Excited about the attention UX is getting – hopefully that means issues impacting core functionality won’t languish for months anymore (see e.g. [1]) and also that Element won’t provide such a poor experience for non-technical users.
While I admit that I’m interested in Cerulean as well, my worry here is that the Element team are spreading themselves too thin/becoming unfocused. Slack is “just” a chat app – not a protocol with multiple server and client implementations and also a social app. Because of that razor focus (and also by virtue of having a gargantuan team + orders of magnitude more revenue and funding, to be sure), Slack is able to provide a pretty straightforward onboarding experience for new users that doesn’t require half a degree in computer science, with detailed end-user documentation to boot.
I can’t help but be slightly excited at the mad science experiments, but they also make me a bit nervous. I know as a developer when we go too far down these “cool” rabbit holes (especially ones that nobody asked for, and that are somewhat removed from my core value proposition), the systems we are responsible for that people rely on can suffer. Here’s to hoping the Element team gets this balance right
I am cautiously optimistic that Spaces will get me something I desperately need: a way to have a set of private rooms that an allow list of accounts can enumerate and join. This is super easy with Slack and seems to be basically not possible with Matrix today, even if you set up the existing Community structure. Fingers crossed!
As bloat is my main annoyance, I checked out Hydrogen.
It does superficially look nice, but I quickly found there’s no sane way to move encryption keys from other clients (including importing from Element), nor does it seem to have a way for doing the needed verification (initiated by Element).
Hydrogen is beta, so: patches welcome. That said, sharing encryption keys with other clients works fine, if you are encrypting them and storing them in secure storage on the server. Manual import/export ironically would be much easier; just needs to be written. You’re right that it doesn’t do verification yet though.
Excited about the attention UX is getting – hopefully that means issues impacting core functionality won’t languish for months anymore (see e.g. [1]) and also that Element won’t provide such a poor experience for non-technical users.
While I admit that I’m interested in Cerulean as well, my worry here is that the Element team are spreading themselves too thin/becoming unfocused. Slack is “just” a chat app – not a protocol with multiple server and client implementations and also a social app. Because of that razor focus (and also by virtue of having a gargantuan team + orders of magnitude more revenue and funding, to be sure), Slack is able to provide a pretty straightforward onboarding experience for new users that doesn’t require half a degree in computer science, with detailed end-user documentation to boot.
I can’t help but be slightly excited at the mad science experiments, but they also make me a bit nervous. I know as a developer when we go too far down these “cool” rabbit holes (especially ones that nobody asked for, and that are somewhat removed from my core value proposition), the systems we are responsible for that people rely on can suffer. Here’s to hoping the Element team gets this balance right
[1] https://github.com/vector-im/element-ios/issues/3762
I am cautiously optimistic that Spaces will get me something I desperately need: a way to have a set of private rooms that an allow list of accounts can enumerate and join. This is super easy with Slack and seems to be basically not possible with Matrix today, even if you set up the existing Community structure. Fingers crossed!
yup, that’s very much the hope. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc1772/proposals/1772-groups-as-rooms.md#restricting-room-membership-based-on-space-membership is the section of the spec that outlines how it should work - and yes, you can’t do it today in Matrix without a bot to manage it (a bit like how folks used eggdrop decades ago on IRC before chanservs provided access lists).
I hope that more alternatives (not coming from riot) libraries/clients with pop-up (see for example https://invent.kde.org/network/neochat and https://github.com/quotient-im/libQuotient). I kinda don’t trust Riot guys.
Riot is called Element now and there are a few solid alternatives presented in the post :)
I still don’t see one that works on Linux and Windows. :/
As bloat is my main annoyance, I checked out Hydrogen.
It does superficially look nice, but I quickly found there’s no sane way to move encryption keys from other clients (including importing from Element), nor does it seem to have a way for doing the needed verification (initiated by Element).
Hydrogen is beta, so: patches welcome. That said, sharing encryption keys with other clients works fine, if you are encrypting them and storing them in secure storage on the server. Manual import/export ironically would be much easier; just needs to be written. You’re right that it doesn’t do verification yet though.
I understand it is beta, but I still expected a path to switch from using Element (the most popular client) to using Hydrogen.
Great to see how many awesome things were archieved this year \o/ Looking forward to all the things coming in 2021 :)
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