[Arathorn]

One of the big problems is that folks judge Matrix based on the legacy Element apps, which have now been succeeded by Element X: https://element.io/blog/we-have-lift-off-element-x-call-and-... etc. Element X kicks ass, in my (very biased) opinion: it's a super-speedy Rust core with fancy SwiftUI and Compose native UI layered on top. It radically outperforms any other encrypted messenger i've used in terms of UI perf and usability.

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.

[BrenBarn]

> One of the big problems is that folks judge Matrix based on the legacy Element apps, which have now been succeeded by Element X: https://element.io/blog/we-have-lift-off-element-x-call-and-... etc.

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.

[eredengrin]

I think this is a pretty fair summary. I've been using matrix since before the patreon was started and it's gotten a whole lot better for sure, but there is still no single client that does everything. Element X is right out since it doesn't support spaces yet. SchildiChat next comes close for me, but it can't edit room topics, pinned messages can get a bit weird once you start editing them, and I have a few invites to some pretty nasty looking spam dms that I can't delete, so there are still some rough edges.

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.

[mindslight]

I think an early major mistake was that Matrix spent all this time and energy designing a general synchronization protocol, but not doing it in terms of native encryption and cryptographic identities. This was post-Snowden, and it was glaring at the time.

Bolting on encryption after the fact then sucked so much energy out of the ecosystem for clients. This one doesn't implement encryption, that one does but it has bugs/warts/etc, this other one does if you pull this year-old experimental branch and build it yourself. The web (-technologies) client became the de facto one because it "worked", despite being bloated and laggy - reliable tools don't even have the code to show these spinning delay circles that have become synonymous with the web ecosystem.

I don't want to be entirely negative because I do see it as the least-worst messaging option available. I use it for communicating with a bunch of friends and things do seem to be getting better, and I look forward to when I can actually switch to its window to type a message and not wait around for redraw / garbage collection / reloading messages from server /etc. That might be on me for not having surveyed native clients recently or tried Element X on my desktop, but that's exactly the negative momentum I'm lamenting above.

[BrenBarn]

That's true, but in another sense I think it's just that trying to "do it all" encryption-wise is significantly harder than some people realize. Having encryption that's really "safe" raises barriers to casual use that most casual users aren't really willing to accept.

Like suppose I use Matrix only on my phone, so I just have the one device. Then I lose my phone and have to get a new one. How do I regain access to my account, including all of my old messages? Or suppose I (still using Matrix only on my phone) decide I need to log out because I want to let someone else (a friend, my kid) use my phone for a while and don't want them snooping in my messages. How do I retain access to all the messages I receive while logged out?

I'm not saying these are problems with Matrix; they would be problems with any service that attempts to cover the same bases (in particular, e2ee with forward secrecy and multiple independent devices). The average user's conception of a messaging service is "I can log in with my password and then have total access to all of my messages, past, present and future." There are too many ways to break that assumption if you try to have perfect forward secrecy and all these other desiderata that encryption wonks care about but normal people don't. I think this is one reason there's still a big gap between comments on HN saying "matrix still works fine for me" and the tales of "I tried to get my grandma to use this and it was a disaster". I don't think it makes sense to try to roll Matrix out for general use, or say it's "the best messaging app" until it can smoothly handle all of those use cases.

[mindslight]

I'd say that all of those usability problems are made worse by bolting on encryption after the fact. It makes it so there are now two layers of authentication/identity, rather than a single one. Whereas with built in encryption, you can always punt on solving the problems you list and make implementations that are less secure. For example, just store the keys on the server, accessed by the password. That's obviously less secure, but not less secure than no encryption.

[BrenBarn]

Yeah, I don't disagree. Just saying that even if they had put encryption in at the outset, there are still tough issues to solve in terms of integrating that with user expectations.

[throwaway98334]

> One of the big problems is that folks judge Matrix based on the legacy Element apps, which have now been succeeded by Element X

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.

[Arathorn]

> Which is mobile-only. Element's UX on desktop is still a joke.

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

[throwaway98334]

Well, it looks like my overly cynical response wasn't warranted. Best of luck in your future endeavours and I hope you manage to get the money you need without locking too many features behind enterprise Matrix.

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.

[zamadatix]

You're probably right that it's the UX of the OG Element that was the original problem people got hung up on but Element X isn't actually a relevant answer until it's usable, regardless of how much better it sounds like it will be on paper. A secondary problem people got hung up on was the endless parade of "you're just using the wrong client, try ${this}" and then finding it was missing half the things that they were told Matrix can do.

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.

[db579]

It's a little frustrating that Element X is constantly pitched as the answer when it isn't yet supported by Element's own EMS One hosted service.

[Arathorn]

Element One should support MAS + EX in the next 2-3 weeks.

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.

[mcepl]

Yeah, we are just paying customers, who cares about us, right?

[db579]

Appreciate the response, that's great to hear.

[crossroadsguy]

It's been years of seeing Matrix posts being made on hn here (and founder - that is you - enthusiastically replying to comments; which is actually nice that you still care) and even that is long after I finally gave up on it realising it is (and now it seems was never even planned to be) a communication tool for the "masses" or end users - you know - you, I and our friends and family... kind of.

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.

[floren]

> Maybe 100% of times you are missing the point why people think that way by just assuming this?

"Am I so out of touch? No, it's the users who are wrong"

[Arathorn]

> I finally gave up on it realising it is (and now it seems was never even planned to be) a communication tool for the "masses" or end users - you know - you, I and our friends and family... kind of.

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

[freilanzer]

> One of the big problems is that folks judge Matrix based on the legacy Element apps, which have now been succeeded by Element X

Yeah, wake me up when X supports all the features the original app has. Until it's usable, there is no point.

[Arathorn]

which features are you actually missing? the only gap now is threads (in beta), spaces (in final design) and widgets (which were very very rarely used). the whole "i can't use X until it has precisely the same featureset as Y" feels a bit spurious, especially as you can run each app side by side and revert to the old one if you really need a given feature.

[freilanzer]

Spaces.

[godelski]

I think this happens a lot. At least a lot more than people think. Take Firefox vs Chrom{e,ium} (yes, that includes Brave). The differences are really minor and 99% of people wouldn't notice the difference. But boy do people have strong opinions. I'll make one argument for Firefox and I'm not sure other ones matter nearly as much: there needs to be competition in the browser space, and different colors of Chrome don't count. Having one backbone is good for no one. Yes, even Brave gives Google too much power over the entire internet. Hopefully Ladybird will become competitive, but in the mean time some of you should stop being dumb and use Firefox. Because frankly, it doesn't affect your browsing experience. You're just biased in your evaluation because things are "different".

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...)