I feel like someone tooling with a secure messaging app makes it less…reliable that its secure, despite yanking google play parts out of the code. Thoughts?

  • HMH
    2·
    3 years ago

    it’s available on all major platforms with a native client

    Yeah, but all native desktop clients are still more or less in alpha and have no feature parity with Element. Can you recommend one, I am currently using nehko and it is okayish but still very much under development?

    what’s wrong with the user experience of Element

    To mention just a few obvious issues: Element on desktop is very slow and heavy as it is an Electron app, search in encrypted rooms does not work, if I scroll through longer chats the scrollbar becomes incredibly jerky, on mobile notifications sometimes don’t show up. And there are many more things that just need more polish, I am not an UX designer so I am not that good at pointing my finger at all UX issues but I can still feel them.

    I sincerely hope that given a little more time things improve and I can finally recommend matrix to my non technical friends.

    • sibachian
      1·
      3 years ago

      I totally and entirely agree that element suck largely due to its inherent limitations as an electron app (speed, memory use, etc) and I despise electron out of principle. But it is as you said, the only matrix client which is ahead in development. And yes, it has a handful of bugs, but nothing that should deterrent people from using it, i mean, the vast majority use Messenger as their daily driver, and it is plagued by bugs, especially in the desktop client, more so than Element I’d say.

      But yeah, being an electron app is not an argument, sadly. At least not as an argument not to use Element. As the most common chat applications (discord, messenger, signal, whatsapp) are all electron apps as well. Telegram is a notable exception, but Telegram is not secure and should never be brought up among the security/privacy based alternatives (same goes for Whatsapp). Which leaves us with Element, Signal, and the myriad of federated XMPP clients.

      But, I don’t even see the point in Signal. It’s centralized, american, and lacks all modern chat features. There is no reason for anyone to ever choose Signal over any of the XMPP clients. Especially considering XMPP is ancient, stable, has more features than signal, federated, and secure. And so, for modern chat features, that leaves matrix.org as the only option on the market. Basically.