Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org
71 comments
·July 19, 2025Takennickname
buovjaga
> It's tough finding an open-standards based IM application for corporate use.
I didn't try it, but this seems interesting: https://github.com/jesse-greathouse/eIRC
"eIRC is a modern, scalable enterprise messaging architecture built on the IRC protocol. Designed for organizations that require ephemeral, real-time communication without the heavy operational overhead of pub/sub systems like Apache Kafka, eIRC delivers high-throughput, low-latency chat experiences while minimizing memory and CPU usage per user."
It does support history as well: "IRC History Bridge: Implement Redis-backed buffer for message replay".
duskwuff
That's too far in the other direction, IMO. The IRC protocol was a poorly designed mess. Tying yourself to it means inheriting all of its bizarre quirks and limitations, and there's very little that existing IRC servers do that would be difficult to replicate.
xorcist
For the past decade or so, I have used Conversations on mobile and Gajim on desktop. Seems to work fine with a minimum of work. What am I missing?
keysdev
https://schildi.chat is better client than Elememt IMHO. That was the whole point of matrix federated. You dont hear ppl complain oh I am going to give up on SMTP cause outlook or fill in the blank sucks. Then make another client or server.
EDIT:
It really sucks that the default implementation is so bloated. But I do not equate matrix with element.
Arathorn
you do understand that schildichat is a relatively light fork of element…?
hammyhavoc
Exactly.
attendant3446
Have you tried Delta Chat? I like the concept, but I can't convince anyone to sign up to test it out :(
usr1106
The best chat system for geeks is zulip. Messages threaded, everything markdown. very efficient use of screen estate.
For less geeky use I indeed have had Delta on my list for years. Haven't really tried yet myself, not to speak about convincing.
j45
Architecture Astronauts, and Cowboy Coding are all problematic.
This is more of a question of enough clarity, direction and alignment.
Either both groups have it, or they don't.
this_user
Tech people don't like to hear this, but you also need product people. And I don't necessarily mean those with a business background, but those who can see the larger picture from the user/customer perspective and who can ensure that all of the technology is packaged into one coherent and actually useful thing.
If the project is run by those who are all deep in the weeds of low level technological details, odds are that the larger product turns into a giant mess that is all over the place.
ranger_danger
> I try to be positive and supportive of project, but my experience with these guys is that they're incredibly arrogant.
This has been my experience with many FOSS projects in general. Don't even get me started on what happens when a fork emerges.
"They don't want open source, they want to be the ONLY source."
freeopinion
This statement might be ok in a generic sense, but it is unfair in a discussion of Matrix and Element. They have gone out of their way to encourage other source.
I get that you didn't say this explicitly about this particular project. I just think these folks deserve some credit.
majorchord
Got a link? What forks of element or synapse have they publicly endorsed?
bn-l
I guess it’s an old story. You can’t have pure tech guys guiding the ship.
the__alchemist
Is that the case? If so, this makes it look worse: Pure tech guys should be able to make a performant application.
agilob
This implies developers care about performance.
acheong08
I'm of the same stance. I've been using Matrix for 3 years now, primarily to communicate with family located where there is high censorship and most messengers are blocked. Probably due to the complexity of the system and inherent design, performance is horrible. Good enough for usage but just unpleasant. Their new Element X client is meant to solve a lot of problems but they're starting to deviate from common standards (e.g. TURN/STUN for calling) and towards "Element Call" and livekit which are a nightmare to set up. There's been more and more encryption problems lately where I'd sync the keys but still fail to decrypt messages on certain clients and lose history on others. I'm sticking with the old Element client but it's obvious the Vector people aren't putting much effort into it anymore seeing as there are very old but critical bugs (main one being the fact that it automatically reaches out to matrix.org when trying to sign in with other homeservers and freezes if the domain is blocked. This is fixed by Element X.) I can fix it myself but until IOS allows sideloading, I have no way of getting my fork onto my family's devices.
If anyone knows an alternative that has web, IOS, and Android clients, easily self hostable, and can do calling, please let me know.
freeopinion
Aside from your valid concerns about Element roadmaps, you highlight a completely different really crummy problem. You have chosen (or have had chosen for you) the support of a closed platform that puts you in a pickle. The dev team for an app of interest to you doesn't seem to have the bandwidth to address all your concerns as quickly as would be super. But they have taken the hit to get their code into the walled garden where you can use it. You have the bandwidth to tackle some of your wishlist, but don't have access into the walled garden.
So what might be a negotiation between two parties--you and the app dev team--is now complicated by a thorny third party--your os platform team. Presumably you derive some value in other areas from your walled garden that offsets the penalty it introduces in this case. But it's still crummy that you're caught in this snag created by your os platform.
mattnewton
I think this misses that GP is using this to communicate with other people who use these platforms. It’s been chosen for them by their friends and family.
