It has improved tremendously, but it's still nowhere on par with solutions such as Telegram or Discord. As much as I like Matrix, the clients (which I think is where the UX lies for me, as I think it's expected that it takes effort to set up a homeserver), are horrible.
Have you seen Cinny?[1]
It's a very Discord-like client that I'd honestly the best I've used thus far. I instantly switched to it as mt daily driver on the computer and even made a donation to help out the maintainers.
The thing I miss the most is localization, but I get it's not a big priority. I just like translating things, seeing how that can help people.
I'm using it right now and it's the best on I've found. But it doesn't support the up-arrow-to-edit feature, which drives me crazy. There's an open issue for it, so I'm hoping it gets resolved (or I might try to do it myself somehow).
Other than that, Cinny doesn't address the problem of Element on mobile not working very well. FluffyChat's UI isn't very nice either.
> There's an open issue for it, so I'm hoping it gets resolved (or I might try to do it myself somehow).
Hehe, I hopened with the inte tion to do it myself too, but never got around to doing it. It would require me to learn a bit of react and I don't have the time for it atm :/
The one thing I would like to see fixed is better cross-device verification. Discord solves this in an elegant and painless way with QR codes. Element has users manually compare emoji or codes and perform steps. Anecdotal: my last experience was less than good. For some reason it tried to verify twice, but even after I verified both times, it was still showing device listings as unverified.
I don't know what went wrong, but it still needs work. I'm glad to see that it's easier than last time I tried that.
Verifying is only part of the promised solution. Assuming you've verified your own or someone else's device, Element still marks some messages as untrusted/unverifiable. Especially ugly if you get a new device or want to deprecate an old one.
The promised functionality doesn't really work reliably enough to protect against MITM, causes ugly warnings, but has been totally unactionable for years now.
Cross-device works with QR codes, unless your client doesn't support it in which case you can use emojis. For user verification emoji actually makes sense, since it basically allows you to remotely verify without access to the QR code.
You can do verification with either emoji or QR codes. Honestly I think the emoji version is far better for cases where you're verifying identities without meeting in person (one person says what the first 4 are, the other says the last 4).
I had issues with verification a while ago but recently it's worked perfectly fine.