It's a real shame. These are technical people who don't particularly mind verifying a key by hand. In fact I personally even prefer it.
The problem is not only that certain things are not done automatically, but that the UI is designed to make it difficult to do them even manually!
E.g., I have one device 'foo' which you already trust. I add a new device 'bar'. Why on earth would you want to verify its key manually when I could just send you the new key from 'foo' which you already trust?
Even worse, the key for 'bar' is not straightforwardly available anywhere in the UI on device 'foo'. It should be easily viewable in the right hand pane where the list of devices is, but it's not. The only way to get the device ID and key is to send a message from 'bar' to 'foo' and view the details of the message. Why?
This particular issue is being worked on right now in Riot, and should be fixed early in the new year.
If I could then this would be a minor inconvenience at best, I'd just copy/paste the key from the already-trusted device.
Cross-signing is obviously better, no question about that. However this simple UI change would be at least 95% as good, and certainly good enough to have prevented my friends from giving up on Riot.
I hope that is at least somewhat constructive. Thank you for your work.
I recognize this is a common attitude, but it makes no sense to me.
Some software you tried today isn't designed in a way you prefer, so you go back to using something else. Okay. Makes sense.
But to declare the whole project forever hopeless as if it can never be improved upon because the snapshot of your first experience with it was negative is truly irrational.
After all that they quickly come to realize that something simple like adding a new device is a massive pain in the ass.
It's not that they declare the whole project as forever hopeless, it's that they invested time and effort into trying it already and it turned out (for them) to be a waste.
It's just a bad taste left in the mouth. In order for them to try it again, they not only have to overcome their natural laziness/time constraints, but also the rather unpleasant memory of the last time.
Now, if it is obvious that something is a work in progress then I personally wont mind giving it a new shot.
I've often encountered this when I paste one of my Markdown notes from my knowledge base into the chat in order for it to be rendered so that the other participants may read it in a visually appealing form. But then I decide that I also want to give this same note to someone else in another room, but there's no way to copy the message and simply paste it at the new destination.
Conversely, sometimes I write a worthwhile Markdown note directly in Riot and I'd like to save it in my notes system, but it's hard since there is no "copy entire message" button.
ad 3 - from my testing it's fine for about 98% of the time, but sometimes it takes ~3-8seconds to send a message (sitting on 300 or 500Mbps wired connection), in e2e direct message room
ad 4 - @ copy entire message - interesting, i needed it just recenly so i went into the submenu and there's show source, show decrypted source (which is cool but maybe something that should probably be enabled in via a toggle in the options menu) and quote but no message copy (and using quote messes up markdown formatting...)
ad many people asking - i totally understand that, however, this could be used as a roadmap for shipping features. And since I don't write code (read javascript) I am trying to contribute with testing/reporting bugs (so although not obvious from my OP, my testing continues as is suffering of my friends ;) )
3: Interesting. It could be a very temporary CPU saturation on the Matrix.org CPU master. We're working on sharding the master per-room to mitigate this, but it's going to be a few months to land.
4: Looks like there is a bug for this already - please upvote https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/10649.
Testing & reporting bugs is absolutely invaluable - thank you.
3: Matrix.org homeserver performance should be absolutely fine now. Delays when doing things like joining big rooms are unrelated to the hardware, but perf optimisations we need to do to synapse in general. They're on the radar.
4: This is literally the first time i've heard an ask for 'copy entire message'. The other features exist in labs, and yes, we need to fix notifs and add custom emoji. "Many people asking" doesn't magically produce features unfortunately, especially when we are battling points 1 & 2. Contributions help though. Thanks for testing though.