The Matrix Trashfire

https://blog.koehntopp.info/2024/02/13/the-matrix-trashfire.html

by summm • 2 years ago

308 213 2 years ago

blog.koehntopp.info

crimsoneer5• 2 years ago

I mean, this is quite silly. Matrix is the open-source network infrastructure, Element is the client. Of course if you go to the Matrix web-page, it's not particularly user-friendly - if you expect to just use the thing, you should be going to Element. The ActivityPub page won't exactly help you sign up to Mastodon either.

There are plenty of problems with Element and Matrix (I say that as someone who has been trying to migrate off Slack for 1+ year) but this comes off as the author just not doing basic reading.

IanCal8• 2 years ago

if you expect to just use the thing, you should be going to Element.

Element sent them to matrix.org

crimsoneer5• 2 years ago

I'll happily admit the Element/Element X migration they're currently on is silly and unhelpful, but the point being if they'd just gone to the Element home page, or download the actual Element app instead of the X one, it would have perfectly happily registered them to Matrix.org by default and everything would have been just fine.

skowalak• 2 years ago

I disagree. I have been using Matrix with Element as my main IM with my own homeserver for 3 years now, and the onboarding experience is just bad. You have to read so many texts which are spread across so many pages just to get stuff to work and even then sometimes it just won't.

Sure, the author could have prevented some of their problems by reading the documentation, but Matrix is trying to become a solution everyone can use. And noone wants to read a manifest only to send some messages.

crimsoneer5• 2 years ago

Honestly, on this I totally agree - hosting your own Element/Matrix instance is really unnecessarily painful, with the documentation all over the place. But hey, it's free and open-source.

But as as user, if you're even a little technical, downloading Element, registering and messaging your friends is really not the difficult bit.

4ad• 2 years ago

his comes off as the author just not doing basic reading.

Perhaps a technology will not have success if its users need to do basic reading.

bhaney2• 2 years ago

Perhaps I would prefer a chat platform devoid of people who can't do basic reading

arlort• 2 years ago

A chat platform for the illiterates might not be the best business proposition

Jokes aside, I don't think matrix/element, at this stage, are trying to overthrow telegram or whatsapp.

It seems their main approach is somewhat aimed at the people who use(d) IRC on the general audience side and institutional clients who they work with to create ad hoc solutions for employees, in which case which client to download is slightly less problematic since it's going to be a custom one anyway

DoItToMe813• 2 years ago

You literally just install the non-beta client and register an account and then log in. It's that simple. I'm impressed that anyone could get this wrong and then blame the program.

Havoc• 2 years ago

Things like this are technically correct but irrelevant. If the average person can't figure out the UI & flow without getting frustrated then it's game over.

prmoustache2• 2 years ago

I think the core of the problem is the naming separation between the default client and default instance.

It is ok that matrix the protocol and matrix the server software have a different name than element. But the official server instance used by element should not be matrix.org but element.io because that is where you have to sign up and log in if you want to use the default official instance. Otherwise you redirect clueless end users to protocol papers and server administration docs.

skywhopper3• 2 years ago

He did start with Element. He only went to matrix.org because there was no way to set up an account through the Element client.

TulliusCicero2• 2 years ago

The ability of some in the FOSS community to always blame the user for poor UX design is truly impressive.

Do we need to test and simplify our onboarding? No, it's the confused users who are wrong!

DoItToMe813• 2 years ago

My grandmother could use Matrix when she was starting to develop dementia. The only thing that tripped her up was the end to end encryption and key loss. It's not a UX problem, its a PEBKAC issue.

turblety• 2 years ago

We also tried to use it, but frequently, messages will fail to decrypt with no option to retry. Threads is a mess, where messages will show as unread, but you can't actually see what message was unread.

Matrix/Element is so close to a great alternative to Slack, but in it's current state it's totally unusable.

wakeupcall2• 2 years ago

We also tried to use it, but frequently, messages will fail to decrypt with no option to retry.

This is a years-old issue with Element, which never happened to me with other sending clients such as FluffyChat. It's unbelievable that it's unfixed given it's a dealbreaker as it results in permanently unreadable messages on your end (the "waiting" in "waiting for this message" is a lie). And since this needs to be fixed on the sending side, you NEED to use another messenger to fix the conversation (if at all, as this requires reading extremely long issues on github with buried suggestions many won't do).

After getting it a few times most users would just dump Element and blame matrix as a failure to never touch it again. The excuse "we're working on this on the next client iteration" is actually ensuring a growing list of users will hit this (as it's bound to happen) and avoid matrix in the future.

UI/onboarding issues are minor compared to the fact that the conversation can be randomly broken.

creatonez• 2 years ago

This just sounds like a description of Matrix's key sharing mechanism? Messages are supposed to be unencryptable if you don't have the keys, and bringing online another device (or having all your keys pre-shared so you don't have to) is what provides the keys. If you want to avoid this altogether, the UI prominently advertises the optional encrypted key backup service provided by the homeserver, and various manual options for sharing keys.

If FluffyChat is not having this issue, it is probably overly eager to share encryption keys instead of allowing the user fine-grained access to control keys, which is successfully hiding the complexity of the ratchet encryption but potentially exposing the user to attacks to force the sharing of keys.

