I've been using this as the data source for a Matrix bridge for the better part of a year now. I'm thrilled with it so far! The only worry I have is Signals hostility towards analogous projects, but for the meantime it works for me as this is helping me wean off Signal. Maybe one day regular people will use Matrix...
I want to like matrix but the UI is just beyond terrible when you enable encryption. It also just ends up in lots of strange situations where if you log in from a new place the verification system completely bugs out. I can barely make sense of what it wants most of the time let alone getting non tech friends to use it. I want to like matrix but the non default encryption and terrible UI on element is a dealbreaker.
I agree that the whole identity verification stuff is confusing in element. I think it would be less so if they just generate and present the backup security key at account creation, telling users to use this when they want to login on a different device and drop the whole ad-hoc 'scan a qr code' process.
Having said that, is the UI/UX apart from the above really terrible? When using as a simple messenger app, the experience for me is almost the same as WhatsApp (which almost completely replaced sms at least in the Netherlands). The biggest issue I have is that when you open the emoji selection screen when typing a message, you have to close this and reopen the keyboard to continue typing, which is a bit silly, but not a deal breaker.
> I think it would be less so if they just generate and present the backup security key at account creation, telling users to use this when they want to login on a different device and drop the whole ad-hoc 'scan a qr code' process.
That's exactly what I like about Matrix. I can verify other devices simply by comparing emojis - simple, easy, great. That it should work reliably is a completely different matter, but in itself it's great.
Fair enough, maybe it was just buggy behavior that made this process confusing to me, as I agree that something like this could in theory provide a smooth experience.
Yeah I completely agree. And server side, it's not good either (you can't federate with only a few servers, bugs are everywhere)… I honestly don't get how it started to be the "de facto" open source chat system trying to replace IRC while it is this broken.
Those are minor growing pains, and irrelevant when compared to the nightmare of navigating fifty independent slack instances or convincing an entire group to move their communication onto a private solution. For me matrix has been absolutely transformative. It's letting us grow our project's realtime communication without bounds. Because it's open and federated, without the political baggage of tools like Signal or the ancient cruft of IRC, we can convince anyone to meet us there. There are almost no impediments to it's use. The clunkiness is very minor. Although they may lack some subtle UI polish, the tools don't crash and work more than well enough. I'm looking forward to when the world meets on matrix.
In my experience, neglecting the onboarding experience is a cardinal sin for any project challenging some incumbent.
I‘ve been struggling with understanding what Element wants from me when signing up or signing in on a new device. Unfortunately I can‘t, in good conscience, recommend this to less technically knowledgeable friends and family.
...Except you can? federation_domain_whitelist in synapse settings. Seems to have been working since 2018. I'm using it. Enabling it can sometimes cause significant delays when communicating with users on homeservers you're not federating with, though - I have some vague memory of seeing an open issue around improving relaying in these scenarios.
I do agree that there's a long way to go before I can start recommending anything Matrix-based for friends and family. Things are just too slow, broken and inconsistent on both server- and client sides. There has been steady progress on all fronts, though. Maybe in a year or two.
While the UI is a bit buggy I would not call it terrible. It is an improvement over Google Hangouts (which is also quite buggy), Facebook Messenger, Skype and Whatsapp. Sure it is not as good as Slack or Discord, but if people are fine with Facebook Messenger they can also use element.
Mind sharing the matrix bridge? I think we are really close to regular people using matrix. Element is a really good client but it's slightly too rough around the edges still. We need something that's as joyful and fun to use (and look at) as Slack.
We also need a very easy export/import process for other clients. That's a huuuge untapped feature. It means the data stays the same but you just slap a new UI on top of it. "Apps" then only compete on UI which means the diversity and sophistication of those experiences will grow rapidly.
Combine that with a plug and play self hosting solution eventually and we're well on the road to secure personal clouds.
I found it on Matrix's site[0], direct link is here[1]. It's a bit of a pain to set up initially, particularly in a Docker-Compose deployment, as the containers are created to incrementally build up configuration.
