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There’s a surprising amount of negativity in here. Matrix is great for me. I’m happy to see the improvements. I’m also happy to hear the team is approaching sustainability. Matrix isn’t perfect but it has only improved in the 5 years I’ve been using it. I’m looking forward to what they can do in another 5 years.

Every new release or "This week in Matrix" post I check to see if Discord style detailed permissions and voice channels get added and every time I get disappointed. I fear it'll never be added at this point due to the funding issues. I hyped it up to all of my friends who stick to Discord that "One day" it'll compete with Discord and we, and millions of others can all finally be happy. I hope that day will come, but my hope is fading.

custom emojis still didn't make the cut?

I use beeper to connect with WhatsApp. Saves me from 4 device WhatsApp web limit that is imposed.

That said, I am personally not so keen on using matrix. Remember India government banned matrix and other apps for "facilitating terrorist communications".

Ah... the joys of democracy.

Can't wait until MAS is just part of synapse/dendrite, will be a lot easier to install and maintain than the extra moving parts.

Does anyone know if homeservers still control room membership + user key lists or if it's somehow properly signed now?

I couldn't find anything on https://matrix.org/blog/2022/09/28/upgrade-now-to-address-en...

It baffles me that when you install the Element App (which uses matrix.org by default), you can not easily find any of your friends, because you cant “connect” your phone number…

This makes the App a no-go for everyone and their grandmother. The registration and setup process was so cumbersome, even people with some tech knowledge in my friend circle had trouble getting it to work.

Anyway, it seems so user hostile, why not just make connecting a phone number optional? That would attract many more people?

I'm happy Matrix exists and I've been a user in deployments at more than one university (where - fortunately - Teams, Slack and all the other externally hosted stuff isn't even an option).

I used it for a month. It's full of cartoon kiddie porn and porn in general.

Super happy to see matrix chug along. I’ve been self hosting dendrite home server for a long time but it doesn’t have sliding sync support, so can’t use the new modernized client. Anyone using conduit for self hosting and do you know if it works with the new client?

So my issues are with Element and not matrix specifically.

Dropping Element One was not a great decision. This was a great opportunity to get funding and let hobbyists in a the ground level without insane business pricing that reminds you of Microsoft or Atlassian.

The devs convinced the leadership to completely halt improvement of features and implementation of new features to rewrite their codebase in an obscure and niche language that offers minimal benefits. Yes Rust is cool. Yes rust may be more secure. Completely re-implementing your main client in a new language while removing tons of functionality was a bad decision.

There's no mobile client support for spaces, you can't browse public rooms from mobile, threads is horrifically broken, replies are terrible, they completely redesigned the emojis but dropped support for / commands.

Element Server Suite is terrible, it isn't even close to enterprise level. There's no meaningful way to manage rooms at an admin level. There's no way to manager users through MAS in a reasonable way. You can't let admins take over rooms unless there is an admin bot in every room, including DMs. There's no way to manage federation. Requiring K8S to run a chat server is insane. The entire stack is way too heavy and most of the features that would make it worthwhile are pure vaporware.

None of these things are why I and everyone I know doesn’t use Matrix.

I like the idea of matrix and element, but the execution is just so lackluster. Even Signal added a lot of quality of life improvements, and WhatsApp is consistently getting better. I don't like the idea of using a messenger owned by Meta, but honestly, messengers absolutely need an excellent UX and UI, QOL features, etc. and Element is just far behind in this regard.