Edit: I was looking around. While Matrix is well documented, Element's documentation is poor because they expect you to figure things out from popups in the UI -- fair enough, unfortunately most apps are like this, and Element's popups have gotten a lot clearer. But I did find these two pages from a university that seem to serve well as "Element's missing manual". Worth a read if you are trying Matrix for the first time, because it discusses some things that can look like bugs but are really user error.

https://docs.matrix.kit.edu/en/settings/

https://docs.matrix.kit.edu/en/faq/

jeroenhd6• 2 years ago

messages will fail to decrypt with no option to retry

In my experience, this is generally resolved automatically in the background. It occurs when the device that's supposed to share the necessary keys isn't online while any of your devices are online, and the moment enough devices are connected again, the messages will pop into your timeline. I'd like a "retry" button, but if the error shows up, manually clicking "retry" wouldn't really do much.

As for it being a Slack competitor: just don't enable encryption and you'll skip over a lot of problems, and come a lot closer to Slack in terms of usability.

The threads UX is a bit weird, but it does show you that there are unread messages hidden in threads through a little indicator by the threads icon. Not the greatest UX, I agree, but I wouldn't call it "unusable".

ThePowerOfFuet• 2 years ago

I gotta say, he nails it.

I so wanted to love Matrix. I tried it for a year and it just had too many sharp edges.

theshrike79• 2 years ago

I was on IRC when ircII and BitchX were common clients along with huge scripts on both for "irc wars" and shit. I can deal with jank.

But the Matrix UI/UX still grates me on how bad it is. Just stop pretending, copy what Discord does and be done with it.

kibwen• 2 years ago

Cinny is the Matrix client that copies Discord's UI. My friends and I use it as the default web interface for our private server, no complaints (other than the fact that it makes you appreciate Discord's sometimes-annoying "join all channels by default" feature; the opposite, classic IRC approach of forcing everyone to search for and manually join all channels scales better but is an absolute disaster for discoverability on small-to-medium servers).

bhaney2• 2 years ago

I tried to follow along with the author by going to the same pages and seeing the difference between what he should have done and what he actually did, and it convinced me that there's no way he was doing this in good faith (unless something has changed). I still can't figure out how he managed to get to some of the pages he described, when the thing that he said he wanted was clearly right on the page he said he was viewing before.

bowsamic5• 2 years ago

The fact that the official Matrix Mastodon account as well as the "Matrix Director of Program Development" agree with his assessment with the Mastodon account agreeing that it is a "trashfire" makes me sceptical of your suggestion that he was manufacturing these issues.

crimsoneer5• 2 years ago

I mean, Element and Matrix are 2 separate entities, which is kind of the key problem with all these efforts - there have been plenty of posts about how hard it was to join a Mastodon instance, or creating 2 accounts etc.

That said, the Element/Element X migration is a mess. But if he'd just gone to the Element website and clicked "get started", it would have just worked.

frereubu• 2 years ago

People at Matrix responded - see the bottom of the article - so they may well have tidied things already up based on his feedback.

danpalmer4• 2 years ago

I've never used Matrix, directly.

However I use Beeper all day every day, via their iOS, Android, and macOS clients. Beeper (not the iMessage app, but their previous and continuing multi-network app) is pretty great. I get one consistent UX across all chat networks I use. Sometimes the networks drop out, but rarely due to Beeper issues.

Beeper is essentially a Matrix homeserver, plus a bunch of hosted Matrix bridges, and as far as I can tell, that whole part of Beeper was a great technical decision. The Beeper clients started off as forks of the Element clients, and honestly they were a trashfire at the beginning, but Beeper have been quickly iterating and replacing parts, and they're now pretty solid. They're not yet WhatsApp quality UX, but they're approaching it.

I don't think the problem is Matrix.

LorenDB• 2 years ago

This. I use Matrix daily using nheko for my client. It's a rock solid experience (except for a bit of trouble with voice calling one of my friends). I've never been randomly told I have to reverify. If you are being asked to relogin and reverify every time you restart your client, you're doing something wrong.

raziel2p4• 2 years ago

Depends on how you define "Matrix", I guess. The technology is undoubtedly great, but it also needs to sell itself as a (standalone) product if it wants to catch on.

danpalmer4• 2 years ago

But Matrix isn't a product. There are companies building products on it, such as Element and Beeper, and as far as I can see the latter are doing a perfectly good job of selling themselves.

avtar• 2 years ago

Curious to try Beeper now. If anyone has a referral code, please reach out. Email address is in my profile.

haltcatchfire• 2 years ago

We used Matrix for a couple of years at my company, but got kicked out from their managed hosting due to the new requirement of 50+ seats. The years we've been using it has been more of tolerating its flaws than a pleasant user experience. We migrated to Slack and was blown away of how It Just Works.

master-lincoln5• 2 years ago

Who is "they"? Afaik the matrix organization doesn't offer hosted servers

apetresc2• 2 years ago

They do indeed: https://element.io/pricing

rglullis14• 2 years ago

If your company ever considers going back: https://communick.com/services/matrix

aine• 2 years ago

Another option is https://etke.cc - truly FOSS managed hosting, both on-premises and cloud, huge list of supported components, priced by complexity, not users.

Disclaimer: I'm one of etke.cc developers

rglullis14• 2 years ago

Ok, now do XMPP. Or Signal, but with the added requirement that you want to run your own server.

rapsey2• 2 years ago

i.e. moving the goalpost fallacy.

rglullis14• 2 years ago

My goal is "let's have a communication protocol that is secure, enables applications with modern features on all major platforms and is not controlled by any single entity".

