it too much to have a good opinion on that.
When choosing a messenger, I go to Signal for security, to IRC for simplicity and to Telegram for UX. I never thought "Oh let's use Matrix"...
Even the official clients are a little weird. Element X, their next gen super fast client released in 2023, still won't allow me to create a thread on iOS. It will let me put a caption on a photo though, but Element won't.
I thought that, too, but at the very least it probably grows with usage. On my single-user-server, synapse currently needs ~100MB of RAM and does not consume CPU at all. It's not "slim" but I wouldn't call it a resource hog either.
[1]: https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko/issues/1786 [2]: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/08/libolm-deprecation/ [3]: https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-ol...
Meanwhile the plan for Aurora (Element X Web) is to run it in Tauri or similar to placate all the Electron-haters: https://github.com/element-hq/aurora
However, because it's a rewrite, it doesn't quite have feature parity with the old apps, which are now over 10 years old: Threads is in beta; Spaces haven't landed yet, and Widgets aren't implemented yet. Therefore, we have to keep the old app around for users/customers who depend on those.
As a result, >80% of the people who say "Matrix sucks" are actually talking about bad experiences on the old Element mobile apps - rather than better client Element X or indeed Matrix clients from other folks.
There's also a large set of people who got bitten by encryption problems, almost all of which were fixed by Sept 2024.
Finally, there's folks who got bitten by the sad history of bridging in Matrix: IRC bridging used to be relatively okay; the team then got very stretched due to lack of funding; we tried to land a major PR to improve its architecture; the PR introduced bugs; Libera got very upset; we tried to fix things but failed to do fast enough. As a result, bridging to Libera in particular is awful these days, using adhoc bridges which funnel all traffic through a single user, with no ability to join arbitrary IRC channels on demand or use Matrix as a bouncer.
These days, the priority at Element is providing a self-hosted, decentralised WhatsApp and Teams replacement for governments... and once we get sustainable doing that, we'll be able to spend time building community features once again.
Okay, but they do that because they used those apps, and they did that because you released those apps and said the same thing you're saying now ("use our app, it's really cool"). Surely you can understand why someone who dealt with that is going to be suspicious of "this time for sure".
> However, because it's a rewrite, it doesn't quite have feature parity with the old apps, which are now over 10 years old
So people can either judge based on "legacy" apps that do more, or the shiny new app that does less. Again, surely you can understand why people might be disappointed with both of those.
There isn't any way to avoid being judged on your whole history.
I recently tried Element X. I will say the onboarding was better, although that comes with the caveat that I'm not sure how that would go if I didn't have another device at hand to verify with. And UTD errors have definitely decreased (across all clients). Apart from that, the UX is okay, but I don't see it as radically better than the old Element.
There has been a good deal of improvement in Matrix, which I appreciate and kudos are due to you and the team for that. But I think it's a bit of a stretch to make claims like Element X being "radically better" than any competitor. And, importantly, making grandiose promises like that increases the risk of losing trust if people's experience isn't absolutely stellar.
On the desktop side, if there were a client as good as SchildiChat maybe that would work, but last time I tried one of the Element desktop clients I wasn't even able to log in (it either crashed or hung, can't remember), and most of the time I'm fine with Fractal anyway. Fractal is actually a very nice client for what it does, it just has a limited feature set: missing spaces, copy/paste doesn't quite work like you'd expect, no search (I'm not sure there are any clients with fully functioning search for encrypted rooms), and my memory is that heic image previews weren't supported. I can fall back to nheko for some of the other things when needed.
As far as I know, there aren't any clients that support the new element call unless you enable the labs feature in element x.
All that said, I can't overstate how much I appreciate all the work the matrix devs do, and it is still fine for my daily use. Even if I sometimes disagree with Arathorn's conclusions about how ready matrix is, I have to appreciate the optimism and I imagine it is part of why he's been able to continue through all the negativity :) and it's not entirely wrong to say that matrix beats the competition - I'd say it easily beats teams and imessage (teams does not deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as anything else), and it is mostly comparable with messenger and whatsapp. Slack probably has it slightly beat, and discord is leagues ahead of everything else.
