We have lift-off Element X, Call and Server Suite are ready

I really hope this fixed a bunch of encryption and key issues.

We ran Element for our dev team for 6 months and had to give up because frequently a person would just not be able to decrypt a message, warnings would appear but there was no way to solve this. So literally people where missing messages and just having to ask people to post the message again (because there was no way to request the keys be sent). It was a complete disaster and only got worse over the 6 months.

The notifications icon was a mess too. You would frequently see the "unread messages" indicator for a message that was in a thread sub conversation somewhere, even though all the messages had been read. So again people were missing messages.

Despite numerous people begging for threads to be disabled while Element fixed the bug, they refused to put that option in.

In the end, we had to give up and just move to Slack. I really want Element/Matrix to work. I feel like we need it to work, but the lack of support and understanding from the development team would make be warn people to not use this in a professional/day job environment.

That being said, I'll defo be trying it out again personally with the hope they've listened to the community and fix these important bugs.

> Finally, cryptographic warnings are being eliminated. Historically, as end-to-end encryption was rolled out throughout Matrix, not all apps verified the identity of their users, triggering confusing and unactionable warnings to users. We are now shifting towards only letting devices whose ownership has been verified by their owner participate in conversations, killing those warnings - as well as other underlying protocol changes to eliminate warnings.

As the operator of a small instance for family and friends, that's an important topic. The very frequent use case is : "I lost/replaced my phone and didn't save my passphrase". Does that mean that the account would be lost ?

We have lift-off but we're not making it past the lower atmosphere ...

Was the Android version flow-tested by anyone at all at element.io?

When I tried registering a new account, it did not accept my handle. I guessed this because the handle text was red.

But why it didn't like it I can't see because the little box with the error message is outside to the right of the screen (I guess there is a box because I see a little arrow on the right and I understand that this just a web view of something not originally designed for mobile/portrait).

Basically, if this was my ma or any of my non-techie friends, they would close the app now without ever registering.

After I login with my existing account and verify the device via my Linux client it asks me to enter a "recovery key or security phrase".

I enter my security phrase, I get a spinner, the spinner disappears, the 'Continue' button is grayed out. Nothing happens.

These are both flows that (a) a new user would see or (b) an existing user would see, immediately when using the app for the first time.

How is it possible they're broken like this?

Is there like, any UI/UX plan for the main chat view in Element X? I feel like I've been using it for a year now and every time I see an update available I find myself hoping it's fixed the glaring spacing/padding issues in that particular view.

There's a lot of talk of Element competing with mainstream chat applications, but I don't see how it does that with what feels like an incomplete UI. I also just don't quite get how you ship a chat application in 2024 with issues like this, considering chat UI itself is somewhat of a solved problem. It's like one of those things that just has no reason to be badly laid out.

(Is this just SwiftUI being less than ideal for some types of views...?)

To be clear, I like and use Matrix daily. It's definitely still got rough edges but I appreciate the work they're doing and I think it'll eventually "get there", so I don't want to just be a (total) detractor.

A kind suggestion - add links to Apple / Google Store so apps are easier to find and download

If element x doesn't have threading on Android yet, and I checked last week, it's not ready compared to the default element app.

My co-op uses matrix as our primary communication method, replacing slack because it was too expensive, and we're very happy with it, but I was always surprised that element x was even on the app store considering how primitive it was compares to Element (the first app).

So this is like slack and signal mashed together?

I really hope they can reduce the amount of time it takes to start a "room" / add a person to contacts. Its really a deal breaker only those with strong federation desires will wait for element to load.

Matrix is mostly a victim of the government forks taking up their time in different directions instead of having just one app like signal.