> I think we are really close to regular people using matrix.
I personally haven't met any "real" people who are even aware of Matrix. When I broached it with a non-IT friend, they were actively uninterested in unifying messaging applications as they had "facebook friends" and "whatsapp friends" and interacted with them differently.
> export/import process for other clients
conversation history, you mean? Is there other data a messaging app captures that you want access to?
I am running my own home server, everyone in my family has an account they use there (the domain is our last name). Non-techy people use it and like it (past the initial setup, since setting up a custom domain requires a few more clicks than :matrix.org account). I am not waiting for the day, though, when they will need to set up a new device without access to the old one because of E2E setup. I would like Matrix to provide a setting to advise UIs to not use e2e encryption for the same domain -- that's useless if you trust the home server (my family do trust my home server).
> I personally haven't met any "real" people who are even aware of Matrix. When I broached it with a non-IT friend, they were actively uninterested in unifying messaging applications as they had "facebook friends" and "whatsapp friends" and interacted with them differently.
I tried to sell it too with the "unify your messaging apps", but this is a wrong selling point to new users. First they need to start using matrix as their messaging app, realize that it works well, including VoIP and video calls. Once trust is there, only then start thinking about using bridges. Because there will be rough edges (e.g. federated voice/video calls do not work).
Because of the way bridges integrate to third-parties, they are not bug-free. Reliability is just not great yet. Maybe except a hosted service, Beeper[1], which is run by people who know most about these bridges and can provide support.
To sum up, I am using Matrix for my family network, and some bridges personally; I am not yet planning to spread the use of bridges beyond myself. Besides the encryption setup, I like the UI a lot. I also use gomuks[2] from time to time, which is a terminal matrix application. I have not stumped into server-side problems.
I am donating monthly to Tulir[3], the most prolific Matrix bridge developer (and, to my knowledge, co-founder of beeper). Because I started using Matrix thanks to his bridges.
Oh, and I love the Matrix sms bridge[4]. I set it up to see if it works, and I am not going back. It's great.
> I would like Matrix to provide a setting to advise UIs to not use e2e encryption for the same domain -- that's useless if you trust the home server (my family do trust my home server).
It's not useless. What if there is a server vulnerability and someone (or something) hacks your server? Now all your logs have been exposed because they were stored plaintext.
That's super cool! I have not gotten anyone else on Matrix, I (and my bridges) am the sole user of the server, and it's my first exposure to the ecosystem. I had basically just set everything up when I saw Beeper's announcement. I'd love to set up an Android VM to host WhatsApp, as that's an appealing part of Beeper's offering. The host phone having to stay Internet connected is a pain.
> Oh, and I love the Matrix sms bridge
Agreed - I totally buy Beeper's testimonials, as I 100% am more willing to have an actual conversation with a text contact if I'm able to type it out on the device of my choosing. Ever since by Blackberry kicked the bucket, I've hated typing on my phone. That said, I've meant to fork the Android app to try and put a bit more feedback in it - if it doesn't work 100% right off the bat it gives roughly no indication of why. Could use a little love, as it's one of the killer bridges!
Holy moly I can't believe it took me this long to hear about beeper. I'm pretty awful at responding to msgs sometimes because I have so many different places that I can receive them. Will definitely be giving Beeper a shot and am surprised that more people aren't looking for this exact solution.
I even went looking a while back and all I found was franz which felt clunky and unusable.
Even though I want to get away from the fb ecosystem, at the end of the day, normies gonna norm.
Ahh ok I wasn't aware of this. I used the bridge about 1.5 years ago and dropped it because of its crazy memory use and instability. I didn't realise it had been rewritten. I'll give it another try, thanks!
> I think we are really close to regular people using matrix.
I wish this were true. We're not even that close to getting regular people to use Signal, at least not in meaningful numbers. Perhaps your friends family are more tech-savy and privacy-focused than mine, but it's like pulling teeth to get folks away from iMessage or Whatsapp.