I'm still optimistic about Matrix but I am a bit worried that it has lost a lot of steam because of this UX history.
Which is mobile-only. Element's UX on desktop is still a joke.
> These days, the priority at Element is providing a self-hosted, decentralised WhatsApp and Teams replacement for governments... and once we get sustainable doing that, we'll be able to spend time building community features once again.
In other words, you don't have the community's best interests in mind, but we should rest safe because you'll have their best interests in mind at some point in the future, maybe.
Not very reassuring.
Actually, we span up Element X on web a few weeks ago and are currently figuring out how to transplant EW's view layer (which is fine) onto matrix-rust-sdk (which is more than fine): https://matrix.org/blog/2025/06/05/this-week-in-matrix-2025-... etc.
> In other words, you don't have the community's best interests in mind, but we should rest safe because you'll have their best interests in mind at some point in the future, maybe.
I'd argue that by having spent >10 years building out Matrix and Element as open source, we've demonstrated that we have the FOSS community very much in mind. But we'll only be able to continue doing that as our day jobs if we can pay our salaries, and the way to do that appears to be to sell enterprise Matrix distributions to Governments. Once we get financially sustainable doing that, we'll be able to focus more on the community again.
> Not very reassuring.
Au contraire, mon capitaine; I find it very reassuring that Element might finally be approaching a position to keep working on improving Matrix indefinitely :D
EDIT: I do still find issue with the claim that Element X is the solution to every UX problem though. Sure, you've begun experimenting with a web version of it, but it's still in the very early stages - it's not exactly production-ready.
Mozilla's EMS hosting got migrated over yesterday (at last)
60% of the rest of EMS-hosted servers are also migrated already.
Sorry it didn't happen earlier, but all our focus has been on getting on-premise deployments for people like NATO & the UN working excellently, and the SaaS deployments have been lagging.
Reason? It is still "work" to even try to start using Matrix and yes I tried the kicks-ass-new-swift-client and it seems to be just another dull almost useless iOS messaging app which was done as a proof of concept of an open source project with very high values and goals and completely missing the point of usability and what people need and where smartphone messaging is today.
Also by the way - how many has it been? Matrix -> Riot -> Element.. is it changing again now?
> 80% of the people who say "Matrix sucks" are actually talking about bad experiences on the old Element mobile apps
Maybe 100% of times you are missing the point why people think that way by just assuming this?
> self-hosted, decentralised WhatsApp and Teams replacement for governments
Well, I do hope you realise that "Govt as the entity" per se that would not use these apps - but "the people" (which actually kinda comes back to you, I, and our friends) in those governments will use those apps and services.
Anyway, good luck.
"Am I so out of touch? No, it's the users who are wrong"
Matrix has always intended to provide communication for the masses. You can see this from day 1 here: https://matrix.org/blog/2014/09/03/hello-world. You can see it in the Matrix Foundation's manifesto & mission here: https://matrix.org/foundation/about. You can see this in my "Road to mainstream Matrix" FOSDEM mainstage talk this year: https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6274-the-....
However, we have to fund our work on this, and the Matrix team at Element do so right now by building digitally-sovereign comms apps for governments. The reason is that generating funding out of mainstream consumer messaging apps is very hard when you are competing against 'free' (WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal) and when you aren't in the business of monetising data/metadata or selling ads or AI. Signal has problems with funding even at the scale they're operating, for instance. So, instead, the strategy has been to focus on getting $ from governments which in turn can then keep the lights on for everyone else. And I personally am continuing to jump through every hoop I can to try to get Matrix into mainstream use.
