It’s great to point out usability issues with open source software, especially issues that arise in the interactions between multiple projects. However, this article contains a number of somewhat odd observations.
Outside of Element, there are very few clients, most of them very old and not being updated within the last few years.
This is simply false. I currently use Nheko on desktop and FluffyChat on Android, and both are updated regularly. A variety of other options exist.
When I close any client, I have to re-login, re-compare the Emojis, and all chat history is gone.
This is very strange. While it’s obviously bad that this is a possible failure mode, I’ve never heard anyone else report this; I’m curious if others here had the same experience.
With the unique mail-address used to sign up to Matrix, I am unfindable because only Matrix uses this specific mail address.
What does this mean? I have never used an e-mail to look up a Matrix account; everyone I know who uses Matrix just lists their Matrix ID on their social media profiles or website, or communicates it directly. I often have success simply searching for people’s habitual usernames, if we happen to be in the same large rooms.
I very much hope that Matrix and Element eventually turn into something useful.
Statements like this are unnecessarily negative. I have run a Matrix server for a long time - about four years now - and have “non-technical” friends and family members messaging me via Matrix regularly. Several communities I’m in use it heavily as well. It is useful, however much improvement it requires.
I’m glad this post is urging the Matrix team to tighten their ship, but I feel we, as a community, can make that kind of change without being intentionally and excessively negative.
I am unfindable because only Matrix uses this specific mail address.
Matrix does have support for discovery based on third party IDs. Basically you upload some hashed IDs to some service and it tells you related Matrix IDs. I have found like 2 contacts this way.
But this complaint seems a little asinine because:
They chose to use a unique ID.
You can verify as many emails as you like, so you can just add your “public” email.
I have been operating a couple of Matrix home servers for about five years as well, for personal use and for our work chat at Oxide. There have definitely been issues, it’s not perfect! But while I don’t know this person (thank goodness) I am familiar with the sort of tone in their writing: you can tell when somebody is trying not to enjoy something. I did enjoy the mixture of effusive and even obsequious responses from Matrix folks – anybody who has had customers or a community to manage can immediately sense the exhaustion behind those carefully cheerful words.
you can tell when somebody is trying not to enjoy something.
That may be true, but I think it reflects a very common attitude people are likely to have when signing up. Early on all your users will be there because they’re enthusiastic about distributed chat networks or whatever, but if your service is the slightest bit successful, most signups will be people thinking “oh great, I have to sign up for YET ANOTHER account just to talk to X”. They aren’t going to be in the mood to cut you any slack the way the first group did.
Okay, and if someone’s reaction, while in that mood, is to go on the internet and loudly proclaim “trashfire”, they should be punched in the mouth once for every word they write.
The most interesting thing about this was the response. It sounds like the upstream team acknowledges that almost all of the things in the article are real issues and wants to fix them. That gives me a lot of hope for Matrix.
I dislike the way bridges on matrix.org are advertised. It says on the website on the bridges page:
Bridges
Bridges allow you to connect Matrix to a third-party platform, and interact seamlessly.
But the bridges aren’t automatically included with the server right? So they need a giant star at the end of that that says: *Only if the provider has set up the bridge, or if you set up your own.
Wow, they seem to have broken a lot. I’ve been using matrix daily with both a web client and some element Android app and I don’t remember any of those problems.
I also onboarded some family members (we use a server hosted by a friend), zero problems, years ago.
Servers marked as vulnerable, unavailable and with profanity in their name.
This is a virtue, not a problem. A truly decentralized chat system should allow someone to create a server with a name someone else thinks is profane.
I am trying to recover the password for the account which I just validated, using the email from the verification mail. The account is unknown.
This is definitely annoying, although not unique to matrix - I actually just ran into this exact same issue trying to sign into my credit card company’s account, and when I closed the browser tab and tried to log in again, their flow said that the username/password that I had just reset was missing or unknown, and prompted me to reset it again.
Unable to verify this device It looks like you don’t have a Security Key or any other devices you can verify against. This device will not be able to access old encrypted messages. In order to verify your identity on this device, you’ll need to reset your verification keys.*
What does that even mean?
I’ve run into verification-related bugs with matrix clients before. Definitely an annoyance, although I am aware that creating multi-device chat clients that still have working and secure encryption is a hard problem. IIRC, when you create a matrix account normally it presents you with the security key and prompts you to save it separately from your password, so maybe that flow got skipped for whatever the reason that the homeserver the OP registered the account on didn’t successfully save it.
More broadly, I think that the entire paradigm of having to create a user account on a backend somebody else runs, that has potentially-fragile things like optional email verification flows, is broken. Accounts in a decentralized system should be based on cryptographic keypairs that the end user controls on their devices, not a row in someone else’s database. Otherwise, you’re reliant on that party keeping their database and backend running properly in order to retain your identity. I wish I could do something like this with my credit card company’s website, instead of having no idea why my reset password gets lost every time I login.
Turns out, while the Chat is running on “chat.tchncs.de”, this is not the “Identity Provider.” That one is called “tchncs.de”. You only learn this when you open your config menu in the web chat and look at Identifer shown there.