If not for the last point, I'd be using WhatsApp just fine. But because of it, Matrix/Element is currently the best we have. Is it great? Absolutely not, but it is the best we have at the moment, and to call it a "trashfire" without putting things in perspective is a disservice.

AshamedCaptain3• 2 years ago

I find that XMPP interoperability (terrible as it is) is still just miles ahead of Matrix. For all intents and purposes Element controls the protocol and despite that I almost constantly find friction communicating the client for Android and the desktop Electron-based client. With 3rd party clients it is a nightmare.

rglullis14• 2 years ago

When https://siskin.im/ is seriously touted as the best iOS client for XMPP, you already lost 50% of the market share in the US. And if you don't have any usable app for 50% of your users in one of the most important markets, you can not really claim "interoperability", can you?

Don't get me wrong, it would be great if more people were using XMPP. Now that I am more involved in the Fediverse space I'm learning how many wheels are being reinvented and XMPP has already solved. If more people learned about https://movim.eu I'd be able to shut off Communick and move on to do something else to do with my life, but the reality is that XMPP failed to achieve critical mass because it never had someone to complete control the protocol.

upofadown5• 2 years ago

The big usability issue with Signal is that it has a dark pattern that leads to most users using it without verifying that they are actually talking to who they think they are talking to. If you do verify a particular contact's identity it involves comparing a 60 digit decimal number. The 7 emojis seen in the linked article are arguably better but a short decimal number would have been good too and would have eliminated the issue that the emojis don't look the same.

Neither seems to provide any sort of conceptual framework to allow the user to react in a reasonable way when something goes wrong with the identity stuff...

OMEMO running over XMPP is pretty terrible for identity stuff, at least for the clients I have encountered.

hiq5• 2 years ago

If you do verify a particular contact's identity it involves comparing a 60 digit decimal number.

Why wouldn't you scan the QR code instead of doing that?

the_third_wave3• 2 years ago

Running an XMPP server is dead simple, just install Prosody and make few simple edits to the configuration and you're set. It hardly takes any resources (32 MB resident on my server) so it can happily live on whatever server you're already using. You will want to add some records to your domain to make it all run smoothly but this is well-documented and even works fine on free DNS providers like Namecheap and Cloudflare. Once you've done that you just install Conversations (from F-Droid, of course) and something like Gajim or Dino-im on your laptops and you'll bask in the glory of evading the surveillance dragnet because you're using OMEMO encryption which works end-to-end.

If you happen to have Jitsi Meet installed you'll already have an XMPP server up and running to which you can add some configuration to make it useable for this purpose.

Source: this is what I've been doing for many years

rglullis14• 2 years ago

Ok, now go try to convince your 70 year-old father, who is using iOS, to join you and to use it as your primary means of conversation.

I'm not being facetious. Try that, and then try doing it with Matrix/Element. Tell me which one do you end up with.

tetraca2• 2 years ago

Having set up and administrated both an XMPP and a Matrix server, XMPP is way less a pain in the ass. I've enjoyed dealing with prosody much more than either synapse or dendrite. XMPP doesn't tank my server every time I try to join a new room and it doesn't take forever to start talking in a room after you join it. And provided you're running the server, getting people onto XMPP has not been hard in my experience. I made a basic registration page with simple instructions. I have gotten people with low technical know-how to successfully register accounts and use it without issue. They just create an account, enter their username into a client I recommend, and they're ready to go (I've never even had them complain about OMEMO).

rglullis14• 2 years ago

If you go through your contact list right now, how many people are on iOS, and how many of them do you think you could successfully convince to use XMPP as the primary method to reach you?

With Matrix, I don't need to convince them.

rakoo4• 2 years ago

I did it no later than Yesterday:

- Install Conversations on Android - In a prompt, there's a "create an account", I create one (it's with conversations.im) - I have an account - At this point there's a slight confusion between "what discussions are happening" and "what discussions do you know about", but I manage to find a room to a discussion I'm interested in - Get in, see the messages

The experience is definitely 100x nicer

rglullis14• 2 years ago

OP was on iOS.

IanCal8• 2 years ago

This kind of process is extremely valuable and should be done by devs more often. Start from the start and follow whatever your application tells you to do. Note down when it doesn't tell you where to go or what to do. You'd be surprised by just how many things you do automatically while working because you know the little tricks and things to get by, and that wording doesn't necessarily match what the app requires now.

Side note - this kind of this is why good QA people are awesome. They'll show you what users will actually do.

I'll add in something here. Element the app said they were logging into matrix.org.

matrix.org has a "try matrix". The first thing is it tells me to choose a client (this feels like a loop), then says to choose a server but also maybe I don't need to, then has a create account button.

The create account button takes me to a docs page. Which tells me to go to the element site, and then create an account with matrix.

So that's matrix -> use element -> element says to use matrix -> matrix says to use someone else, ok you can use us -> to use us go to element -> element says you're making an account with matrix.

edit - oh you can and should also do this with your dev process.