Perhaps an analogy is Linux On The Desktop. I'm sure when Linus created Linux he was hoping to create a generic kernel which could be used all over the place for everyone. As it happens, it first got traction serverside, and so lots of effort and focus went into refining that; meanwhile clientside Linux lagged a bit, especially as reconciling great UX with open source is... challenging. As a result, loads of people on /. or whatever complained bitterly about clientside Linux not being mainstream. As time went, on though, organisations subsequently focused on building great Linux-based clientside products like Android, Ubuntu, etc, and you could argue that Linux did eventually go mainstream on mobile, and may yet go mainstream on desktop. But it took ~20+ years to do so, due to the twisty path it took to get to critical mass.
> yes I tried the kicks-ass-new-swift-client and it seems to be just another dull almost useless iOS messaging app which was done as a proof of concept of an open source project with very high values and goals and completely missing the point of usability and what people need and where smartphone messaging is today.
You'll have to explain to me how EX misses "what people need and where smartphone messaging is today", as the feedback here feels a little unsubstantiated...
> Also by the way - how many has it been? Matrix -> Riot -> Element.. is it changing again now?
Matrix is still Matrix, and always has been. Riot got renamed to Element in 2020 and there are no plans whatsoever to change that. We should print t-shirts for folks who bring up the rebrand to hit us with 5 years later. Meanwhile, here's a shout out to Riot Games' lawyers for forcing us to rebrand in the first place...
> Maybe 100% of times you are missing the point why people think that way by just assuming this?
Maybe, but this is the first time i've heard someone complain about Element X (other than being impatient for threads/spaces); i have a high sample size of people confirming that it's a big improvement.
> Well, I do hope you realise that "Govt as the entity" per se that would not use these apps - but "the people" (which actually kinda comes back to you, I, and our friends) in those governments will use those apps and services.
Not entirely sure how to parse this, but if your point is that our competition for Govt end-users is Signal & WhatsApp, then totally agreed. Which is why we've focused on matching/outcompeting them with Element X.
> Anyway, good luck.
thanks! :D
The reason I brought that up is because there are so many parallels with what you're talking about with Matrix. Even down to the rewrite in rust and people acting like software hasn't improved in a decade. But the competition space is very important in chat platforms, just like browsers. You can support Signal and Matrix at the same time. They solve different problems. You can also use WhatsApp, Telegram, and/or iMessage or whatever. Competition is necessary in this space. We don't want monopolies. Especially if you're a firm believer in distributed systems! Distributed systems can become highly centralized. Just check your email account. I'll bet you have a Gmail account... I'll bet you also have an Outlook account. Or look at your phone!
Totally unrelated fun fact: people consider Coke and Pepsi an oligopoly, yet *combined* they only have a 70% market share. (This is definitely unrelated and definitely doesn't have any connection to our discussion...)
Yeah, wake me up when X supports all the features the original app has. Until it's usable, there is no point.
If you log into multiple devices, you have to go through a verification process to verify the new device. You may need to backup and restore your encryption keys manually or all your messages will be "Unable to decrypt message". Keeping multiple clients open simultaneously is supposed to have one client request the keys from the other client, but this either takes a while or doesn't always work. I have a contact with an unverified device (so all his messages show up with a warning) who refuses to fix it because all the other messengers just work by logging in. This is on top of people being upset that you're adding one more app to their menagerie of texts, Facebook, Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, etc.
I use Matrix with my close contacts but I can't imagine anyone ever saying "Damn, I'm going to use this instead of Discord now!"
I don't remember the details but I have this feeling that I won't use it again. It seemed like the server could do everything (good) but they didn't found their niche (bad and impossible for such a generic framework).
I assume this is caused by the company that does the Matrix development getting its revenue from such customers.
I get the impression it is more designed to be a Slack replacement than a Signal or WhatsApp replacement, which is a shame.
That said, I am personally not so keen on using matrix. Remember India government banned matrix and other apps for "facilitating terrorist communications".
Ah... the joys of democracy.