If no "regular" people use these, then anyone who does sticks out like a sore thumb. One of the main reasons I'm using products like this is to support journalists, whistleblowers, lawyers, etc. (Who also are "regular" people in relevant ways.)
I don't understand why people have such an issue running multiple messaging clients on the same phone. I've managed to move a large chunk of my WhatsApp friends onto signal, then block in WhatsApp to enforce the signal usage. Of course there are holdouts.
> I don't understand why people have such an issue running multiple messaging clients on the same phone.
Simple: there's a messenger everyone is on. WhatsApp. There is no need to install anything else.
One of my friends who studied something IT related is adamant about having only one messenger installed. It's too complicated having 2-3 and not all contacts use either of the alternatives to WhatsApp.
Here in Sweden also everyone have multiple messengers installed due to no messenger ever reaching a critical mass. Both MSN Messenger and Skype were close at some point but neither succeeded.
> The only worry I have is Signals hostility towards analogous projects
Moxie certainly know that, but he can't actually prevent third-party clients. Not even Microsoft, ICQ and AOL succeeded on this when we were using Pidgin (and Licq and Gaim before that) to talk in MSN Messenger, ICQ and AIM.
Yeah, it creates an adversarial relationship which isn't particularly pleasant. E.g. they have no incentive to build functionality to help integrate, nor do they have the same incentive to provide stable integration points. In fact, it sounds like stable integration points are borderline actively dissuaded as they would limit agility of Signal and relegate it to irrelevance.
As much as I disagree with the underlying values, I haven't carved out 40 million monthly active users from a crowded space, so maybe it really is the best chance.
Nobody needs to absolutely prevent third-party clients; they just need to create enough friction to prevent serious investment in those clients. At least in Signal's case, there's a clear rationale for why they're doing that.
I kinda feel like that's more due to lack of interest than anything else, at least on the part of WhatsApp, which is restricted enough feature-wise that it'd be somewhat feasible to reverse engineer and build a client.
If I think about something like Slack or Discord, though, they surface area of those things are just huge. So many protocol details to work out, and so many features to duplicate for a third-party client. And they're such moving targets, too, with features added at a regular cadence (unlike AIM, ICQ, etc. back then, though even then Gaim/Pidgin didn't have voice & video support for a long time).
I also think the third-party client drive for AIM and ICQ was driven by people who wanted to use it on Linux but had no way to do so at all. The clients were Windows- (and Mac-?) only, WINE was a pain to use back then, and there were no web clients initially. But with Slack and Discord the impetus just isn't there. At least with Slack (I'm not super familiar with Discord), Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS are all officially supported, and there's always the web client if you don't like the Electron-based desktop clients.
On top of that, Slack's API is rich enough to enable things like a Matrix bridge, so, again, probably just not enough interest to do something truly standalone.
The only thing I'm somewhat surprised about is that no one has tried to build a third-party standalone WhatsApp client that doesn't require being tethered to the mobile client. But perhaps Facebook/WhatsApp has done a better job at obfuscating and hiding their protocol than AOL and Mirabilis did long ago. Or maybe the interest just isn't strong enough to warrant the effort.
Interesting, what makes you think the surface area of Slack is larger than that of WhatsApp, for example?
I think the latter hides a lot of complexity behind a simple UI, most notably all the E2E encryption logic and the purely client-side message storage, with an optional backup system and even its own built-in remote access server (for the web client).
Compared to that, Slack is mostly a HTML renderer as far as I can tell, with most of the complexity server-side (e.g. complex notification rules, multi-client support etc.)
I suppose the poster above you is referring to user experience - WhatsApp doesn't even have reactions, never mind the huge list of plugins that slack has. The only thing in favour of WhatsApp as a user is the encryption, which AFAIK slack just doesn't bother with (maybe that changed now).
I‘m still not convinced that all of these user-facing features necessarily translate into a larger client codebase.
My guess is that WhatsApp (and Signal, Matrix etc.) client logic is much more complex, since so many things that are fairly easy to do server-side need to be reliably performed in the client instead once E2E encryption is introduced.