This whole business with getting the right DNS name of the homeserver and having to deal with new and not-widely-supported features like sliding sync is also a genuinely-confusing thing about matrix, especially for a beginner to the system. I don’t know if there’s anything the matrix project can realistically do to make this better - if they develop a new feature, they can’t make everyone running a homeserver upgrade at once, and new users can’t be expected to know what random homeserver they pick does or does not support. Again, this is really an indictment of the homeserver paradigm (which again is not unique to matrix, it’s how most web accounts work).
A friend was trying to use a Matrix messenger on their phone, and waited 9 hours for this to complete.
This class of bug is the single biggest issue with Matrix clients (as well as with a lot of other modern software). Having an application GUI just spin for a long period of time without telling you whether it is making progress on the task or is broken is a really bad and sadly-common user experience failure. Random client delays are something I’ve experienced in every Matrix client I’ve tried, using several different homeservers, and I’m not really happy with any of them. I kind of want to write my own client just so that I can add better error handling to it.
I’m personally bullish on Matrix, and I do use it to chat with a bunch of people. Unfortunately, the poor UX right now for inexperienced users is a genuine problem - there are a number of people I currently chat with using Discord, who have expressed some interest in switching from Discord to Matrix, and while I would love to support this I know that the basic chat UX would be inferior to what is provided by the Discord client for them.
I’m aware that the Matrix project does not currently have a huge amount of funding, and is in the position of having to triage what feature work and bugfixes it can and cannot afford to spend developer-hours on. This is a damn shame, and is a problem that can unfortunately only be solved by giving the Matrix project a lot of money.
In the video linked in https://lobste.rs/s/gzvdfc/opening_up_communication_silos_with, they explicitly stated that the third room project got shut down because the Matrix foundation could not devote developer resources to it in lieu of higher-priority work, and the volunteer free software developers who were working on it moved onto other things.
Three (iirc) developers were payed by Element, and the project was shut down because they did not get the funding they expected. Matthew’s message in July 2023 explaining the situation:
in terms of the thirdroom funding situation: we had at least four major parties who verbally said they wanted to fund TR at the beginning of the year. but when called on it, they flaked - my best theory is that they were only interested in the first place because they blindly follow fads, and even though TR would have been incredible for them, they proceeded to continue to follow on to the next fad (gen AI etc).
meanwhile TR hasn’t got to the point yet where it can make $ itself by folks publishing content or renting TR Matrix servers, and Element as a whole is still in a delicate financial state because we’ve given away too much stuff as FOSS without a way to generate $. so while i absolutely hate this situation, we literally had no $ to fund the team.
Servers marked as vulnerable, unavailable and with profanity in their name.
…in what universe is cyberfurz.chat something that has “profanity in [its] name”? (I’m assuming that’s what the author is referring to here, since it’s the only name that’s highlighted in the screenshot.)
Like, whether or not you approve of furries, it feels like a bit of a stretch to call the name of something “profane” because it has “furz” in it. Or if they’re talking about the “cyber” bit of the name, I have news for them about the existence of the cybersecurity industry 🤷🏻♀️
I don’t like Matrix for a variety of reasons, so I thought going in that I’d be nodding along in agreement with this article, but… idk, that bit was just weird to me, enough so that I gave up on it.
It’s great to point out usability issues with open source software, especially issues that arise in the interactions between multiple projects. However, this article contains a number of somewhat odd observations.
This is simply false. I currently use Nheko on desktop and FluffyChat on Android, and both are updated regularly. A variety of other options exist.
This is very strange. While it’s obviously bad that this is a possible failure mode, I’ve never heard anyone else report this; I’m curious if others here had the same experience.
What does this mean? I have never used an e-mail to look up a Matrix account; everyone I know who uses Matrix just lists their Matrix ID on their social media profiles or website, or communicates it directly. I often have success simply searching for people’s habitual usernames, if we happen to be in the same large rooms.
Statements like this are unnecessarily negative. I have run a Matrix server for a long time - about four years now - and have “non-technical” friends and family members messaging me via Matrix regularly. Several communities I’m in use it heavily as well. It is useful, however much improvement it requires.
I’m glad this post is urging the Matrix team to tighten their ship, but I feel we, as a community, can make that kind of change without being intentionally and excessively negative.
Matrix does have support for discovery based on third party IDs. Basically you upload some hashed IDs to some service and it tells you related Matrix IDs. I have found like 2 contacts this way.
But this complaint seems a little asinine because:
I have been operating a couple of Matrix home servers for about five years as well, for personal use and for our work chat at Oxide. There have definitely been issues, it’s not perfect! But while I don’t know this person (thank goodness) I am familiar with the sort of tone in their writing: you can tell when somebody is trying not to enjoy something. I did enjoy the mixture of effusive and even obsequious responses from Matrix folks – anybody who has had customers or a community to manage can immediately sense the exhaustion behind those carefully cheerful words.
That may be true, but I think it reflects a very common attitude people are likely to have when signing up. Early on all your users will be there because they’re enthusiastic about distributed chat networks or whatever, but if your service is the slightest bit successful, most signups will be people thinking “oh great, I have to sign up for YET ANOTHER account just to talk to X”. They aren’t going to be in the mood to cut you any slack the way the first group did.
