Let's not forget the shock image spam issue. Public Matrix channels are plagued with horrendous shock images (including CSAM). The development team seems to not care, they have a proposal for "policy servers" which is still incomplete and not supported by all server implementations.

You did better than I did. I installed the recommended Element app, created an account on matrix.org, tried to send a message to another user, and… gave up. Every try got stuck and eventually created an empty room or whatever they call it. I have literally never succeeded in sending or receiving a single message.

I feel they underestimated what the MVP really is and started touting Matrix as great before it was really there, which has backfired and led to disappointment. They also went a bit too overboard on the overgeneralized idea of it being "a decentralized eventually consistent JSON database", which led to a lack of focus on its concrete usability as a chat system. I still use it and it's not bad in some respects, but it's a long, long way away from being able to attract a mass of ordinary users.

If IRC suffices for your purposes, then Matrix, with its encryption and all, is apparently overkill.

If I were to upgrade an IRC-based community to something newer and richer, I'd go with Jabber, well-known, well-established, with a ton of various clients and several servers. Yes, it's not ideal, but it's still a massive upgrade compared to IRC, if your server supports a good list XEPs and your community members agree to use non-esoteric clients that also support them.

Unfortunately how I feel about it too. I gave an honest effort at getting into the ecosystem and tested it out with a few close friends. The rough edges brought the experience down compared to other stuff that “just works”, and losing community support for the IRC bridge took a huge use of my own away from it.

The rough edges are too much for even very technical users and admins, so there's no way we're going to get friends and family to adopt this.

> There seemed to be a lot of velocity in the beginning but the last couple of years have addressed approximately nothing in terms of the UX and it's a crying shame as Matrix/Element had a lot of potential.

It still has.

And with Element X they have greatly improved the UX.

Plus utd errors have been reduced by a lot.

That said, I haven't ever had issues with devices not being correctly verified ( I use that feature since it was released - and can still recover the encrypted messages of that time).

Anecdotal but running a server with multiple bridges for multiple years. Had such issues initially but none recently.

It’s that hard even with a user in the loop to press buttons. Verifying bots is even worse and the docs are either non existent or wrong. This is such a shame because element otherwise does exactly what we want but it makes me nervous it’s so badly supported and buggy.

> but the last couple of years have addressed approximately nothing in terms of the UX

This sucks to hear. I thought they had made massive improvements in the last year or so (I don't know because I feel too burnt by past experience).

When I looked into it the complexity of standing up and admin'ing a Matrix server was clearly either a massive "architecture smell" so bad the project was likely long-term doomed, or a deliberate choice to make it terrible to get people to pay for managed hosting.

In either case, that's a no for me dawg.

I've had constant problems with the verification ever since it was introduced. As far as I can tell it hasn't improved at all. Sometimes it works, sometimes it repeatedly kicks me out moments after succeeding, and it's still prompting me to verify some old devices that I removed Element from years ago and I can't find any way to make the constant pop-ups go away (when they feel like appearing again - sometimes they go away for a couple months).

All this will do is make me lose EVERY profile.

I went through the same frustration recently. I only occasionally use it, but every second or third time I have to open it up to talk in some channel I lose 30 minutes chasing my tail trying to work through the latest set of problems.

I like the idea, but the effort to reward ratio for using the product has not been good. It has caused visible churn and attrition in the few channels I’ve tried to participate in and it’s become a problem for the OSS projects I’m part of that try to use it for their communication. Of course, there are some people who like it that way and think making communication spaces difficult to access is a bonus, but that’s another topic.

are you using your own server?

I have never heard of such issue and not experienced it despite intensive use, so it's a bit strange that you and people you know have experienced this repeatedly.

@Arathorn would be an objectively better person to discuss this, but the Redditor isn't completely off the mark: metadata is (currently) not nearly as well-guarded on Matrix compared to Signal.

However, work is ongoing to improve the situation; more importantly, Matrix is a different threat model (in my opinion), and allows for different trade-offs.

When I use Signal, I have to trust Signal's servers and their admin team. With Matrix, we get to keep trust circles smaller (friends and family on smaller servers, where we already trust the people running them). We have no hard requirement to federate either - if I want something just for people I know, we leak less data than Signal does to the outside world. We also get to host Matrix servers in areas we're comfortable with, whether that's our living room, or any nation that isn't America.

Matrix isn't perfect, but I appreciate how quickly they're improving, and the areas they're focusing on.

It's pretty accurate. I was a bit shocked when I saw that room names were not encrypted. I thought that was such a basic privacy requirement, and it's not hard to implement when you already have message encryption.

