Comment by styanax

Comment by styanax 2 days ago

As a former user I felt these pain points trying to do nothing more than have a very active one-on-one chat with a good friend. Tens of messages an hour, maybe 2 years running. Using matrix.org and the pre-X clients. It's fine for group chat (IRC style) but that's not a high bar.

(a) the encryption between using a mobile and the webapp desyncs/breaks all the time, it just sucks. I mean you'll get "cannot decrypt" a lot, have to bounce back and forth and generally try and force it to re-sync properly again. Sometimes never worked at all. Lots of issues on GH over the years.

(b) as mentioned in this article, insane delays on new message notif and sending and receiving. Just logging in on the webapp every morning took minutes of some sort of mysterious sync process, often the mobile app had the same problems. The X stuff may fix this, we were pre-X.

(c) cleanup. There's no message retention set on matrix.org, when I wanted to extract and remove our past chats the process and experience was excruciatingly bad. It took tens of hours over several weekends of the webapp (mobile completely non-op in practice for this) polling and loading old content, just so I could select 100 at a time to delete and then it took an hour. Once I started culling back over a year or so, the loading got longer and longer and longer, until eventually it 100% stopped working at all to load old messages.

Signal and DeltaChat are far, far better experiences for one-on-one chats with friends & family. The Delta client is a bit UI/UX behind but not horrible; e.g. you can't correct a typo in a sent message in Delta, unlike Signal - because each msg is a unique gpg-encrypted "email" rather than a database object that can be re-manipulated.

salzig 2 days ago

Thanks for mentioning Delta - https://delta.chat/ and implicitly https://chatmail.at/

Reply View 0 replies

kassner 2 days ago

> you can't correct a typo in a sent message in Delta

At least on the iOS app you can, just tested it. I run my own postfix/dovecot, so shouldn’t require any esoteric configurations.

Reply View 1 reply

styanax a day ago

Good to know, thank you - those of us currently using it are on Androids so we've not had a friend on iOS join yet. We're using a chatmail relay.

Reply View | 0 replies

tcfhgj 2 days ago

a) is really not a big issue any more

b) yeah, X solves it (via sliding sync)

Reply View 5 replies

bronson 2 days ago

a) As of when? I had a "cannot decrypt" room failure on matrix.org a year ago.
b) Unfortunately, X breaks other important things, like audio/video calls. It currently feels like an alpha-quality release: buggy and lots of missing features. Not ready for widespread use.

Reply View | 4 replies
- jedahan 2 days ago
  
  I felt bad making a long thread once I opened Element X and saw it didn't have support for threads.
  Someone let me know later that threads are hidden behind a Labs setting, but it only allows the client to reply to threads, but still exposes the entire thread inline for the channel which sucks up all the air in the chat.
  
  Reply View | 3 replies
  
  Arathorn 2 days ago
  
  this is wrong - the threads support in labs lets you create threads and navigate into them as you expect.
  what you are describing is the old threads workaround which predates the proper solution in labs which should exit labs asap.
  
  Reply View | 2 replies

Arathorn 2 days ago

I'm sorry you had a crap time, and agreed that in the past things were not great. But in defence of the Matrix team, we fixed almost all known encryption in ~Sept 2024, and the new generation of clients fixes the slow sync issues.

In terms of message retention: https://element-hq.github.io/synapse/latest/message_retentio... is how you should have/could have cleaned up those rooms. (It's not exposed in Element's UI yet as we've been prioritising more fundamental stuff).

Reply View 1 reply

styanax a day ago

Hi Arathorn, I recognize your name as the core developer lead. :) Alas, when I was trying to cull my old messages I tried that (and a lot of other API type hacks I found floating around) and none of them, at that time, worked.
In short: the complete lack of user-facing easy to use controls for data retention and culling in the Matrix (Element) clients is a deal killer for me. That painful experience taught me a lesson - now when I test something new, one of the first things I look for is "how do I extract from this thing?". I never want to go through my Matrix extraction pain again, so a personal life lesson was learned.

Reply View | 0 replies