Create an empty folder, check out the repo and follow the readme. Do you actually get a running system for local dev? Can you successfully run the tests? If you are able to, do this on a clean machine (maybe load up a docker image and see if you can follow it in a truly clear system). Does it turn out it assumes you already have tool X installed because your developers already have it from another project? Do you actually need postgres running with a specific user with specific login details?

If you're like me you don't like writing docs, so this may actually just push you to add scripts that do the setup required.

To not sound sanctimonious about this every time I've done this with my own code I've found issues with the documentation.

INTPenis• 2 years ago

This kind of process is extremely valuable and should be done by devs more often.

The fact that it's not being done doesn't bode well for their perceived engagement to this project.

I remember when it launched and how much they hyped it up to be the future of secure messaging. That was how many years ago now? It was pre-pandemic.

I'm a lover of all selfhostable federated solutions so I actually hosted a Matrix server for a couple of years. My conclusion is that it's just not ready for production scalability.

And you can't migrate easily between implementations because of their unique database design.

vallode• 2 years ago

QA is a massively underappreciated position. A QA person that knows when to automate, when to manually test, and how to report and file issues relevant to the project can save a significant proportion of hours on a project overall. I wish many more companies included budget for QA, it saves developers a lot of time.

A bit of a side-note: this sort of analysis is a great answer to "I want to contribute to open source, how?". Some fairly simple wins for significantly better user experience, and no coding required!

ChrisMarshallNY3• 2 years ago

The old wisdom in the US, is that if you have "Quality" in your job title, your career is over.

At the Japanese company that I used to work for, it meant that you were one of the most powerful people in the corporation, and was a sought-after adornment.

Different strokes, and all that...

brightball• 2 years ago

Good QA people are hard to find and it's a weird balance to strike.

I've seen QA get run over by aggressive developers.

I've seen QA people who were so good, detailed and provided clear reproduction steps that developers couldn't wait to see them work.

I've seen QA people who were completely unwilling to work on efficiency improvements, automation or even testing things in parallel so they became a bottleneck to the entire organization.

I've seen QA people who just fall into a routine, do exactly what is asked of them and never try to improve.

Like with anything, it comes down to the person in the job. If you get QA people who are really committed to the work, take pride in what they do and are always trying to improve it's the dream.

When you don't have that, it's a very mixed bag.

thibaultamartin6• 2 years ago

Hi, I'm the Thib person mention in this article, and I agree that QA is super important. I can mostly talk about matrix.org, since I have little power over the Element clients. Disclaimer though: I'm technically employed by Element (to make paperwork simpler since I'm France-based, Element has an entity in France, and the Foundation is UK-based), but I'm working for the Foundation full time.

This kind of article is super valuable since it gives us the perspective of a new user. I opened https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues/2178 to translate the gripes mentioned in the issue into actionable items for us. I took action on the most urgent one (updating the Try Matrix page), but want to take the time to go beyond the surface symptoms and address the root cause of the other gripes.

On the Foundation side, we're a small but mighty team of four. The website is currently maintained part time by me and a volunteer who is doing an excellent job at it.

As I wrote recently in a blog post "Tracking what works, not people" (https://ergaster.org/posts/2024/01/24-tracking-what-works/), I would love to have the resources to conduct user research and user testing on the website but I unfortunately don't. We deployed privacy-preserving analytics to see where people drop and what confuses them. It's not nearly as good as proper QA and user testing, but that's what we can afford for now.

Overall I'm grateful to the author for documenting their frustration, and even more grateful for reacting constructively to our responses and integrating them in the blog post! One of the strengths of open source is to find and address issues collectively. I consider this blog post to be a good open source contribution.

If people around believe in our mission and want to help us with their brainpower, I invite them to join our "Office of the Matrix.org Foundation" room: https://matrix.to/#/%23foundation-office:matrix.org

For those aligned with our mission and who want to support us financially, the https://matrix.org/support/ page should give you all the information you need to help us out.

gowings972• 2 years ago

Do you have any thoughts on how you might improve this workflow?

oohffyvfg• 2 years ago

most of those complaints are talked about weekly on the element/elementweb own rooms at matrix.

also, i myself gave up contributing small fixes because you don't host source map files and I'm too lazy to setup a dev env.

IanCal8• 2 years ago

Hi, hopefully things came across OK, for clarity I wasn't saying "why haven't they done this, they're bad at QA!?!?!" but just wanted to say that most of us should be doing the same kind of thing with our own products/tools/sites and give a shoutout to QA peeps.

Thanks for working on matrix, I'm building some things on matrix and it's been pretty interesting.

For those aligned with our mission and who want to support us financially, the https://matrix.org/support/ page should give you all the information you need to help us out.

Great highlight, I've donated.

selimthegrim• 2 years ago

Is there a good reason why the password workflow is so much worse on mobile than on desktop for matrix?

jtbayly• 2 years ago

Just wanted to add that I signed up recently and wanted my wife to sign up too. I managed to figure it out, but the article is correct. Even down to trying to figure out whether I should use Element or ElementX on iOS. I also realized that my wife would never figure it all out.

justin_oaks• 2 years ago

If you're trying to make a good onboarding user experience then you should do your onboarding testing with people who've never seen the product before, not devs or QA. Once people are familiar with the product (devs, QA, and anyone who has used it before) then they're "tainted". They'll remember the weird way that they had to work around an issue, and that'll just end up being "the way it is" rather than something to fix.