Matrix seems to have a lot of these structural flaws. Even the encryption praised in the Reddit post has had problems for years where messages don't decrypt. These issues are patched slowly over time, but you shouldn't need to show me a graph demonstrating how you have slowly decreased the decryption issues. There shouldn't be any to begin with! If there are, the protocol is fundamentally broken.

They are slowly improving everything, with the emphasis on "slowly". It will take years until everything is properly implemented. To answer the question of whether the future of the protocol is promising, I would say yes. This is in no small part because there are currently no real alternatives in this area. If you want an open system, this is the best option.

To be fair: signal means everybody trusts one central authority. Doesn't matter that it's a foundation or non-profit or whatever.

And: a phone number is still required, a PIN is not, so by default it's susceptible to phone/SIM spoofing attacks. This one really boggles my mind, it's not that I personally am afraid of this vector, but I don't understand why they would insist on phone numbers at this point.

I think part of the problem may be that Matrix is just pretty complex, because of its modular and decentralised design. Meanwhile, Signal is much more centralised and monolithic. And while they have added a few features over the years, its core functionality is relatively simple, and they were initially just focussed on getting that right.

it's pretty on point, it's mostly a "trusted" platform as long as you trust the host with the messages between two people (or more?) being (optionally) encrypted.

I wish FOSS communities that want an alternative to Discord or Slack ditched Matrix altogeter. It sucks for that. Better use Zulip or Mattermost, both of which are self-hostable.

Edit: I looked up and apparently Mattermost would be out of the question for their feature downgrades in the community version as of late...

Okay so -- this and Bluesky.

REALLY feels like no one talks about how "permanent and duplicated" is very much an anti-feature if autonomy and safety and freedom is your goal?

Like, no actually - automatically saving everything all the time is bad. I thought we sort of already knew that.

Pretty crazy, right? It almost seems like a honeypot

https://element.io/en/help#encryption-device-verification

> After Alice logs in on a new device, she uses her cryptographic identity to demonstrate to Bob that the new device genuinely belongs to her, rather than being added by someone else with access to her account. She can do this either by entering her recovery key (which gives the new device immediate access to her cryptographic identity ), or by carrying out an interactive verification from an existing verified device.

In this case, it's what you do when signing in from a new device (or browser) to attest that it's yours. It avoids warnings to you and your contacts that a device has gained access to your account without your approval.

It involves doing one of these things:

- Comparing a short sequence of emoji on each device and confirming that they match.

- Using one device to scan a QR code displayed by the other.

- Entering a recovery key (a line of text) that you were given when you first set up the account.

Pretty quick and easy in most cases, although some clients can be glitchy in this area and require trying again.

(Gripe: The recovery key approach was unfortunately made painful and error-prone in recent Element releases, by disabling the option to choose a passphrase instead, but most people can simply use one of the other two approaches.)

I was afraid of that as well given the wording but, no, it's nothing to do with third parties at all. Just when you log into a new device, you confirm it on your old device so it knows it can transfer encryption keys for old messages to the new device

This has been in Element/Matrix since forever and I found it the easiest verification mechanism of all the encrypted messengers I've tried. I'm not surprised they're making this part of the standard process, but the wording in 2025 is... unfortunate. Or perhaps that adjective should be applied to the rest of the world since it's not the Matrix Foundation which changed. For the reader to decide ^^

In the current state, it's basically just a self verification. When you use a new device it shows a series of emoji on each device and asks you if they're the same, then the device is verified.

Thankfully, no, it's not anything evil like Play Integrity is. The simple explanation is that the first time you log in to an existing account from a new device, you need to go on one of your old devices and confirm that the new one is yours.

I’m a server admin and I still couldn’t tell you why when I sign new endpoints in and verify for cross-signing it still also asks me for a recovery key.

For encrypted search on desktop it has to fetch batches of messages and this is configurable in settings. It just had a number? what is that? how large the batch is, how many ms? no clue! good thing we can’t do encrypted search on mobile/web.

In my case, it transferred my willingness to self-host a chat server to something else.

(I think) It transfers (access to) your keys for end-to-end encryption between devices.

Yeah, I was wondering this as well. At the very least, this appears to be an Element requirement that was just enabled by a Matrix protocol update, so moving would be possible, but afaik Element is extremely popular as far as Matrix goes.

[dead]

> Despite all the gnashing of teeth in this thread, this seems reasonable

I empathize a lot with the negative experiences shared in this thread.