Arathorn
It’s depressing to hear that you’ve given up on Element X, given that’s where all the work has been going, including ensuring the encryption is rock solid. Element Call is still webrtc; the fact it’s direct calling to a SFU rather than needing TURN for firewall traversal should be a good thing. How did you try to set it up? I did a basic walk through at https://github.com/element-hq/element-docker-demo in case that helps.
AAAAaccountAAAA
It's depressing to see and hear that New Vector is rewriting the flagship client about every 5 years or so, with each rewrite taking multiple years. Each time the new client is hailed as the saviour, and then after a while, denounced as obsolete. Soon again, the new saviour is right around the corner.
That is not the way you create high-quality software in a cost-efficient manner.
While Matrix has a value as the pretty much only open-standard IM system with even moderate levels of user adoption, all this makes it hard to actually love it or even to be enthustiastic about it.
methuselah_in
You can try monal xmpp. It's working great for my contacts. There are multiple servers that you can self host. On android you have better part is conversations. My entire family uses it.
kniffy
I want to like matrix, but I had to give up my homeserver. For reasons that are unclear to me I was added to the matrix.org homeserver blacklist, with no communication on why or response to my asking why.
Eventually I noticed some issue with the database, it having grown many hundreds of GB (something about my users being stuck in matrix.org rooms that they're blacklisted from, I guess) so I rm -rf'd it and that's that. :\
mystraline
We had a variation on this discussion a few days ago here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44591820
I discussed that their primary server had a child porn/child sex assault imagery problem. Others who had similar concerns were completely dismissed and attacked by the Element/Matrix admins.
I have to agree with this article. Matrix is basically dead, and not worth keeping around. And it starves the open source ecosystem from better things taking hold.
lousken
youtube has this problem, discord has this problem and many other platforms
what do those platforms do to combat child stuff? i don't like to dismiss anything but it is something all platforms and even multi billion dollar ones struggle with
eu tries to decrypt e2e chats while you can see this stuff everywhere without encryption and nothing is being done to combat this on these major platforms
as discord and whatsapp are getting shittier, i still keep it around for talking with friends, having my own server is not that hard and there are zero issues compared to main matrix.org server, just couple dollars for vle2 on ovh is sufficient
dzaima
The issue of broken rooms was reportedly the database having gotten corrupted indexes, which affected a bunch of rooms (2/55 of ones I was in): https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/issues/18606#issuecomm....
Not much a protocol/implementation can do about that. It did take over 2 weeks for it to be resolved though, which is a rather long period of time.
Also on the status page - https://status.matrix.org/incidents/8gljb3gtlv11 (shows start at Jul 2, but I noticed it on Jun 28)
After that was resolved, messages that were sent and received by/on other homeservers during that time never ended up on matrix.org, so much for federation :/
Arathorn
The corrupt room bug which pushed the OP over the edge was due to a corrupted DB index on matrix.org which caused millions of rows to be incorrectly deleted and was an absolute nightmare to debug and mitigate. You can see some of the story at https://marc.info/?t=175161814600006&r=1&w=2.
We need to write up the incident report; it’s not clear whether the root cause was a bug in postgres (potentially years ago, and only caused problems when we started using the corrupt piece of the index by coincidence) or due to potential corruption from a HW failure years ago.
The rooms affected should now work again after reconstructing the lost data. No data should have been lost over federation though; the room history should have synced up as normal. Also, only room state (not msgs) was effected. Do you have a bug report anywhere for the missing msgs?
dzaima
Thanks for the link to the postgres discussion! An incident report would definitely be interesting.
I haven't reported the missing messages thing anywhere as I assumed that was just expected (IIRC (and this is a big IIRC) it was mentioned a long time ago (i.e. entirely unrelated to this) by TravisR on Discord bridge problems as a possible cause for missing messages).
Here is one event in an affected room, made by a t2bot.io account on July 6, to which t2bot.io accounts can reply to, but which gets an "Event not found." error when requested by me, @dzaima:matrix.org: (and for reference t2bot.io functioned properly on other rooms during that time, so overall t2bot.io↔matrix.org federation should've been fine; and for reference there's a third homeserver that federated with t2bot.io fine in that room just fine too; and to be clear the room works fine now)
https://matrix.org/_matrix/client/v3/rooms/!WpdazzauuDxyGNAiCr:matrix.org/context/$BM9s8e3vUhk_iHfdg7D_s7CsQ5COFSPdlJdygz7TKvUudev4096
Wait, did anyone investigate on why messages were not stored by other homeservers? That's rather odd, given the selling point of matrix is federation
dzaima
I've heard that messages not getting through federation in some cases is just a thing that can happen. How that's compatible with calling matrix as having good federation, I don't know.