I've read that a strategy for this is create an ad and pay people $50 to come in and try to use your software. Tell them to do something in your software and see what they get hung up on. The worst UX problems will be hit by nearly every user.

As simple as that is, none of my employers have ever done this. The closest was one of the bosses asking his wife to try out the software.

IanCal8• 2 years ago

You can go one simpler if you need, you can use something like https://www.usertesting.com/ which will do the ad side of it for you. I used to do testing for them for some beer money. You'd use something for the first time and try and achieve some task, often talking through it, and it's all either screen recorded or it used to be videoed for phones.

Having someone in person can be extremely valuable for other reasons, but this can be a quick approach.

For larger customers, going onsite and watching them use your tools is so valuable.

Once people are familiar with the product (devs, QA, and anyone who has used it before) then they're "tainted".

I broadly agree, though this is where I'd split out really good QA people I've worked with. The added advantage is they can also explain the change required that would get some user X to have a better experience (e.g. how your autistic users may get more stuck at a certain place, or how to change the flow such that a 3-4 year old can navigate a UI).

amarant• 2 years ago

Huh, I've been using element for a while now, and the only problem I've encountered is that quite few of my friends use it. I've joined a few communities based around common interests, and never really had any technical issues with anything.

I don't really recall much about the sign-up process at all, which I guess I would've if it was anywhere near as difficult as this guy claims...

I'm on android tho, while he uses iPhone, maybe that's the issue?

gtirloni2• 2 years ago

These user reports are invaluable. They contain so much information that us devs miss because we're so used to working with our software.

onli• 2 years ago

Note though that this is not a regular user, but an old school blogger with deep database experience and afaik programming skills, at the very least someone highly technical (and known in Germany). He is just able to put his user hat on -> regular devs can do that too.

gtirloni2• 2 years ago

Yeah, that's a good point. When I put my user hat on, I try to force myself to not know things (conciously ignore them if I can), but I think it's not a "natural" experience like an end user report. Still, better than automatically doing what will work.

vdaea• 2 years ago

Developers could also do these processes. And they probably do, often. But they usually have their heads so far up their asses that they don't see how inscrutable this onboarding process is even for very technical users.

It's like when you use one of those Linux phones and your reaction all along is "ew". Do developers not notice how bad this is? No, they don't. Some of them haven't used a good UI ever. They can't fathom it could be better. They really think they are doing a good job.

Why did Discord win? Oh, it must be dark patterns, regulatory capture, moat, etc. It can't possibly be because the UI makes sense!

rapsey2• 2 years ago

The state of the project is completely typical of open source trying to do end user applications.

prmoustache2• 2 years ago

Why did Discord win? Oh, it must be dark patterns, regulatory capture, moat, etc. It can't possibly be because the UI makes sense!

I don't know but the Discord UI doesn't makes much sense to me, this is a huge mess.

Signing up might be better though with the caveat that I never had any problem signing up with Element (not Element X for which I have 0 experience).

master-lincoln5• 2 years ago

Nowadays companies win because of better marketing and then network effect. The quality of the product does normally not play a big role for capturing a market

TulliusCicero2• 2 years ago

Bullshit. Discord absolutely gained traction among gamers (and then other communities) due to being a good product that Just Worked.

mpldr• 2 years ago

Developers could also do these processes. And they probably do, often. But they usually have their heads so far up their asses that they don't see how inscrutable this onboarding process is even for very technical users.

I would argue that as the one developing a system (frontend or backend) you can not perform something like that. The reason being that you already know all the small little bits, tricks, and band-aids. The only way to get proper feedback, is by putting someone completely fresh in front of the system.

dschuetz• 2 years ago

Can we please stop submitting click-baity titles?

bowsamic5• 2 years ago

Changing the title is against the rules, isn't it?

hannob• 2 years ago

I feel the "clickbait" accusation has a tendency to be overused.

I mean, when I hear "clickbait", I think "the headline makes me think there's something interesting that isn't really backed up by the content". But here? The headline says "Matrix Trashfire", the content delivers exactly that.

Steltek• 2 years ago

"Trashfire" is absolutely clickbait. The article lays out some poor onboarding documentation for a hypothetical 100% naive user. Matrix, Element, etc work and they work pretty well. The onboarding workflow for most Federated services don't suffer fools. There's nothing exceptional here.

influencer30002• 2 years ago

While it's never fun to receive negative feedback, it'll only help to improve the product.

Still, I run Matrix servers since inception of the project (10 years now \o/), and for an experienced system administrator this is not something difficult to do.

If you think running a Matrix server is difficult, you are probably not the intended audience: running an IRC server, an email server, or some other server, is mostly similarly difficult.

Matrix is a communication protocol, and it is not intended to be touched by end-users. If your goal is to just communicate on the matrix network as an enduser, stay away from matrix. I haven't seen an email enduser who browsers to https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321.html, to figure out how to sign up for hotmail.....

Element on the other hand, IS intended to be userfriendly, and there is obviously a lot of room for improvement. But through the years I experienced that users who want to use Element to stay in touch with their loved once, have no problem with that.

Lastly I think comparing an open source project like Matrix/Element to Publicly traded corporations like Slack or Meta, is not fair. They operate with totally different business models. If you'd compare the quality of Matrix/Element to Slack in relation to annual budget, Slacks ROI would be depressing.

solarkraft• 2 years ago

Lastly I think comparing an open source project like Matrix/Element to Publicly traded corporations like Slack or Meta, is not fair.