I think the problem is that every little decision in Matrix might be reasonable to the people who have complete context about the decision, but all of the churn and rough edges have added up to a very bumpy ride. Not only that, but it has been a poorly communicated and documented ride as many in this comment section can attest.

I suspect all of these issues and changes feel like no problem to people who are active in Matrix every day and have a support network to chat with where they all get through the issues by sharing tips and info. For the rest of us who are casual users who only occasionally log in it feels like I’m rolling the dice every time I have to use it. Some times it works like it did last time, some times I have to go on a 30 minute adventure with Google and play games across devices to get it back into a working state again.

Doesn’t verification also exchange encryption keys, letting you decrypt messages from before you logged in? I remember that being a huge issue where you would see unable to decrypt messages.

Probably just bad UX to let people skip the verification step.

> Despite all the gnashing of teeth in this thread, this seems reasonable

I think it's not the requirement itself that's the crucible of discussion but the issues are rather that the blog post should have explicitly defined what verification is in it's second sentence and that matrix/element still is barely useable even for reasonably technical users.

Not sure how often they update these pages, but Thunderbird is still listed as beta on matrix.org clients page [0], and I remember trying it out some time back and it was indeed very beta (maybe not even beta). It didn't feel like it was getting much maintenance so I stopped using it. I think it's fair to expect bugs in beta releases.

I am in the same boat. It is ridiculous and shows no signs of improving.

I like XMPP and I use it with my family (with the Conversation client) but the web interface (converse.js) if pretty rough.

I would like to replace Matrix at work with an XMPP server, but to convince my colleagues I would have to show something better than that :/

> I tried out an alpha client once & can’t get the stupid pop-up about unverified devices to go away now.

Open app with device management (e.g. Element Desktop) and remove the unverified devices you don't intend to verify.

Regarding XMPP: With the lack of Cross Signing, key backup and consistent storage of messages, it can't be expected to provide the convenience Matrix does for the foreseeable future - just my personal opinion. The matrix-rust-sdk should it also make easy to get started with a client.

I used to consider myself a HUUUGE matrix fanboy....while i still respect what the teams have done over time, I have been feeling a little, i don't know, deflated maybe? Maybe its the UX/UI aspect, i don;t know...i have not run a homeserver since like maybe 2019 or so? But nowadays, i have less interest in running a homeserver, and as far using the various clients: meh. Element feels bloated, and others either might be more snappier but might have an odd bug, or don't implement all features that might be expected, etc.

So, last year i tried to play briefly with Prosody server to re-acquaint myself with xmpp...and it wasn't so bad. Not as great as i expected for this day ana age, bbut not terrible. The server setup felt like i needed to study a bunch of different docs...and ultimately was smoother than expected....so i think documentation is either outdated, or was written a little less clear than expected. That being said, the low resource usage was ridiculously pleasant compared to matrix homeserver! The fact that an xmpp server allows for such scalability on such low resources is a great testament! And, that was prosody, which some folks state is not even as performant, scalable as ejabbered....so they say...so wow, that's impressive if that's true. Regardless, xmpp servers that can run on such low resource hardware but enable so many users to chat...is quite awesome!!! The client side of xmpp was a different matter; i wasn't so happy. I blame myself because maybe there might have been plugins that maybe i didn't install correctly on server side, i don't know...but it felt not as easy as i expected. The clients were a little disappointing; again not terrible but not great.

Maybe i'm spoiled? Or, maybe i did too much wrong? But if that's the case, the maybe there's an opportunity for better documentaiton? I don't know....i really like both matrix and xmpp because both live in the realm of free and open source software.....so i really want both or either to succeed. I want to live in a world where we are not beholden to only proprietary options, like whatsapp, crappy sms/text messaging, etc. I want to give props to all the folks who made and maintain all aspects of xmpp...as much as i am whining, i don't want to take away from all the hard work that they have freely given; super props to them!!!

What i really want is a modern, free and open source version of IRC, with plenty of modern features (E2EE, file uploads, presence detection, etc.), decent desktop and mobile clients, easy server installation and management, and said server-side software would ideally not need such beefy hardware to run...Or, is my wish too far fetched?

They verify their device. Usually means opening Matrix on a other device, clicking the pop-up, and scanning a QR code or matching emoji. One device signs proof of verification of the other and exchanges encryption keys so the new device can read encrypted conversations.

Unverified devices are indistinguishable from a hacker logging in through credential stuffing/password leaks until verification is done.

It's a process similar to adding devices to Signal or WhatsApp, except with Matrix you can still log in without having physical access to another device. Useful if you only ever visit unencrypted rooms perhaps.