Okay, and if someone’s reaction, while in that mood, is to go on the internet and loudly proclaim “trashfire”, they should be punched in the mouth once for every word they write.
It’s possible that people just give up at that point and never bother reporting it. I’d certainly give up.
The most interesting thing about this was the response. It sounds like the upstream team acknowledges that almost all of the things in the article are real issues and wants to fix them. That gives me a lot of hope for Matrix.
hmmm, I’m happy to see the response from the developers. acknowledging issues is a vital step towards fixing them.
I have complained about Matrix in the past, so I say this by way of giving credit where it’s due.
I dislike the way bridges on matrix.org are advertised. It says on the website on the bridges page:
But the bridges aren’t automatically included with the server right? So they need a giant star at the end of that that says: *Only if the provider has set up the bridge, or if you set up your own.
Also, bridges suck, A LOT. Almost everyone I know who has tried using bridges has ended up with major spam problems from the Matrix side of things.
Wow, they seem to have broken a lot. I’ve been using matrix daily with both a web client and some element Android app and I don’t remember any of those problems.
I also onboarded some family members (we use a server hosted by a friend), zero problems, years ago.
This is a virtue, not a problem. A truly decentralized chat system should allow someone to create a server with a name someone else thinks is profane.
This is definitely annoying, although not unique to matrix - I actually just ran into this exact same issue trying to sign into my credit card company’s account, and when I closed the browser tab and tried to log in again, their flow said that the username/password that I had just reset was missing or unknown, and prompted me to reset it again.
I’ve run into verification-related bugs with matrix clients before. Definitely an annoyance, although I am aware that creating multi-device chat clients that still have working and secure encryption is a hard problem. IIRC, when you create a matrix account normally it presents you with the security key and prompts you to save it separately from your password, so maybe that flow got skipped for whatever the reason that the homeserver the OP registered the account on didn’t successfully save it.
More broadly, I think that the entire paradigm of having to create a user account on a backend somebody else runs, that has potentially-fragile things like optional email verification flows, is broken. Accounts in a decentralized system should be based on cryptographic keypairs that the end user controls on their devices, not a row in someone else’s database. Otherwise, you’re reliant on that party keeping their database and backend running properly in order to retain your identity. I wish I could do something like this with my credit card company’s website, instead of having no idea why my reset password gets lost every time I login.
This whole business with getting the right DNS name of the homeserver and having to deal with new and not-widely-supported features like sliding sync is also a genuinely-confusing thing about matrix, especially for a beginner to the system. I don’t know if there’s anything the matrix project can realistically do to make this better - if they develop a new feature, they can’t make everyone running a homeserver upgrade at once, and new users can’t be expected to know what random homeserver they pick does or does not support. Again, this is really an indictment of the homeserver paradigm (which again is not unique to matrix, it’s how most web accounts work).
This class of bug is the single biggest issue with Matrix clients (as well as with a lot of other modern software). Having an application GUI just spin for a long period of time without telling you whether it is making progress on the task or is broken is a really bad and sadly-common user experience failure. Random client delays are something I’ve experienced in every Matrix client I’ve tried, using several different homeservers, and I’m not really happy with any of them. I kind of want to write my own client just so that I can add better error handling to it.
I’m personally bullish on Matrix, and I do use it to chat with a bunch of people. Unfortunately, the poor UX right now for inexperienced users is a genuine problem - there are a number of people I currently chat with using Discord, who have expressed some interest in switching from Discord to Matrix, and while I would love to support this I know that the basic chat UX would be inferior to what is provided by the Discord client for them.
I’m aware that the Matrix project does not currently have a huge amount of funding, and is in the position of having to triage what feature work and bugfixes it can and cannot afford to spend developer-hours on. This is a damn shame, and is a problem that can unfortunately only be solved by giving the Matrix project a lot of money.
I’m disappointed they shut down thirdroom.io
In the video linked in https://lobste.rs/s/gzvdfc/opening_up_communication_silos_with, they explicitly stated that the third room project got shut down because the Matrix foundation could not devote developer resources to it in lieu of higher-priority work, and the volunteer free software developers who were working on it moved onto other things.
Three (iirc) developers were payed by Element, and the project was shut down because they did not get the funding they expected. Matthew’s message in July 2023 explaining the situation:
…in what universe is
cyberfurz.chatsomething that has “profanity in [its] name”? (I’m assuming that’s what the author is referring to here, since it’s the only name that’s highlighted in the screenshot.)Like, whether or not you approve of furries, it feels like a bit of a stretch to call the name of something “profane” because it has “furz” in it. Or if they’re talking about the “cyber” bit of the name, I have news for them about the existence of the cybersecurity industry 🤷🏻♀️
I don’t like Matrix for a variety of reasons, so I thought going in that I’d be nodding along in agreement with this article, but… idk, that bit was just weird to me, enough so that I gave up on it.
apparently ‘furz’ means fart in German. Sorry you don’t like Matrix.
“Cyberfarts” is a good name for a chunk of the IT industry, though.