> It's ahead of Signal in usability

I like and use Element but it definitely isn't ahead in usability. Getting e2e set up for "average" people isn't trivial. Especially if they have multiple devices.

That being said it is the the best long term option in my opinion and I am donating to the organization. Hopefully they can work on polishing the e2e UX.

Encryption in Matrix is shit, and is making me feel foolish about inviting various friends onto Matrix.

I set up my own server using Synapse, and invited about half a dozen other IRL techie friends to join me in there to continue chatting during Covid times.

Considering we've all worked in tech for decades and run our own servers/services, none of us can really work out how the hell it's supposed to work. I mean, after lots of time consuming verifying of devices it kind of works. Except recently, all of a sudden, one of the people in our main chat room can not see the messages I sent from one of my devices. It tells him to get my keys from another session, he has only every used a single device/session. There is no UI that either of us can find to help fix it. We can chat fine in a different encrypted room, or if I use a different device.

I'm not pulling anyone else into the Matrix ecosystem until encryption stops being just so god damn awful.

Can I ask why you didn't just use email? If you wanted a technical challenge you could have setup your own email server. You could also run your own Teamspeak server for video conferencing.

This is the problem with matrix et al. They have to offer something that is leagues ahead of the current baseline, which I'm not convinced they are.

We aren't using email for this, because we wanted a chat room. We aren't using Teamspeak because we don't want video conferencing.

I've been running my own email server for going on 20 years now.

[edit] To add to the above, I use the same Matrix server to chat in various Matrix, IRC and Gitter rooms, and also to host a couple of self-written bots which I use to control a few aspects of my life. Email isn't really a replacement for the things I use Matrix for.

This I've experienced as well, plus various UI/UX glitches and inconsistencies. It's getting slowly better though it seems.

Same experience here but i feel like Element is slowly getting worse. It is starting to use popups for everything and its becoming so annoying my friends are slowly leaving.

Verify this, is this you that.

I think partly its because i am not always on latest version of Synapse so the self-updating clients expect slightly different backends but uff.

It feels like Moxie is right with his anti federation argument. Call me stupid but i am really trying to keep it together but i still cant tell why some of the popups show up or why some sessions of my friends wont decrypt and they show gibberish.

Do you mean the UX of the encryption or the privacy guarantees?

The UX. I assume it functions well technically, as they don't seem to have made any compromises to make it easy to use.

The web UI use to ask you for your encryption password, but that seems to have disappeared recently.

> Getting e2e set up

Do you mean about accessing an encrypted chat from multiple devices?

If yes, I was playing with that just this weekend and I did not understand at all how to trust the other devices by using "text" (which "text"? I didn't get anything to type/check/approve anywhere); on the other hand by using the option to use emoji (compare a series of emoji between devices and then confirm) was very simple.

As well finding the link to a group-chat that I just created was not simple (or at least the place where to find it was not obvious).

> That being said it is the the best long term option in my opinion and I am donating to the organization. Hopefully they can work on polishing the e2e UX.

Same here & I agree.

For me the verify by text worked, but you can click on a lot of very similar places and you get different results. For example if you click verify it forces interactive verification. If you click the sessions and then click a session you can verify individual sessions. Of course you can't non-interactively verify a users main key.

I'm also confused why each device is handled separately. I would rather I just share a key around (and ideally it rotates occasionally) and not share what and how many devices I have and what one I am using at the moment.

> but you can click on a lot of very similar places and you get different results.

Aha, didn't notice that, thx!

> I'm also confused why each device is handled separately.

Well, I can understand it more or less (I guess kind of similar to confirming in Whatsapp your multiple open sessions on different devices, to ensure that nobody is using something that you forgot/left behind?), but doing it this way is quite hardcore - on the other hand it could be that the whole thing is deeply embedded in the software's encryption principles/guidelines => it would probably still be ok, but it needs to be explained better, be more clearly accessible.

I guess that having a rotating key (with the software asking from time to time "do you want to accept key jf8k4d9k?") would probably be confusing for non-technical users and would probably generate uncertainty/anxiety/etc... ?

Losing the device is an interesting point. However I think due to the way that cross signing works they could use that device to sign new sessions anyways. They would also have access to key backups so I don't think that case is supported well right now.

For the rotating key it would be automatically signed by the previous key or master key so no user-visible change would be shown.

> However I think due to the way that cross signing works they could use that device to sign new sessions anyways.

So you don't think that if I cross-sign devices A and B, and then I would cross-sign devices B and C, if I would revoke B then C would automatically become invalid as well?

Kind of similar question about "key backups" (to which keys would device C have access to?).

(I honestly did not ever look into all these details - I was hoping that this would be covered by more clever people)

It would make sense but I'm not sure how it is implemented. I can also just imagine revoking old devices because I don't use them anymore or have reinstalled them. In that case I wouldn't want the things it signed to be revoked. (Really just saying don't trust this key for anything in the future, but past things are fine).

Maybe the best solution would be revocation after a date. So you can say "don't trust anything after {time-i-lost-the-device}" or "don't trust anything after {now}" and it does the right thing. However that could be complex to implement correctly in software. Lots of bookkeeping.

Exactly. Very bad name, too techy for the average folk and it doesn't have the same network effect as Signal or Telegram. I disagree that it is ahead of Signal for usability in fact it is still behind.

Although I do praise it for not requiring and collecting my phone number and being a bit more future-proof and decentralised, unlike Signal and Telegram.

But in terms of getting my friends grandmother over it, it completely loses on usability and its name is so confusing to them you just had to also mention the Matrix protocol, when it is just Element. which even that by itself is very ambiguous.

Matrix feels akin to trying to tell my (non technical) friends that they should use HTTPS as their social media site. I think it's technically more capable but trying to explain what you can do, how to get started, or why it's better is a much higher bar than something like Signal.

Absolutely correct, I just did that this weekend: big effort trying to explain all pros vs cons and the its technical background and future outlook, prepared test chatroom, wrote simple instructions to create account and try it out => got ignored, failed miserably, hehe :)

> What about Element / Matrix ? It's ahead of Signal in usability, and much more future-proof.

If only it could be present-ready.

No, I am kidding :).

The way I see it Matrix and Signal have different short term and long term goals, some overlapping. And both could do way better in term of usability.

I wish that they would have chosen a different name when switching from Riot to Element because I am just starting to getting used to it. But it is still my #1 option.

It's not really any less generic than Signal, though. Neither are great names.

Signal and Telegram at least have something to do with communication, Element probably makes most people think about rocks.

I think Element is way behind Signal in terms of usability. The iOS app is the most confusing chat app I've seen, especially if you are using your own servers.

I use Signal and Matrix with different usecases, Matrix being more a replacement for IRC and Signal for communicating with friends.

Why is it more future-proof?

I'm guessing the federated aspect. You can jump ship to another server and not break your social graph.

Also you can use alternative clients, which (I think) is against Signal's TOS, and is at least discouraged.