If we want to "win" (reach similar/higher adoption), we need to at least come close. It's not easy work, but not doing it and leaving the product that so much good work has ready gone into unusable for a vast number of people would be a bummer.

influencer30002• 2 years ago

Not sure we want to "win". If endusers want apps "to just work" without "paying up", then I would recommend them to stay with Whatsapp.

That kind of users aren't worth the hassle if they have no money.

I personally have better relationships with people that enjoy learning something new, and coming up with solutions for issues themselves, eventually contributing to the ecosystem.

nottorp3• 2 years ago

Matrix is a communication protocol, and it is not intended to be touched by end-users.

So what is "intended to be touched by end users"? I can't figure that out either from the article or the comments here.

Assume I can (and actually have) run an irc server, but I haven't set up Matrix for the last 10 years.

raziel2p4• 2 years ago

The end user is meant to use 1) A client (e.g. Element), and 2) an account created on some server - with the client connecting to that server.

Liskni_si• 2 years ago

If you think running a Matrix server is difficult, you are probably not the intended audience: running an IRC server, an email server, or some other server, is mostly similarly difficult.

Running an IRC server is absolutely not as difficult as running a Matrix server.

There is no state, so you can literally build a tiny Docker image with the config baked in, run it on a VM with the specs of a cheap computer from the 1990s, and then forget about it for years. If it gets hacked (which I think isn't super likely as it's a small codebase that's been out there for decades), you build a new image with a more recent version of ircd.

juped• 2 years ago

It's heartening that some Matrix people responded positively to this free QA work; that's something we almost never see.

master-lincoln5• 2 years ago

Maybe because it was mostly feedback for the Element people, so the Matrix people can sit back

Arathorn• 2 years ago

The initial Element response is at https://mastodon.matrix.org/@element/111935349393238249 fwiw.

maelito2• 2 years ago

I'm talking daily with friends on Element. Most of them don't work in tech, but are quite comfortable with computers.

It's ok. Most bugs concern threads. But it's one of the only chat apps that enable threads, so I'm ok with that, threads are absolutely needed in my opinion. Signal conversations can become such a mess because of that.

ElementX lacks threads, but apart from that is refreshing. Looks more like a chat app than an enterprise messaging app.

Still your article is very important. The UX should be improved.

hiq5• 2 years ago

Signal conversations can become such a mess because of that.

The workaround is to create new groups, even if that's with the same set of people. I even have groups with just another person and myself, e.g. for specific projects. In my experience that works well enough, also because if something is longer-lived, I'll put it in a shared doc instead.

maelito2• 2 years ago

But I won't create a new group to for example talk about a video.

That's what I just did with a friend : share 10 messages about a video.

We're 4 in the group. 2 of them might never be interested by the talk about that video. It's completely unpractical to create a new group to just talk about that.

Then you need to either close or leave the group. No problems with threads, it's created with a click and finishes by lack of new messages.

It's just what happens in real life : people move around 2 meters when they want to talk about something in particular, and other people can either ignore, either join the ephemeral group.

jesprenj4• 2 years ago

I really don't like the forced end to end encryption of chats. I do not care that much about the security of my chats to justify the complications of end to end encryption -- verifying devices, constant "reset" prompts that I don't even know what they do, but they seem like they are very destructive.

I trust my homeserver, since I host it myself. I do not need end to end encryption. I understand this is an issue of the client, not the protocol. But there aren't many clients. Prebuilt element for android from fDroid will connect to matrix.org, vector.im and other network hosts and I don't want that at all, although this tracking can't easily be disabled. It feels very centralised.

I run my own homeserver and want to chat with my friend that runs his own server. It is unacceptable to me that clients connect to anything other than those two homeservers (apart from CRL and OCSP, which should also be disabled by default, as I consider those protocols great spyware). Not to mention the fact that homeserver software itself is known to make connections to the servers of the developers by default, without ever talking to someone on matrix.org. This is also unacceptable. My homeserver should only connect to other homeservers.

3PID is a failed attempt, as it centralises identities and works by utilising a single point that gathers a lot of personat information at one place. I don't want it.

XMPP does not have those issues. Set up prosody and use dino or Conversations and they won't make any connections to non-essential servers. Furthermore, the end to end encryption is way easier to use in XMPP (OMEMO), and it's easy to turn it off if you don't need it.

lxgr• 2 years ago

It sounds like you’re happy with XMPP – are you missing anything from Matrix in terms of functionality? If not, why not just stick with XMPP?

jesprenj4• 2 years ago

I think matrix has group voice calls. But maybe I'm wrong and they're just using Jitsi.

I like that Matrix puts an emphasis on message history, but on XMPP that seems like an afterthought. For example on XMPP multi user chats, messages history retention relies on the server that hosts the chatroom and this is sometimes very limited, sometimes even disabled. And if that's the case, you only get messages when you have a _client_ online, as your server won't store messages when you don't have a client connected. Or something like that.

And AFAIK, multiple clients with a MUC room opened will appear as multiple users sometimes. I'm not sure how it all works really, so take my words with a grain of salt.

XMPP seems more like a pubsub system for system messages, like MQTT (:

dijit3• 2 years ago

tbh the best thing about Matrix is that you have a hope in hell of actually federating it.

