I would recommend signal simply because Element’s UX/UI and branding (which is more important than tech people usually admit) is bad.

I’ve had the element app on my iPhone sitting unused for a long time, and sometimes I scroll by it and forget what it is. When I launch it, the first thing I see is a loading spinner thing on top of my chat rooms and contacts. What is it loading? I don’t know, and I probably don’t care enough to want to wait for it.

Element is superior to Signal in technical aspects, but crappy in the parts that matter most for a social/chat application. Luckily, Signal is a decent alternative.

As you say, Element is superior technically and in my experience has a better UX/UI (simple sign up, no need for phone numbers, and straightforward chat app).

I don't recommend Signal due to the, as you say, inferior technical aspects, the phone number dependency security issues, and the centralized single point of failure (recall the huge, day long outage they had a few weeks ago)

I use Element as my primary chat application, across platforms like iOS, web and android, and I've never seen it load. I use it with friends, colleagues and with my 73 year old mum.

Bonus points because it's in F-Droid, too!

Basically, it's just great, in my opinion!

It loads when you are in a large number of rooms and it has to pull and decrypt large amounts of backlog. But its really not that long.

You are really great at just assuming things it seems. Not so great at plain old reading tho.

1. You have no idea what my problems were (because I never said so), yet you still assumed I am stupid — something that tells more about you than about me.

2. I never said I didn't manage to use it. I said I cannot recommend it to my friends yet. In fact I use Element daily, which makes me confident in the judgment I communicated here.

All in all you probably should form the habit of pausing for a moment before hitting the post button, let the emotions cool down and wonder whether you really understood the other person right or whether you fell victim to what you wanted to see.

Hey, I'd like to apologize for the tone that I took to your reply. I'm sorry. I hope I didn't cause you much grief.

No worries I am pretty stoic when it comes to such things, great to see you made the best of it. Gives me a little hope for humanity and it's experiment with the internet : )