[justaj]

> Matrix isn’t perfect but it has only improved in the 5 years I’ve been using it.

I'd very much like to disagree.

From the top of my head, in the past few years of using Element Web:

- Notification center is now gone.

- Room search is now only limited to official Matrix rooms.

- At peak it consumes ~2.2 GB of RAM.

- UI feels more sluggish by the day.

- Loading it now takes ~10 minutes.

- Using it as an IRC bouncer (to Libera) is now gone, which was what initially attracted me in the first place.

And I don't even use the voice / call functionality of Element Web.

I somewhat understand the reasoning behind the decisions, but I feel like they should have improved the UX first before working on the protocol itself.

[Arathorn]

> - Notification center is now gone.

It's still there; it just got moved into Labs given it never worked in encrypted rooms, and having a flakey feature for new users was (correctly) considered worse than not having a feature at all. Go look for "Enable the notifications panel in the room header (Unreliable in encrypted rooms)" in Labs on develop.element.io or Element Nightly.

> - Room search is now only limited to official Matrix rooms.

This isn't accurate. On one server (matrix.org) the room directory is currently locked down to stop it filling up with spam, however this should be opened up again to be a curated room list in the near future.

> - At peak it consumes ~2.2 GB of RAM.

> - UI feels more sluggish by the day.

> - Loading it now takes ~10 minutes.

So agreed that Element Web performance is very painful for power-users. This is because we've been putting all of our effort into fixing perf in the protocol itself (via sliding sync etc) using matrix-rust-sdk on mobile in Element X to prove it all out. We've also spent huge amounts of time on encryption reliability.

However, good news is that we've finally moved to Element X Web (codenamed as Aurora: https://github.com/element-hq/aurora), which runs matrix-rust-sdk in browser but with MVVM React components from Element Web for the UI. You can play with an alpha at https://dangerousdemos.net (non-permenant-URL) right now. In contrast:

- At peak it consumes 80MB of heap.

- UI feels instant and is O(1) regardless of account size

- Loading takes ~2 seconds (although that's about 20x slower than it should be given Aurora doesn't currently persist any local state, so it's loading everything from scratch on launch).

> - Using it as an IRC bouncer (to Libera) is now gone, which was what initially attracted me in the first place.

Agreed that this sucks. We did everything we could to stop Libera removing the bridge, but failed due to lack of $ meaning we didn't have enough dedicated manpower to meet Libera's demands.

> And I don't even use the voice / call functionality of Element Web.

Element Call's actually rather good, in terms of providing end-to-end encrypted group calling. If you used it you'd probably complain that we broke backwards compatibility with the legacy 1:1 Matrix voip calling though, which would be true; again, due to lack of dedicated manpower.

> I somewhat understand the reasoning behind the decisions, but I feel like they should have improved the UX first before working on the protocol itself.

To improve the UX with clients, we had to improve the protocol, and Element X shows how good that UX improvement is. We're now catching up on Web.

[nadir_ishiguro]

Really appreciate your work and am thankful for matrix and element.

As a user of Element call via the desktop app, I found myself sometimes confused whether I was actually using the new implementation or the legacy version.

Has the move to encrypted calls happened on the non-element-x platforms? Is there a difference between group and one-on-one calls on those platforms?

Is Jitsi still in use anywhere?

[justaj]

Thank you for your extensive reply.

> a flakey feature for new users was (correctly) considered worse than not having a feature at all.

Would you say that implementing a flakey feature in the first place was a bad idea? I'd think that once users get dependant on a certain feature (no matter how lacking in its usefulness), it's going to be tougher for them taking it away than not shipping it in the first place.

> On one server (matrix.org) the room directory is currently locked down to stop it filling up with spam

Yes, that's what I was initially talking about since I'm (mostly) on the matrix.org homeserver. I'm glad this is a temporary situation.

> However, good news is that we've finally moved to Element X Web (codenamed as Aurora: https://github.com/element-hq/aurora),

Oh I wasn't aware of this. This is excellent news! I hope it gets lots of attention in the (near) future. I'm guessing that the enshittification of Discord is about 2 to 3 years away at this point, so I believe having a proper alternative would do wonders for the open ecosystem.

> To improve the UX with clients, we had to improve the protocol.

While I believe this to be the best way forward, was it also the fastest way to acquire a userbase? If we look at Bluesky for instance, they pretty much did the reverse of what Matrix.org did, and (I think) thus was in a position to garner hefty growth as a result.

[lrvick]

Have you considered that multiple of your complaints could be addressed by protocol improvements?

[mqus]

I don't see this, since the complaint is about things that used to work and not things that are still missing.

[Teever]

I can't tell if this comment was written in jest or not.

It's always protocol improvements and 'it's coming in the next version's or 'msc #xxxx just got approved' with Matrix.

It's always someone saying 'oh this next version fixed all that' and then someone says 'well what about mobile' or 'what about desktop's and then someone says 'actually it doesn't fix it there.'

I'd love matrix to be the solution to my communication problems but it just isn't.

[justaj]

While that would perhaps be the best solution in the long run, wouldn't you agree that gains in userbase necessary for growth (or at least sustainability) are predicated upon how good the UX is _currently_ ?

[medstrom]

Element is just one UX.

[justaj]

Yes, however it is also the most feature-complete UX.

[zx8080]

> Loading it now takes ~10 minutes.

What?! How is this possible? How come users tolerate it at all?

[fanatic2pope]

Probably because it's hyperbole. I've been using element web for a long time and have not seen those kinds of issues. Not to say that it is perfect, there are definitely bugs.

[eredengrin]

I don't think that is normal, at least I've never had any client take that long to load, and nobody I communicate with on matrix has ever mentioned that as being an issue either.

[lrvick]

I am a power user and have never experienced this. Their system must be disk bound or ram bound or something.

Granted I have 0 systems I use with less than 64gb of memory. Ram is cheap.