XMPP had that promise but due the XEP situation it quickly became difficult to actually federate as most XEPs are optional or not supported on your federation partners.

Everything you said is true; if you can tolerate centralisation then just stick to XMPP, it's pretty good.

upofadown5• 2 years ago

What XEP interoperability issues prevent federation?

zaik5• 2 years ago

difficult to actually federate as most XEPs are optional or not supported on your federation partners

This is false.

jesprenj4• 2 years ago

Why centralization? XMPP users are identified with their JID in format username@server.example, similar to email addresses. And server to server communication is very well documented and major XMPP servers for instant messaging (ejabberd and prosody) both allow server to server message exchange. I don't see any benefits for Matrix when it comes to federation and I wouldn't agree with you that by using XMPP you tolerare centralisation at all.

It's level of centralisation is comparable to that of email (and email is very well federated in my opinion).

MUCs like the XEP you mentioned are handled by a different XEP.

skywhopper3• 2 years ago

Fantastic writeup. I’m a little confused by the screenshot with the caption “Servers marked as vulnerable, unavailable and with profanity in their name.” In the screenshot, three things are highlighted: labels for “Vulnerable”, “Unavailable”, and the server name “cyberfurz.chat”. Is “cyberfurz” supposed to be profanity?

LeonB3• 2 years ago

I had a hunch … so I opened a German to English translator and put in the words

Cyber furz

In English:

Cyber fart

Every day is a school day!

dale_glass3• 2 years ago

It's not German, it's a furry instance with some 90s flavor.

tdullien• 2 years ago

People call this "QA", but isn't this just good product management?

nottorp3• 2 years ago

Interesting how most comments come from people inside the bubble that have an intuitive understanding of the system now and assume everyone else does.

Yanael• 2 years ago

A friend wanted me to switch to Matrix for our 1:1 conversations and group chat of 3 people. The onboarding and user experience have been very poor on Element for years. I'm left with the feeling it is not made to replace a 1:1 messaging app. The protocol covers a broader use case, and the end-user apps are buggy and have a confusing user experience.

There is some complexity in educating due to its distributed nature, but a top notch UX is much needed to overcome it.

noirscape• 2 years ago

Honestly, the matrix documentation is a total mess in general.

The protocol is from what I can tell pretty cleverly designed/usable as a casual chat app (even if it leans heavily towards IRC esque design), but actually figuring out how to use it is somewhere between "wisdom of the ancients" and actually impossible. A lot of very relevant information is stored in old documentation that is currently marked as outdated on the site but has no updated equivalent.

The bad apps and onboarding only hamper it further.

It's still baffling to me that the best way to actually administer a selfhosted matrix homeserver (specifically, synapse, the reference homeserver) is to do a database hack to promote a user to an admin and then use an external PWA hosted on GitHub[0] so you can actually do basic moderation actions without having to resort to using curl.

[0] https://awesome-technologies.github.io/synapse-admin/

thibaultamartin6• 2 years ago

Indeed the documentation generally needs much more love. In an ideal world, every single page of the documentation would have a person in charge of keeping it up to date.

We're a rather small team on the Foundation side and lack the personpower to do so.

We're in the process of listing what documentation we need and what we need to update. This will be the foundational work to apply to Google Summer of Docs and for individual tech writers to apply to grants like NLNet (who doesn't usually fund "large" organisations like us) to help us out.

I'm also adding instructions on how people can step in and contribute to the docs if they have the time and desire to do so: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/pull/2155

We're doing our best with our limited resources, but I'm confident we can improve the situation eventually!

phyzome2• 2 years ago

There are a lot of sharp corners, but going for the beta option was not a wise move.

c0wb0yc0d3r• 2 years ago

Unless I read it wrong, the author chose element x because it was available on all platforms. It looked like element wasn't available in the Mac app store

phyzome2• 2 years ago

Ah! I see now.

LukaD• 2 years ago

I have been using matrix from time to time to chat with some folks who prefer matrix over other chat systems for reasons unknown. Matrix is an absolute trash fire indeed. Every once in a while a chat session with someone just craps itself and my client is unable to decrypt received messages (both element and element x). The issue then usually fixes itself within a couple of days. The bad UX aside, a chat system should at let me reliably send and receive messages. The other issues I had were related to the device verification. The last time I wanted to verify a new phone the verification request simply did not arrive on my other devices. At that point I gave up on matrix.

1attice• 2 years ago

This feels like a mis-aimed article -- I use Matrix a lot, and Element, while annoying, is only one of many options.

Compare "The IRC trashfire" (an article about the infelicities of Mirc)

nusl2• 2 years ago

Pretty poor post. It highlights some issues, sure, though the author obviously never tried to actually try. Also, they say there's profanity but I don't see any; apparently the word "cyberfurz" is profanity? The author's prejudice is showing.

zaik5• 2 years ago

Furz means fart in German.

nusl2• 2 years ago

Okay. Even then I wouldn’t call it profanity

the__alchemist• 2 years ago

It's nice to hear I'm not alone. I use Matrix/Element to chat with Rust embedded devs; I have heard about it in other contexts; generally favorably. In my experience, it is awful, and has been for years. Highlights:

- The verification is a mess (in the article; By the way: Once your account is set up, the verification failures don't go away). It has frequent verification popups and overlays; when I attempt to follow them, various errors occur, and it fails. So, the client nags you to verify, but the verification process is broken.

