[pojntfx]

I still wonder why my experience and the experience of my friends, community and family with Matrix has been so positive compared to what people describe all of the time. Maybe it's because something changed in ~2025 when I started using it again? Both Beeper (my main Matrix provider, the one that preconfigures WhatsApp, Signal, SMS etc. bridges) and Element (the new mobile app and EMS for hosting). I onboarded something like two dozend non-technical people to it, and they are all happily using it every day, mostly to use the bridges that come with Beeper. Haven't heard a single complaint, even switching devices just works now. Almost all communities I care about (GNOME and so on) have Matrix servers, and since the spaces feature launched it's been really competitive with Discord, even UX-wise thanks to the new apps on desktop and mobile. Yet all I hear on HN and elsewhere is people complaining about UX issues that just have not appeared a single time for myself. Maybe it's people using non-compliant clients, old servers, or some other strange configuration? It's a mystery to me.

[Arathorn]

My best theory here is that because Matrix is actually quite close to being really good, folks get very upset about the remaining flaws, especially when the last few years have had to prioritise development for public sector deployments over being a Discord killer, in order to keep the lights on.

[rapnie]

Yes, that is my impression also. Extensively using for a couple of years, and only occasional quirks now and then, e.g. a profile verification issue (seeing the annoying red shields to each comment), but easily fixed. Or a UX update that doesn't necessary feel improvement (this is an Element thing, really).

It may not be good enough for your grandma, but certainly can support your software dev team, and there are countless of those active most probably. I really like Matrix as a daily driver. Also using Discord and Slack, and to me these look like a UX Christmas trees full of blinking lights, and far from anything you can call 'calm technology'.

Update: Seeing who I respond to, taking opportunity to mention these recent UX musings.. there used to be 'favorites' in one click in Element, now it is in a drop-down of filters not shown by default (I make distinction of 3 groups 'favorites', 'people', and 'rooms' for all/other. Not using spaces at all (except for the record)). And then there's paragraph spacing between replies given one after the other, is to small. Setting margin to 10px (think its 4px now) makes a world of improved reading already. Element web UI in firefox. Oh, I might add very long UI (re)loading times of a browser tab refresh of Element, as somewhat annoying and to avoid.

[Arathorn]

> Update: Seeing who I respond to, taking opportunity to mention these recent UX musings

Thanks - the Favourites roomlist section will be back shortly; we just hadn't re-added sections to the rewritten roomlist (and in retrospect, probably shouldn't have launched without it). In fact I think they've already landed (experimentally) on the same roomlist component but in the Element X Web playground at https://github.com/element-hq/aurora.

> And then there's paragraph spacing between replies given one after the other, is to small. Setting margin to 10px (think its 4px now) makes a world of improved reading already.

Hm, is that new? Probably something to propose for the compact layout.

[wkat4242]

> Thanks - the Favourites roomlist section will be back shortly; we just hadn't re-added sections to the rewritten roomlist (and in retrospect, probably shouldn't have launched without it). In fact I think they've already landed (experimentally) on the same roomlist component but in the Element X Web playground at https://github.com/element-hq/aurora.

That's not a complete fix though. The split between users and groups was also really important. Because the old view showed the top X chats in both categories at the same time. I'm not sure about others but for me the group chats are less important but update more frequently and when they're bunched together the individual user chats get drowned out. Favouriting them all isn't really an option either as I have too many.

There's a filter now but then you don't see group chats at all unless you turn that off again, making it very restless to have to constantly switch.

However it's great to see the favs are coming back.

[Arathorn]

Given the people / rooms section split was my idea in the first place, i can try to make a case to have it as an option. (Interestingly I haven’t missed it much)

[conor-]

As an early adopter (signed up for the matrix.org riot instance some time in 2016) and someone who has run a homeserver on and off for nearly a decade, my primary issue with Matrix these days is that it still feels like there largely is stagnation in homeserver development because the spec oftentimes seems to follow features from Synapse instead of the other way around.

It seems like a lot of MSCs are implemented as experimental in Synapse while they are under active development, but sometimes it takes months or years for the MSC to be ratified in a way that is stable for other homeserver implementations to pick it up. One example that immediately comes to mind is sliding sync as well as threading and spaces. And in the case of sliding sync, the proxy deployment helped, I think only Synapse is the only server that actually supported (or maybe currently supports?) it and in terms of threads, that was more of a client-side issue of actually parsing and rendering m.thread events.

My feeling on it maybe isn't backed up by reality or the actual data of development but it makes developing on the ecosystem feel difficult.

The other real blocker to being a Discord-killer imo is the permissions model. Having power levels 0-100 is a lot less flexible than the RBAC-style model that Discord uses. Once Spaces were rolled out, a feature that would have been nice is to restrict access to certain spaces or rooms that are children of that space based on a role, which afaik still is not possible to do with the current permissions implementation.

[Avamander]

I think you're partially correct. People are upset at the time it takes to land even the most basic of fixes. Replies being bright red might be one of the most indicative examples. So while the work towards public sector deployments has probably helped with some aspects, the user-facing side has stagnated and people dislike that.

[wowthatsucks]

My experience has been in an enterprise environment but Matrix still falls way short of common enterprise messaging suites like Slask or even Teams. The effort has mostly been in managing channels.

The recent mandatory room version upgrade required a lot of real coordinated effort across our org.

[pkulak]

Yup, this makes sense. I host a Matrix server, and it's equivalent in quality to Discord or anything else. Except that I've had a single unread badge on my account on iOS for at least a year now. It drives me nuts.

[Arathorn]

yup. https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-ios/issues/3151 is a real wart; we're finally at the point now where the push notification process can synchronise with the main process to get the badge count right. Sorry it's taken so long to fix.

[pkulak]

Folks keep saying that, but I can still never get rid of this badge. Even upgraded this morning. Is there _anything_ I can do by say, hopping on the DB and deleting rows???

[0x1ch]

Self hosting experience went well, but it was very confusing for people moving from Discord about a year ago. If it's still the same, there's literally no way to simply send a registration or channel invite link to someone, and have them onboard through your home server by default without the need to explain "Oh, you have to change this URL to that" etc.

My primary issue is that they changed the voice chat system, broke existing self hosted installs, and the new system was barely documented. I threw in the towel since I mostly hosted it for myself. Could never fix their livekit stuff.

[fooqux]

I'm in the same boat. I manage my own server with tons of help from the ansible script(0) and it's generally been great for years.

I can only assume our experience in private servers is way different than people logging into the matrix.org server or in extremely populated rooms?

(0): https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

[lbotos]

Can also vouch for this ansible script. I just updated a very outdated homeserver, postgres, and switched from nginx to traefik, and it was extremely painless. I was dreading it, but it worked amazingly. I donated to the author yesterday because of how well it went.

[bigstrat2003]

For what it's worth, I have had zero issues with Matrix myself. Some friends and I use it to stay in touch and we have had a very smooth experience. I'm not trying to discount the issues people have had, but for me Matrix has Just Worked (TM).

[ranger_danger]

It used to be much worse before Sliding Sync was in widespread use... often just logging in would be next to impossible for me depending on the exact client I used and how much old state there was to fast-forward to... many minutes would go by stuck at "logging in..." as it downloaded gigabytes of god-knows-what.

[mmooss]

Much of the OP is about Matrix's security. What is your experience with that?