[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???