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by justshowpost 1791 days ago
It's funny, but I can not agree more.

I never think a concrete issue will affect me. But over the last weeks I've been affected exactly by 2). Today I finally figured out that it had to do with the sender having turned on the setting "Never send encrypted messages to unverified sessions from this session". It's terribly implemented, because it gives the sender no feedback that they break any unverified receivers, and the unverified receivers only see an obscure error message. For more details, see my issue report: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/18255

Also +1 on Element's terrible UI and UX. It was designed by programmers instead of UI designers, and you can feel that. I always find it weird when people talk about Element being a good client. It's literally the best of the worst. From the thousands of open issues (5000+ Web, 1000+ iOS and Android each!) you can clearly see they have an organization problem. Even most volunteer open source projects are more organized. I hope at least 30 million will be enough for them to hire some talented people and build a better management.

I have the feeling most of them are hackers. Hacking and experimenting with new things like Matrix P2P is great, but it's not enough to have consistent output. You need to manage an organization, and I have the feeling they aren't capable of doing that. On that note, I'm surprised they managed (pun!) to get 30 million of investment.

1 comments

> From the thousands of open issues (5000+ Web, 1000+ iOS and Android each!) you can clearly see they have an organization problem.

As I said before down thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27974054), there’s nothing bad about thousands of issues, quite the reverse in fact. Many are feature requests that may or may not be implemented.

A large number of open issues means the project is growing and many people are have ideas for new ways it can improve.

Furthermore, those thousands of open issues hint to me that a lot of people are actively contributing, and that the dev team takes responsibility for legitimate problems.

Compare this to other projects with the illusion of quality because most bugs haven't been reported, or because their developers routinely dismiss and close reports of bugs that they don't feel like fixing, just to keep their bug tracker looking clean.

Indeed, the contents of the Matrix/Element/Synapse issue trackers played a significant part in convincing me that the developers are making good decisions, and that investing my time and contacts in this network would also be a good decision. That was over a year ago, and I do not regret it. The project still looks very much on track to me.