Arathorn
I’m not aware of any scenarios, including this one, where messages don’t federate (unless the destination server has been unavailable and marked down, obviously).
Arcuru
This also comes as the organization is preparing a coordinated update to fix 2 CVEs in the protocol [1], that were originally reported 6 months ago.
Arathorn
fwiw these CVEs weren’t reported 6 months ago; they were found during a project which has been running for 6 months.
Arcuru
Oh interesting! I guess I read that post wrong, thanks for clarifying.
I would be interested in learning more context around this issue once you are able to share, so hopefully there will be a report/post/etc after the embargo lifts.
jasonvorhe
I agree with all of it. I abandoned Matrix about a year ago and never looked back. Something's very smelly about their history, broken promises and overall quality.
the__alchemist
My experience, contradicted when I bring it up usually (But not by this article): I've found the Element client to be slow and buggy, and I still can't figure out how to either verify my account, or get the verification notifications to go away.
Arathorn
I think everyone agrees that the classic Element client is slow and has a tonne of tech debt, including bad encryption UX, which is why we rebuilt it as Element X. Web /Desktop is yet to follow, although we’ve started it here: https://github.com/element-hq/aurora
rapnie
For some particular areas of development there is strong incentive to be on matrix. For instance most ActivityPub / Fediverse related projects favor matrix. One example of a space that has a big collection of rooms here is "ActivityPub community" space [0], but there are plenty more. Also for the FOSS projects I'm interested in I find them mostly on matrix, and Discord, Zulip, or Slack are the exception (you could say that Discord/Slack are mostly chosen by OSS projects, and FOSS prefers Matrix, IRC, Zulip, XMPP).
[0] https://matrix.to/#/#activitypub-community:codelutin.com
hammyhavoc
"Pull requests welcome" is all I can say to anyone who puts energy into long rants about the "state" of a FOSS project.
If you think volunteer dev is so easy then get stuck in and be the change you want to see.
iforgotpassword
To add to the pile:
- The web client doesn't load any images/media anymore for me in new sessions. I log in, I cross authenticate with another client, no images load. At work I've a very old browser session going and everything works.
- We host synapse at work to explore feasibility. Been going on for about 9 months now. Public profile lookup is disabled. This breaks inviting anyone from our company from another server, when the inviting user is using element. Because element tries to query the user info first, and if that fails with an unexpected error code, it will not allow you to continue sending the invitation. There's obviously an issue open for months now, where multiple people suggested they just add a warning that it couldn't check if the user exists, with a "continue anyways" button, but the devs prefer to come up with idiotic excuses why that would be a bad idea.
I did some quick research myself then, and it looks like the profile lookup is relayed through the server of the inviting user to the server of the user to be invited. The inviter's server converts any http error code from the invitee's server that is "not valid" to a generic error, that element then chokes on, here: https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/blob/1920dfff40ad10780...
i.e. Only 404 is valid, according to code and comment there.
But IN THE SAME FUCKING SOURCE FILE, they return a 403 if profile lookup is disabled: https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/blob/1920dfff40ad10780...
Can't get any better than this I guess. Cobbled together bullshit. I hope my company will consider this experiment failed soon and switch to slack or something. Anything.
arp242
Here's what I wrote in 2019 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592195):
"The reason for Slack's success is probably because it's a "turn key solution": you register your company, invite your employees, enter your CC, and you're good to go."
"With a lot of these open solutions things are more complex. I think we should really focus on providing a good UX here if we want more adoption."
This seems unchanged, or even worse. Arathorn recommended modular.im in a reply, which now redirects to https://element.io/pricing, and "set up a server" just redirects to GitHub, and the only other option is "Talk to an expert" – yeah, no.
Self-hosting is great but realistically, lots of people are just not interested, and that's fine too. And even if they are: having a simple option to quickly evaluate $the_thing is probably a good idea.
This is of course in addition to all the technical problems outlined in this post, which I also reported in 2019: "opening https://riot.im/app/ makes Firefox use 100% CPU and my laptops fan spin; I closed it after 10 seconds of just a loading animation"
I said most of the same things in the Matrix foundation's server. The general response from the team was: "Pay money or shut up and accept what we give you". The number of gigantic changes in direction this project has had in the past couple of years is enough to sink any project. Jitsi to Webrtc, complete change in auth system, Element to Element X. There's two clients. One that's fast, and one that's full featured. You can either skip out on features, or use something slow.
I try to be positive and supportive of project, but my experience with these guys is that they're incredibly arrogant.
It's tough finding an open-standards based IM application for corporate use.
XMPP is kinda fragmented, with no nice clients. Matrix is a clusterfuck with a BDFL who is probably too smart for his own good. Signal is open source but hostile towards self hosting.
P.S I suspect the organization is being led by Architecture Astronauts [1]. Every (including the naming) is abstracted to the point of meaninglessness.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...