When made aware of (near show stopper!!!) issues like those mentioned in this thread the typical reaction from an Element dev is “it works fine for me, make a PR or something”, which forgets that most require concerted efforts to solve, which I’d argue is only realistic with management buy-in. This buy-in seems to be happening (you’re trying to popularize a product, aren’t you??), but so slowly that I don’t see Matrix feasibly replacing proprietary services in this decade. Maybe in the next - for all their faults, they are persistent. And maybe even already big enough to stick around, with all the public sector buy-in.

I definitely want an open chat standard to succeed and I suppose the best candidate (among astonishingly few!) is Matrix. There’s just still a loooooong road until I can get my friends/acquaintances on it.

Is ESS an OpenID compatible server, or does it integrate with OpenID backend? Looking for an OpenID provider for a small-medium friends & family group, so was hoping this fits the bill. There is a dearth of information on this aspect of the product line.

We tried matrix and element a little while back and it had too many sharp corners. Now we use jabber. It also have some problems but we were able to workaround them.

When we did our tests, messages would get dropped, arrive out of order, be impossible to decrypt, joining a room was slow (sometimes days), mobile notifications would be swallowed by the desktop client left running, webhook were hard...

I don't want to speculate too much as it is just a feeling, but it felt that the protocol itself had unfixable flaws.

No threads support on Element X ?

This is the main difference with Signal in terms of functionality...

Also, raising the issue on github gave no comment https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-android/issues/2831 a few months later.

This makes reading conversations with threads painful on mobile with Element X.

Can we expect the same bugs to be fixed on Element not-X ?

I can't find anything on the page - does this mean Sliding Sync is now part of Synapse proper, without the proxy being needed?

I can't test right now myself, maybe somebody else knows.

Anyone else was welcomed with this message on the main screen of element x?

> Upgrade available. Your server supports a new, faster protocol. Log out and log back in to upgrade now. Doing this now will help you avoid a forced logout when the old protocol is removed later.

Meanwhile the desktop client upon launching flashes old analytics and UI "tips" notifications that I closed already.

Does anyone know if this will let you search your messages? This is one of the lacking features I've noticed on the Android version of Element is that you can neither bookmark messages nor search throughout the (encrypted?) chat, making it difficult to find messages you want to refer back to.

You can search on the Desktop app, but not sure why you can't on mobile...

I use Element X every day. On the phone it's very buggy and doesn't get push notification for the latest messages sometimes.

I think many of these features are fantastic and Matrix 2.0 is a great set of features. However I think Element X is still missing quite a number of features for (my personal) daily use (e.g. spaces, threads and roomlist). Also it's not available for Intel-based Macs, which makes it unusable for many of my team members :(

Why would any enterprise use e2e encryption?

In most juridictions and industries you must be able to audit internal and b2b communication.

Not to rain on their parade, but as someone who used element X, gave up because of the bugs. Is currently using XMPP with conversation.im and dino.im. The later seems much more stable, offer OMEMO encryption that worked better. If you want more social media elements there is also movin.eu.

Everybody seems to know what Element and Matrix are, but I cannot find a concise explanation on the website what they are. Element seems to be some kind of "communications platform", whatever that may be. Can someone please give a brief explanation for us not so cool kids?

So how exactly do I get ESS running on my TrueNAS? Cant seem to find straight answer on their page.

It seems some localizations are not available yet in the new app (for example Japanese language), and my old messages would not decode (but I solved it using the backup key).

Otherwise looks great, it seems the app loads much faster.

Want to make account, no idea whats wrong because of the app forbidding landscape mode. https://imgur.com/a/spFQ1md

I’m curious why this is a separate app and not an update to the old app?

SwiftUI only/iOS 16.4 requirement excludes a lot of older devices.

How does one browse rooms on a server using Element X for Android?

Hey, I've heard of Element X forever, time to try it :)

so how do I self host the server that works with this app? I'm self hosting synapse now.

No Windows build

The images embedded in the blog post look horribly compressed

"We have lifted-off Element X, Call and Server Suite are ready." "We had a lift-off for/of Element X, Call and Server Suite are ready."

Proper language.