Same here. I'm literally forced to use it with no more than a dozen contacts among close friends and part of the family, and despite the very short list of people, it's absolutely impossible to convince anyone of them to use anything else.
I would so welcome a FOSS client.
The official WhatsApp client has an excellent UX. There's simply no reason to use another.
For Signal it's not the case. The client is slow, has many quirks and lack features.
If Moxie allowed third-party clients, it would be a win-win situation. Over time users will get a usable client, and the core Signal team would be able to concentrate on their Crypto business.
I completely agree that Signal could very much use a third-party client, especially on the desktop. That being said if they want to push their cryptocrap they have to keep a strong control on the clients because third parties are likely to just ignore that functionality altogether, hampering adoption.
I'm not saying that's the main reason for them to exert such a tight control on the Signal ecosystem but it shows how damaging that move has been: now you can't really exclude an ulterior motive for them refusing to integrate with third parties. It damaged the trust I had in the project.
Is everyone using another WhatsApp client than me? If I would rate all chat clients I have used I would put it in the bottom 2, only Skype has a worse client.
The whatsapp bridge is based on the whatsapp-web api, which is non-functional if your phone is off. The phone part is what needs reverse engineering and replacing.
The motivation presumably is that if people start using Signal, but half their messages don't arrive because their contact is using a half-baked third-party client that hasn't kept up with Signal's development, then that's a great way to lose potential users.
Instead I lose half my messages because the desktop application won't sync correctly and/or corrupt its database every other week.
Surely there's a version header in the protocol that could be used to reject outdated clients outright?
That wouldn't be much of an issue if the official clients worked better and had the features I expect from a modern IM client. For instance I never really considered using a third party Telegram client because the official one works really well in my experience.
But apparently proper syncing will have to wait while they implement a cryptocurrency payment system. Priorities.
Yeah, I can imagine that especially if the team with full access to the back-end already has problems making everything work properly, they don't want to add additional developers with less hands-on involvement to the mix. (Even if those say the adhere to the same version.)
Look, I'm not saying you have to agree with the reasoning or that you would've made the same trade-off in their stead, but at least personally I always prefer to understand how they came to a decision and recognise that, even when I don't agree and am affected by the consequences of it, they're not doing it to spite me.
I'm not ascribing malice to their decisions, but I think they're really shooting themselves in the foot with the way they handle their PR.
Maybe I'm wrong but my theory is that it started with "end-to-end encryption means that you don't have to trust us" and it seems that many among the Signal team and fans took that to mean "we can behave as shadily as we want and not communicate well since it doesn't really matter anyway".
But there's more to trust than end-to-end encryption. I also need to trust that the project will keep improving and that I'll still want to use it three years from now. The fact that Signal is not federated and they keep such a strong hold on the project makes it even worse, I really have all my eggs in moxie's basket.
I used to actively tell people to use Signal, now I say nothing and these days I find myself using Telegram more and more even though protocol-wise Signal is clearly the superior option.
I won't presume the relative weighting of motivations, there's a notable blog post here [0] that elaborates on Moxie's dislike for federation. E.g.:
> So long as federation means stasis while centralization means movement, federated protocols are going to have trouble existing in a software climate that demands movement as it does today.
While my initial reaction was "omg, I hate it", I don't 100% disagree. I think one of the biggest drivers for adoption in Matrix world would be a streamlined on-boarding to a central server (matrix.org?), so that it "just works" by default. Like the front page of Reddit, get people in the ecosystem, then they can discover the subreddits and engage more deeply with the platform.
Agreed, although at that point, what's the point of the decentralisation?
As a comparison, email is technically decentralised, but if I were to move off of Gmail, 80% of my emails would still be on their servers because that's what their recipients use.
(This is of course somewhat of an exaggeration - it's still better than if email were a proprietary Google thing. But it's less of a utopia than my decentralisation-minded self had in mind in the past.)