- The read notification system is broken; most chat groups will show as having unread messages, when there are none. This is possibly related to the thread system, but my results here are inconclusive in regards to the exact nature of the problem, nor the solution.

- Message posting and syncing is unreliable, especially after edits. Some messages will show on the PC program, but not the mobile, and vice versa. Sometimes edits I or someone makes will show up on one client, but not the other.

stevenicr• 2 years ago

Really glad to see these discussions happening.

I started creating a similar post for matrix/element/server installs - a while back,

Screenshots and saving putty sessions.. (wondering if I should find a tool that records ssh input/output or just use the save sessions built in)..

I've succeeded with a matrix server install 2 out of 6 tries.

I am about to try again with a new install since I don't have faith in succeeding a multi-version upgrade.

I wish there was an easy way to export user names and email addys to port to a new install, as I worry that making a new install could allow for some nefarious people to come in and create accounts with another old user's name.

I love matrix and element and other clients, it's the best for what many need - although there are many rough spots in using it both server side and as an end user.

Moderation usability is a major issue for us, maybe with a new install I will jump into that rabbit hole of how to set things up for that and see if it's easier these days.

I hope the vucuum DB and such is better with the newer versions.

Looking forward to scouring the web for tutorials on all the basic things debian and perhaps logging the journey, maybe just screenshots will be fine, we'll see.

joshsimmons3• 2 years ago

Likewise, glad for these discussions. Even if it's a bit uncomfortable to be on the receiving end, this kind of feedback is a gift. Please do share more about your experiences, we're all ears and looking to learn and improve!

BTW, on the moderation front: Draupnir is the most actively maintained tool in that space and I recommend checking it out. Separately, the Foundation is currently investing in developing better tooling to complement moderation bots like Draupnir. We don't have a planned release date, but what we're making will be FOSS and available to all to use.

We're also looking to involve more technical writers to help us better support new users and homeserver admins – for sure, it's a rough road right now.

Josh, Managing Director of the Matrix.org Foundation

brokenmachine• 2 years ago

Check out https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy/

t0bia_s2• 2 years ago

Never used Element on iOS however on Android its... Ok. Not great, not terrible. Recently it's slower in loading chats in rooms and overall responsiveness is sometimes laggy. Desktop experience is without any issues.

worik• 2 years ago

Me too

I tried to get Matrix working to have a conversation. Many worthy people I know use it

But I failed in a similar way

Do many people actually use it?

When it is so easy to use Signal or (Dog help us, WhatsApp)

joshsimmons3• 2 years ago

We definitely have work to do on the onboarding experience, but I'm pleased to say that there are 115M addressable users on the open federation – so many people are having great success once they get past the initial friction. Aside from all the FOSS projects that use Matrix, it's also used by the German healthcare agency, French civil servants, NATO, a number of universities including MIT and TU Dresden, Moodle, and many others.

We're moving quickly to address the feedback in the blog post and will be investing more in docs and UX to address the friction.

Please don't hesitate to share your own experiences if you run into trouble! Stuff like that is a real gift. We're always looking to learn and improve.

Josh, Managing Director of the Matrix.org Foundation

friend_and_foe• 2 years ago

All in all, this is a mess, and my recommendation is to avoid Matrix for at least two years.

Two more years. I've been a matrix user for almost a decade. Things have not gotten better at all.

I used to use Riot, I invested (and subsequently lost) a good amount of social capital on boarding my close circle, mostly non technical people, to using it. We used it. It was a little janky with the key sharing and verifying users and what not, but we managed. Then Element came out, and at first, whatever, but then a lot of those verification tools just stopped working. Several of our accounts became locked in some limbo where they couldn't be verified because the verification methods didn't support legacy verification. Nobody wanted to move to a new client which was less feature rich. We moved to signal eventually and have been mostly happy ever since.

I still use it with a couple of people. Its still just as janky as ever. First riot, then element. Now Element X? Dendrite... How many times are these guys going to rebuild from scratch before they realize they're in over their heads?

I just gave up on it, I still use it with the couple of people I'm connected to and I don't do new contacts on it with anyone. I treat it like I do Discord. For me now it's XMPP and email, and signal for real world contacts. I mess with some of the newer messaging tools out there like Simplex (which absolutely has a terrible onboarding flow, but they're new so they get a pass for now) and things, and I hope to get utility out of them, but I'm never going to burn myself again pushing people to use something new, I'll wait until these things prove themselves, a lesson I learned from Matrix which never did mature into anything worthwhile.

hammyhavoc• 2 years ago

Matrix protocol with Element on my own Synapse Docker container has been working great for me for two years at this point. Not really had any issues with it, whereas maintaining other solutions like Rocket.Chat became a real time-sink prior to switching to Matrix.

DoItToMe813• 2 years ago

This is just stereotypical ineptitude and inability to RTFM or use common sense from somebody used to the spoonfed walled garden side of tech. I do not understand how anyone with a background in technology can't know "beta means buggy and poor support and use the flagship instance if you don't know what you want". I understood this as a teenager, as most people here also should have.

I think Matrix has a lot of problems. E2E encryption is too much for most laymen users to work with and it being so damn resource heavy being the too biggest ones. But come on.

The Matrix Trashfire

Related Stories