> Matrix, Vector, Riot, Element – things just kept happening. App was never an end user app and it became very clear that it was not the intention either.

Element X definitely is.

No, it's just a warning that your client can't prove that the message was really sent by that sender. These will eventually go away once https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/404... lands.

Yeah it's a lot more "just works" than Matrix, still some limitations but improving quickly.

Matrix has E2EE support and many clients are pushing it as the default. But it also supports rooms that are only encrypted in transit.

You don't have to use E2EE if you don't want to. I personally don't because I don't care about it, and it adds extra difficulties to the experience.

cryptographic process to poof that the devices you use in fact belong to you (as cryptographic identity)

It is not; I know we don't read articles here, but...

Isn't this how TLS itself already works? "trust on first use"?

Respectfully, not even close. Verification is when I sign in from a new device, I use an existing device or second passphrase (either-or) to ensure that yes, it is me on both devices. I never have to reveal my ID, name, phone number, or email address to anyone. Not to Element, the Matrix Foundation, or the person running my home server where all my [encrypted] messages live.

My understanding is that there's two different types of verification.

Self-verification means that any new secondary devices you log into your account with will need to be verified by an existing login by way of an automatic popup that asks if you trust the device. It used to just be a Yes/No button but I think now they've added QR codes and/or emoji matching.

The other kind is verification between two different people, like when starting a direct message conversation, you might get the same emoji matching window to verify each other.

Yeah, IMO "verify" was a poor choice of wording for what this is. It has nothing to do with remote attestation or any other form of Treacherous Computing, and it has nothing to do with your real-life identity. It's just "go on your old device and confirm that the new device is really yours."

If you don't mind reading an essay, here is mine from the same discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45989744

If that's true, then E2EE will never become mainstream. Consider this scenario: "My phone got lost/stolen/broken, so I just got a new one. I haven't logged in to this app since I got my last phone, so I forget my credentials for it. I'll reset them through my email. What do you mean my conversation history is gone?"

That's not really far-fetched. If you can get your conversation history back in that scenario, then so can the server operator so it's not real E2EE, and if you can't, then by your statement it won't become mainstream.

I more or less agree. And I also agree with the other commenter who says this may mean e2ee will never become mainstream. I think a lot of e2ee enthusiasts don't realize that the overwhelmingly most important feature for a messaging system is "when I log in, I can see all my messages". If there is a chance of that not happening, you're going to lose a lot of users.

I think there's the potential for a slight middle ground, but it would involve giving up a lot of the e2ee bells and whistles that privacy enthusiasts enthuse about (like perfect forward secrecy). You could image for instance a system where you have a single e2ee password and your data is encrypted on the server with that password. When you log in, you supply two passwords: your login password and your e2ee password. Then you have access to everything.

This tends to irritate people on both sides, since you can still lose your messages if you forget your e2ee password, and your privacy guarantees are also weaker, since the e2ee password can be a single point of failure that allows someone to read your messages. But people already rely on this level of security in other contexts. For instance, some cloud backup solutions encrypt your backup with a single passphrase. People are okay with having one password to unlock their entire hard drive's worth of data but not with one password to unlock their chat history?

I think it's worth exploring the space of e2ee solutions to find something that finds the balance between the levels of privacy and convenience that most users want. The thing is that existing apps that tout e2ee often do so to appeal to hardcore privacy advocates or people like dissidents in authoritarian states who are at risk of death if their messages are discovered. This level of security simply isn't a concern for the average person, and so they're not willing to take on the inconveniences that go along with it.

> E2EE will never become mainstream

iMessage and Whatsapp are both mainstream.

I mean we’re there for Signal. The parts that suck still are regarding access/retention of old messages which is an area Matrix is ironically slightly better about. But Signal we don’t need to think about verification, at worst it says this asshole has a new identity and then I have to tell them I’ve reset my iPhone for the 4th time this week…

Normal users do find retention important even if privacy/security minded users find value in ephemerality.

For what it's worth, I've been using element x with unified push for a month or so now and I get notifications with message contents without any delay. Maybe they fixed the issue you're worrying about?

Self hosting the call/video feature became a lot more complicated though (and it's incompatible with the old system).

I've had mostly good luck with Matrix too. Been self-hosting since 2022 and while there have been frustrations it has been pretty stable for basic chat.

no, you are not alone, though I don't host

Is Keet Open Source? Last time I looked into it (admittedly a few years ago) it was not.

I'm pretty sure you get recovery keys with it also.

It’s still decentralized. If you read the article this is about cryptographic verification, not anything about ID.